Why North Carolina’s Parole Voting Laws are Racist - and Might Soon be Overturned

America has a long and troubled history of tying voting freedoms to an explicitly and implicitly biased criminal justice system, which many argue flies in the face of the Voting Rights Act. Source.

North Carolina has a long, tortuous history of ripping Black citizens out of the political process. Soon after the Civil War, for example, White conservative politicians and the Ku Klux Klan worked to actively strip Black freemen of their newfound political power, with Democratic legislators solidifying those efforts at the turn of the 20th century by crafting voter requirements designed to disqualify and subsequently silence the Black electorate. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Black North Carolinians were at last given their political voices — but given the current felon disenfranchisement laws, it’s clear that our Black population is still disproportionately sealed-off from participating in our democracy. A lawsuit currently in NC Courts is trying to change that.

The suit, filed by Protect Democracy, Forward Justice, and Arnold & Porter, challenges a 1971 statute making it illegal for any person convicted of a felony to vote in North Carolina if they are still on probation or parole. “The impact of this disenfranchisement scheme is staggering,” charge the plaintiffs in the complaint, citing the 70,000 North Carolinians who, regardless of their current status living and working across the state, are unable to vote today due to a past felony conviction. The plaintiffs also point out that African Americans represent 20% of the North Carolina electorate, but “40% of those disenfranchised while on probation, parole, or a suspended sentence,” revealing that the law disproportionately blocks Black North Carolinians from political participation. Superior Court Judge Lisa Bell, who is presiding over the case, said she expects a ruling by early September.

Beyond the specific law called into question by the lawsuit, a quick glance into recent history reveals North Carolina’s abysmal track record of disenfranchising Black voters. In 2013, for example, a proposal shepherded through the Republican-led General Assembly and signed into law by Governor Pat McCrory made it a requirement for North Carolinians to show photo identification before voting. The law, which was enacted purportedly to combat fraud, was eventually rebuked as discriminatory by a federal court since Black voters are less likely to hold the required forms of photo ID. “In North Carolina, restriction of voting mechanisms and procedures that most heavily affect African Americans will predictably redound to the benefit of one political party and to the disadvantage of the other,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote. “As the evidence in the record makes clear, that is what happened here.”

The 2013 voter-ID law may have ultimately been shot down, but the problem of Black disenfranchisement is still alive and well; indeed, it has arguably been baked right into our criminal justice system from the beginning. Southern states, suddenly starved of free slave labor after losing the Civil War, passed a series of laws called “Black Codes” to trap newly emancipated Black folk into a second slavery. Through convict leasing, the practice of using prisoners for work in the public or private sector, southern states like North Carolina profited off a system of free labor and bondage reminiscent of antebellum times — and thus had a significant economic incentive to imprison Black people for even the most petty of crimes, real or imagined. Today, the spirit of the Black Codes lives on in the form of such travesties of justice as mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, and for-profit prisons; it’s not a coincidence that in North Carolina, a majority-White state, the prisons are majority-Black.

If Black felons themselves are a product of a wildly prejudiced criminal justice system, their subsequent disenfranchisement cannot be considered as anything more than another link in a long chain of systemic injustices; likewise, those who espouse such catchphrases as “if you don’t follow the law, then you lose the right to make laws for others” are missing the bigger picture. Besides, felon enfranchisement can be legally defended on aracial, Constitutional grounds as well. 

“The Vampire that Hovers Over North Carolina.,” 27 September 1898, UNC Libraries, https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/items/show/2215. Southern White conservatives, horrified by Black freedom, used the Black Codes to uphold White political power.

If the lawsuit succeeds, the roughly 70,000 citizens toward which the ability to vote would be extended have the potential to tip the ideological scales in a state where many recent elections have been decided by razor-thin margins. But even if felons, who are notorious for their low voter turn-out, do not end up making a notable difference in this year’s elections, it stands to reason that restoring ex-felon voting has more to do with democracy - with racial justice and guaranteeing all North Carolinians their fundamental rights - than it does with achieving any particular election result.