Essay On Felon Disenfranchisement

Over the past twenty years, states across this country have made significant progress scaling back defunct laws that collectively denying voting rights to millions of American citizens with criminal convictions. Unlike Florida, the state has a nearly two-hundred-year-old law that bans people from voting for life if they have a conviction.

Envision if nearly every adult citizen living in Washington D.C. lost their right to vote. That is the reality in “The Sunshine” State. According to estimates from the Sentencing Project, nearly three million Americans across Florida have permanently lost the right to vote even though they have finished their sentences.

Voters should consider the essences of a second chance for someone who has committed

“To impose a permanent ban or to require an additional waiting period on the quintessential element of citizenship, the right to vote is to deny that which is given by birth or achieved by naturalization — citizenship. The right to vote has been jealously guarded since the founding of the United States.

It has taken constitutional amendments and legislative acts for all groups to be granted the right to vote, and thereby recognized as full citizenships. Legally, African-Americans have achieved the status of citizen. Practically, African-Americans have to continue to fight obstacles set up to deny their citizenship. Historically, in a number of United States' jurisdictions, African-Americans have had to challenge poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, whites-only primaries, and felon disenfranchisement laws, all designed to prohibit them from voting and thus negate their