A Modern-Day Poll Tax

Seattle, Washington

Dan Madison wanted to go to the polls to vote in the presidential elections on Tuesday, motivated in particular by President Bush's re-election plan to cut Section 8 funding by $1 billion. Instead, Madison will be sitting at home.

The thing that stands between Madison and the election amounts to a vote-denying "legal financial obligation" (LFO) of $15 per month.

To many Seattleites, that barely amounts to the cost of a decent lunch and a latte. But Madison and his 10-year-old get by on just $506 per month. He can't even fathom being able to pay off the entire balance that he owes to the state: $783.25.

Eight years ago Madison injured his mother-in-law while trying to take his own life. Undiagnosed and untreated for his bipolar disorder, Madison realized he needed help. He agreed to plead guilty to a third-degree felony in order to avoid the chance of a prison term. He also agreed to pay his mother-in-law's $77 hospital bill.

But that small payment soon ballooned into a bigger one, as the courts added administrative fees and charges, and tacked on an interest rate that compounds at 12 percent annually. On his limited income, Madison couldn't do anything but keep up with the monthly payments. Even so, he lost the opportunity to vote in Tuesday's elections. "I did what I was supposed to do: I sought treatment, I went and got my life straight, but I still can't vote," he says.

In Washington State, any ex-offender on probation, parole or with any amount of an LFO is immediately denied the right to vote. Even once those LFOs have been paid off, ex-felons have to go through a complicated bureaucratic process to restore their rights that is anything but user-friendly. Given that more than 90 percent of Washington's felony defendants are indigent at the time they're charged with a crime, this law has had a severe impact on statewide voting. Nearly 159,000 Washingtonians are currently disenfranchised, including a quarter of voting-age African-American men.

But Madison turned his frustration into action, and joined four other plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the voting ban. The suit was filed against the state by the ACLU of Washington last week, and aims to restore voting rights to all ex-offenders in Washington State--regardless of their ability to pay off their LFOs.

The lawsuit is just one aspect of the ACLU-WA's ongoing work to educate formerly incarcerated men and women about their rights. A grassroots community-based group, Justice Works, has also been working hard to get out the word in the months and weeks leading up to the election.

Few people had even considered the importance of formerly incarcerated people in the electorate until the 2000 presidential elections. It was then that the permanent disenfranchisement of an estimated 600,000 ex-felons finally brought the issue to the fore. (Post-election analysis research by Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, actually proved that Al Gore would have won the popular vote in Florida--and the US presidency--if ex- offenders had been allowed to vote.)

The Florida issue hasn't gone away: A few days ago a lawsuit to overthrow the lifetime ban on voting for ex-felons went to a federal appeals court in Atlanta. Although the suit hasn't moved through the courts quickly enough to affect the 2004 presidential elections, attention to the broader issue has spurred advocacy, litigation and even changes in state legislation nationwide.

Some 4.7 million Americans are still unable to vote because of their criminal records, including 13 percent of all African-American men, who have historically voted along Democratic lines.

The Right to Vote campaign was founded eighteen months ago to pool the efforts and resources of national civil rights organizations to start reducing those numbers. One of the biggest challenges, says Right to Vote spokesperson Rashad Robinson, has been countering the common perception that one set of rules applies to ex-offenders and voting.

In fact, each state calls its own shots when it comes to deciding whether former felons can vote. Seven states still keep a blanket lifetime ban in place. In Mississippi, the only way to regain that right is to have a bill sponsored and passed through the state legislature in one's own name. In Kentucky, the process involves writing an essay to prove one's right to regain the right to vote.

It's not hard to draw comparisons to Jim Crow-era laws that granted the local and state authorities subjective and conditional powers over who could and couldn't vote. "But this is more than a black/white issue," Robinson points out. "It's about money."

Where Washington's approach to ex-offenders and voting is concerned, there's great truth to that statement. In fact, the ACLU of Washington has gone so far as to call the state's laws a modern-day version of a poll tax. Adds Robinson, "It's unconscionable for us to be the only democracy that denies people the right to vote for life."

Silja Talvi

Comments (0)