The Modern-Day Literacy Test?: Felon Disenfranchisement and Race Discrimination‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Earl Warren once said that of all the Supreme Court decisions he wrote, he was most proud of Reynolds v. Sims (2) because it ensured that "elections would reflect the collective public interest." (3) Forty years after that seminal voting rights decision, the voices of felons and ex-felons, groups disproportionately comprised of minorities, are absent from Warren's vision of the collective public--and the numbers of felons and ex-felons are growing. The incarceration boom of the past three decades, combined with the corresponding collateral consequences stemming from criminal convictions, has ingrained into modern society a minority underclass resembling that of the stratified societal structure present during the Jim Crow era. Felon disenfranchisement laws deny the right to vote to a whopping 2.3% of the U.S. voting-age population: (4) most of this disenfranchised group are citizens of color. The structure and effect of felon disenfranchisement laws have many similarities to a relic from Chief Justice Warren's days: literacy tests. Courts and Congress (eventually) determined that literacy tests served as a tool of racial discrimination and political exclusion. Today, felon disenfranchisement laws discriminate against, and politically exclude, minorities in many similar ways.