Barred From the Ballot Box

Maurice Clark lost his right to vote, but he hasn’t lost his passion for helping others in Knoxville effect change and participate in the democratic process by casting a ballot.

Employed full-time and volunteering as a community activist, Clark is also currently on probation with a felony conviction, and one of nearly 100,000 other Tennesseans who will be barred from voting this election year because of state laws that voting rights advocates say violate the U.S. Constitution and disproportionately affect people of color and low income.

“It’s important to vote because your daily life is surrounded by laws — if you have kids going to school, you want to have input on who’s in charge of the school system; the community you live in, your city council or county commission members,” Clark says. “Those people are important to me because they make a lot of decisions that affect a lot of the taxes I pay and the parks I visit, and so forth.”

Clark is a member of Knoxville grassroots group Voting Rights Restoration Program, working to ensure the right to vote remains open to citizens regardless of race, income or previously served crimes and providing information on how persons may regain their voting rights.

In Tennessee, 40 percent of those whose voting rights have been rescinded because of felony convictions are African-American. Of children born in 2001, one in three African-American boys will be imprisoned in their lifetime, along with one in six Latino boys, VRRP member Lissa McLeod says. African-American girls are the single largest-growing incarcerated population today.

“People fought and died for civil rights all across the South just a  generation ago, and this is an important civil rights issue,” says VRRP member Lissa McLeod. “If voting doesn’t matter, then white people in the South wouldn’t have fought African Americans so hard. Clearly it matters.”

McLeod represents the Children’s Defense Fund’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign in the group of community members and representatives from the League of Women Voters, the Race Relations Center and other agencies that formed the VRRP.

“If we are committing this many people from a community into jail there has to be a way for them to participate politically or we’re creating a system that unfairly eliminates [that] ability,” she says. “It seems once you’ve served your time you should have a way to be fully restored to society.”

Clark was charged with a non-violent drug offense but isn’t eligible this year to elect the officials whose decisions affect his life because of a 2006 state amendment that requires all restitution and child support payments to be made before voting rights are restored.

The change in law is the target of a lawsuit filed in February on behalf of three Tennesseans with felony convictions who claim the amendment violates the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment by targeting indigent people and the 24th Amendment that dictates voting rights “shall not be abridged by the United States or any State for reason or failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.”

Clark has paid $6,000 of his $8,000 arrearage and plans to pay the remainder before his probation ends in 18 months, at which point he can apply to have his voting rights restored.

“My [child support] arrearage occurred while incarcerated, and I don’t think that’s fair,” says Clark. “As far as a father living out here, a deadbeat dad who gets arrearage and doesn’t pay, I can agree, but if you were paying before you were incarcerated and accumulated it during that time, you can’t just pay it back in a short time, and I don’t think that’s right.”

The American Civil Liberties Union is representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which will be decided in the U.S. District Court for the Tennessee Middle District. ACLU attorney and voting rights expert Nancy Abudu spoke April 8 at the Knox County Community Law Office about the case and felon disenfranchisement in Tennessee.