DISFRANCHISEMENT

DISFRANCHISEMENT

The removal of the rights and privileges inherent
in an association with a group; the taking away of
the rights of a free citizen, especially the right to
vote. Sometimes called disenfranchisement.
The relinquishment of a person’s right to
membership in a corporation is distinguishable
from a motion, which is the act of removing an
officer from an office without depriving him or her of membership in the corporate body.
In U.S. law, disfranchisement most commonly refers to the removal of the right to vote, which is also called the franchise or suffrage.
Historically, states passed a variety of laws disfranchising poor people, insane people, and criminals. Most conspicuously, the JIM CROW LAWS passed by Southern states effectively disfranchised
African-Americans from the late nineteenth
century until well into the 20th century.
During Reconstruction, following the Civil
War, African-Americans in the South briefly
enjoyed voting privileges that were nearly equal
to those of whites. However, beginning around
1890, legally sanctioned disfranchisement
occurred on a huge scale. For example, during
the years directly following the Civil War,
African-Americans made up as much as 44 percent
of the registered electorate in Louisiana, but
by 1920, they constituted only 1 percent of the
electorate. In Mississippi, almost 70 percent of
eligible African-Americans were registered to
vote in 1867; after 1890, fewer than 6 percent
were eligible to vote. There were similar
decreases in the percentages of elected black
officials in all Southern states.
Although the FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT to
the Constitution, passed in 1870, asserts that
“the right of citizens of the United States to vote
shall not be denied or abridged by the United
States or by any State on account of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude,” Southern
states established laws and practices that circumvented
these provisions. They employed
disfranchisement devices such as POLL TAXES,
property tests, literacy tests, and all-white primaries
to prevent African-Americans from voting.
On the surface, such laws discriminated on
the basis of education and property ownership
rather than race, but their practical and intended
effect was to block African-Americans from the
polls. Legal devices called grandfather clauses
allowed poor and illiterate whites to avoid discriminatory
tests on the grounds that they or
their ancestors had previously had the franchise.
When discriminatory laws were combined
with the violence and intimidation
directed at potential black voters by white hate
groups such as the KU KLUX KLAN, the silencing
of the African-American political voice was
almost complete.

Despite Supreme Court rulings striking
down discriminatory measures as early as 1915
(see, e.g., Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347, 35
S. Ct. 926, 59 L. Ed. 1340 [1915]), Southern
states continued to bar African-Americans from
voting for most of the twentieth century. Only
with the passage of the VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF
1965 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973 et seq.) did twentiethcentury
African-Americans in the South finally
reach the polls in significant numbers. For
example, in 1965, only 19 percent of nonwhites
in Alabama and 7 percent of non-whites in Mississippi were registered to vote. Four years
later, after passage of the VOTING RIGHTS ACT,
the percentages of non-white registrants in
Alabama and Mississippi had jumped to 57 percent
and 59 percent, respectively.
Although blatant disfranchisement is somewhat
rare in current elections, claims of racism
still occur. During the 2000 presidential election,
which was one of the most heavily contested and
highly controversial in history, thousands of
minority voters claimed that their votes were not
counted due to minor errors on their ballots.
Federal election law leaves the particular voting
procedures in presidential elections to the states,
so the states use a variety of techniques to count
the ballots. Many states used a hole-punch
method, where machines count ballots based
upon holes punched in ballot cards. If the
machine could not read the card, which may
occur if the hole punch is incomplete or if more
than one hole is punched, the vote was not
counted. This was particularly problematic in the
state of Florida, which was the subject of a
national controversy surrounding the proper
vote count. During the initial election on November
7, 2000, and during subsequent recounts during
the weeks following the election, many votes
were not counted due to errors, and many minority
voters claimed that they cast many of the discounted
votes. Minority groups have pressured
Congress to enact stricter standards in order to
prevent this occurrence in future elections.
Other forms of disfranchisement, including
the disfranchisement of criminals, remain controversial.
Since the early 1990s, all but three
states prohibited imprisoned offenders from
voting. Thirty-five states disfranchise offenders
on PROBATION or PAROLE, and fourteen disfranchise
ex-offenders for life. Because a disproportionate
share of convicted criminals are
non-white, some have argued that such laws
constitute a racially discriminatory voting barrier
that is as pernicious as poll taxes and literacy
tests.Many state criminal disfranchisement laws
date back to the Reconstruction era, and such
laws were often targeted at offenses for which
African-Americans were disproportionately
convicted. For this reason, some groups have
called for the reform or removal of criminal disfranchisement
laws.

FURTHER READINGS
Belknap, Michael, ed. 1991. Civil Rights, the White House,
and the Justice Department. New York: Garland.
Reitman, Alan, and Robert B. Davidson. 1972. The Election
Process: Voting Laws and Procedures. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.:
Oceana.
Schmidt, Benno C., Jr. 1982. “Black Disfranchisement from
the KKK to the Grandfather Clause.” Columbia Law
Review 82 (June).
Shapiro, Andrew L. 1993. “Challenging Criminal Disenfranchisement
under the Voting Rights Act.” Yale Law Journal
103 (November).