Felons are able to vote in Alabama thanks to Republican Gov. But it’s cool because it’s all in the timing, maybe Virginia’s McAuliffe should’ve taken note.- PB/TK
Alabama’s Republican Governor Just Helped Thousands of Felons Get Their Voting Rights Back – By Samantha Michaels / May 25 2017
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a law on Wednesday that could restore voting rights to thousands of felons, many of them African American, in a state where about 250,000 people are disenfranchised because of their criminal records.
The change is all about finally defining a key legal phrase in the state’s constitution: “moral turpitude.” Currently, Alabama blocks anyone from voting who has committed a crime that falls into this category. But the phrase “moral turpitude” was not defined when the state constitution was adopted in 1901—and this very vagueness, critics say, has been used by state officials to selectively prevent black people from voting.
Over the years, lawmakers never came up with a list of crimes that applied, leaving discretion to unelected county voter registrars, with widely different interpretations. As NPR put it, felons “in each of Alabama’s 67 counties might get 67 different answers to whether their crime was one of moral turpitude.”
In 2005, the state’s attorney general tried to clarify that moral turpitude included acts of “baseness, vileness or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellow men or to society in general.” The attorney general and the state’s court administration each came up with conflicting lists of crimes—one included hundreds of offenses, the other just 70—leading to confusion and inconsistency.
The Definition of Moral Turpitude Act was passed by state lawmakers last week and signed by the governor, a Republican, on Wednesday afternoon, according to a spokeswoman from the governor’s office. The law creates a list of fewer than 50 crimes of moral turpitude, including murder, kidnapping, and sexual abuse—though notably, white-collar crimes such as public corruption are left off the list.
Continue to motherjones.com article: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/alabama-governor-signs-law-could-restore-voting-rights-thousands-people
