Thanks to their efforts, Virginia finally began to loosen its grip on its felony disenfranchisement law this year, when Gov. Bob McDonnell announced an automatic process to restore voting rights to people with nonviolent felony convictions who have completed their entire sentence.
Yet as Florida becomes an election-year battleground again, with Governor Bush vowing to ensure victory here for his brother and Democrats eager to reclaim the state, its electoral practices -- including its felon disenfranchisement law -- are drawing renewed attention.
After decades of exclusion from all regional groups in the United Nations, Israel has been accepted on a temporary basis by the Western Europeans, ending its virtual disenfranchisement in the organization.
The Supreme Court rejected those claims on Wednesday, noting that the commission instead acted to secure "compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act," which at the time covered Arizona given its history of disenfranchisement -- and "not to secure political advantage for one party".
This language appears to support the idea that the 14th Amendment, by its text, condones felon disenfranchisement, even if it discriminates against citizens based on race.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson has taken up the cause, too, comparing Benton Harbor to Selma, circa 1965, because of the disenfranchisement of its largely black electorate.
In a way, "How to Dance in Ohio" (which will be shown on HBO in the fall, courtesy of the executive producer Sheila Nevins's outstanding documentary division) completes Shiva's trilogy about disenfranchisement and its effects on youth who live for the normalizing effect of love.
Maria Peralta, senior national coordinator for election watchdog the Lawyers Committeee for Civil Rights Under Law, told VICE News that her group received more than 100 complaints on its hotline about voter disenfranchisement on Tuesday.
By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board.
