Activists helping to restore felons' voting rights for election

As James Bailey, a Virginia Beach voting rights activist, knocked on door after door this summer trying to register new voters, he kept hitting the same roadblock.

Many of the potential voters he encountered were ineligible because they are felons - an automatic disqualification in Virginia.

So Bailey expanded the scope of his activism. His Missing Voter Project shifted gears and began helping felons get their voting rights restored.

With that, he joined a host of civil rights groups and advocacy organizations across Virginia and the nation working to get as many felons as possible to the polls in November. Thousands have been restored to Virginia's voting rolls in the past few years - enough to make a difference in a close election.

Since African Americans are disproportionately represented in the felon population, the campaign would seem likely to benefit Sen. Barack Obama, the first African American presidential nominee. Polls have found support for Obama among African Americans exceeding 90 percent.

Obama's historic candidacy has helped fuel the effort to restore voting rights for felons, Bailey said. "I believe the Obama campaign has motivated folks to believe that their voices should count," he said.

But for many felons, it's about more than Obama. It's also about regaining the most basic right of citizenship.

Darrell Allen, 38, moved back to Norfolk last year after living - and voting - in Pennsylvania for several years. He had assumed that voting in Virginia would just be a matter of transferring his registration.

No such luck. He's disqualified because he spent two years in prison for cocaine possession in the early 1990s.

"I work every day, I pay taxes, I do everything the law tells me to do," he said. "Why can't I vote?"

Allen was among some 75 felons who attended a seminar held by Bailey's group and several other organizations last month at Norfolk State University on how to have their rights restored.

Allen, an African American, has been inspired by the Obama campaign. He attended an Obama rally in Pennsylvania shortly after the Illinois senator declared his candidacy in early 2007.

His interest in voting extends far beyond this election.

"This is my God-given right," said Allen, a cabinetmaker and father of five. "I want to be able to have a say in what's going on with my tax money and my kids' schools."

Regaining that right isn't easy. Virginia is one of only two states - Kentucky is the other - where all felons lose their voting rights for life unless they are restored by petitioning the governor. The prohibition is written into the state constitution.

Nonviolent felons must wait three years after completing their sentences and submit a one-page notarized application to the governor. For felons who are violent or convicted for drug distribution, the waiting period is five years and the application is three pages, plus three letters of reference and various supporting documents.

It can take as long as six months for an application to be processed and approved, according to a state Web site.

The process used to be more complicated. Democrat Mark Warner, who served as governor from 2002 to 2006, streamlined the paperwork and restored voting rights to 3,500 felons, more than the previous five governors combined.

His successor, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, also a Democrat, has restored rights to more than 2,500 felons so far - 40 percent more than had regained their rights at the same point in the Warner administration.

Still, Warner and Kaine together have restored rights to only about 2 percent of the estimated 300,000 former felons in Virginia. The number has ballooned in tandem with the exploding prison population over the past 25 years.

According to The American Civil Liberties Union, an estimated one in four African American men in Virginia cannot vote because of felony convictions.

That is no accident, proponents of voting rights for felons say. They liken felony disfranchisement laws to other now-discredited bars to voting - such as poll taxes and literacy tests - that, while nominally race-neutral, have had the practical effect of keeping African Americans off voter rolls.

"This is the last formal vestige of Jim Crow," said Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia ACLU. "This is a civil rights issue."

With the registration books closing today for the November election, activists are turning their attention to a longer-term goal: amending the state constitution.

For years, state Sen. Yvonne Miller, D-Norfolk, has sponsored constitutional amendments that would allow the General Assembly to enact a blanket restoration of voting rights to nonviolent felons once they complete their sentences. The measure typically passes the Senate only to be killed in the House of Delegates.

Miller plans to reintroduce the measure in January and is cautiously hopeful about its chances.

"It seems that there's some momentum building," she said. "There's some embarrassment on behalf of some legislators that we have taken away the constitutional rights of such a large number of people."

Miller will be joined by Del. Frank Hall, D-Richmond, who plans to introduce an identical measure in the House.

"We think the time is right," Hall said. "There is an enormous number of citizens in this commonwealth who've made a mistake and who have paid the price, met all of the conditions set forth in their sentence, and now would like to return to exercising their civil rights and being productive citizens in our communities."

To become law, a constitutional amendment must be passed twice by the legislature and approved by the voters in a referendum.

If it succeeds, there is little doubt that the measure would primarily benefit Democrats.

Research collected by Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University, suggests that about 70 percent of felons would vote Democratic.

Overton has theorized that several Republican officeholders would have lost close elections in recent years - including President Bush in 2000 and Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell in 2005 - if former felons had been allowed to vote and went to the polls.

Miller's proposed constitutional amendment typically has died in a House committee on a straight party line vote: Democrats in favor, Republicans in opposition. Republicans have controlled the House since 2000.

Del. Chris Jones of Suffolk is one of the Republicans who has consistently opposed the measure. In an interview, he discounted any racial intent behind the existing law.

"I think you forfeit certain rights when you commit certain crimes, and it has no bearing on the ethnicity, creed or color of anyone's skin," he said. "It has to do with the act that was committed."

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com