GOP Has Election Advantage Because Felons Can't Vote

by Johanna Ebner

The United States is unique among postindustrial democracies in that most states have restrictions on voting rights for nonincarcerated felons, which make up three-quarters of the disenfranchised felon population. Currently 48 states disenfranchise felons, which are primarily the working-class poor and African Americans who traditionally vote Democratic.

Their survey data suggest that Democratic candidates would have received about seven out of every ten votes cast by this disenfranchised population in 14 of the last 15 Senate election years.

"By removing those with Democratic preferences from the pool of eligible voters, felon disenfranchisement has provided a small but clear advantage to Republican candidates in every presidential and senatorial election from 1972 to 2000," the study says.

Since 1978, there have been more than 400 Senate elections, and the outcomes of seven of those might have been different if the vote had been given to felons and ex-felons. While the percentage change is small, the difference might have had a significant long-term effect, given the well-known advantage of incumbency.

"Assuming that Democrats who might have been elected in the absence of felon disenfranchisement had held their seats as long as the Republicans who narrowly defeated them," said the study's authors, "we estimate that the Democratic Party would have gained parity in 1984 and held majority control of the U.S. Senate from 1986 to the present."

The outcome of the most contested presidential race in history, the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election, would almost certainly have been reversed had voting rights been extended to any category of disenfranchised felons. Ex-felons would have yielded an additional 60,000 net votes for Gore. This would have been more than enough to overwhelm Bush's narrow victory margin.

The researchers examined only national presidential and senatorial outcomes and did not explore the potential consequences of felon disenfranchisement on U.S. House, state, local, and district-level elections (e.g., in urban legislative districts, where felons and ex-felons are concentrated geographically and where disenfranchisement therefore likely has an even greater impact).

The study by sociologists Christopher Uggen, University Minnesota, and Jeff Manza, Northwestern University, appears in the most recent issue of the American Sociological Review.