In his lifetime, Mr. Richard Gooden, a retired steel
worker of 42 years, has been denied the right to vote twice by the
State of Alabama. He was first deprived of his voting rights in
the early 1960s during a dark period in Alabama's history when Black
voter registration was made virtually impossible by the State's
relentless discriminatory efforts to block the African-American
vote.
Mr. Gooden vividly remembers being asked to interpret
an entire section of Alabama's constitution, a literacy test that
was made impossible to pass even for a Black man who had earned
a Ph.D.
It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 that Mr. Gooden, like thousands of African Americans,
was finally permitted to vote in his home state.
Mr.
Gooden was registered to vote and voted for nearly four decades,
until he was convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol,
and stripped of his voting rights as a collateral consequence of
a felony conviction. In reality, however,
Mr. Gooden was being illegally deprived of his voting rights for
a second time.
Alabama's Constitution, which was passed into law
by the people, permits those convicted of felony offenses not involving
"moral turpitude" to register to vote. Alabama's courts,
the State Attorney General, and Board of Pardons and Paroles also
have made it clear that people convicted of felony offenses like
Mr. Gooden's, such as driving under the influence of alcohol or
drug possession, do not lose their voting rights.
Unfortunately, the Secretary of State, the chief election
official, flouting Alabama's constitution and laws, has advised
county registrars throughout Alabama to refuse to register these
potential voters unless they have a Certificate of Eligibility from
the Board of Pardons and Paroles, a document that they do not need
and indeed cannot receive.
The Secretary of State's unlawful behavior is a symptom
of "felon disfranchisement creep," a practice that occurs
when election officials - whether intentionally or through ignorance
of the law - improperly expand existing felon disfranchisement laws
to deny the vote to eligible citizens.
For Mr. Gooden and a substantial number of similarly
situated citizens across the State of Alabama, felon disfranchisement
creep has erected new barriers to the exercise of the fundamental
right to vote.
To combat this problem in Alabama, the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund and Alabama attorney Edward Still filed lawsuits to
compel the Secretary of State to follow the state's laws. We simply
cannot allow eligible voters to be unlawfully denied access to the
right to vote.
The legacy of the struggle to obtain the right to
vote in Alabama for Mr. Gooden and many others demands that the
State not repeat its history of vote denial. As was the case when
Alabama law enforcement officers brutalized peaceful marchers on
Bloody Sunday forty one years ago, the Secretary of State's purposeful
disregard of the law diminishes all of us.
Ryan Paul Haygood is assistant counsel at NAACP
Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Send comments to: [email protected]. |