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Major voting rights victory in Alabama |
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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — On Aug. 23, in a major voting rights victory, an
Alabama judge ruled that state and local election officials have
improperly disfranchised eligible voters in violation of the state
Constitution.
The court in Gooden v. Worley ordered the Alabama Secretary of State
and Jefferson County Registrar to immediately “cease and desist in
refusing voter registration” to individuals on the basis of a felony
conviction.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and Alabama
attorney Edward Still filed Gooden v. Worley to challenge the unlawful
denial of the right to vote to eligible voters with felony convictions
— Alabama law only barred people whose felony convictions involved
“moral turpitude,” which the statute did not define.
The Alabama Secretary of State, however, had effectively expanded
the reach of the law by instructing voter registrars to refuse
registration to all people with felony convictions.
“The court’s ruling recognizes that the fundamental right to vote ‘for
which so many fought and died’ cannot turn upon the subjective whim of
state and local officials,” said LDF assistant counsel Ryan Paul
Haygood. “This victory strengthens the integrity of Alabama’s
democratic processes.”
It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that
plaintiff Richard Gooden, like thousands of other African Americans,
was permitted to register to vote. Until that time, Alabama
relentlessly and systematically pursued efforts to deny voting and
office holding to Blacks. Gooden was registered to vote from the
mid-1960s until 2000, when he was convicted of felony DUI (driving
while intoxicated), and informed by the State of Alabama that his
voting rights were revoked.
The court concluded that the status quo prior to the ruling
required “guesswork about what ‘moral turpitude’ actually means, all in
violation of every citizen’s right to due process” and that “only the
Legislature has the constitutional power to decide which crimes involve
moral turpitude.”
“Given the fundamental nature of the right at stake … [and] until
such time that there is a statute on the books specifying which crimes
may properly serve as a basis of disenfranchisement, no defendant may
take any action to interfere with a citizen’s registration because of
any criminal conviction.”
The Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, state field director of the Alabama
Alliance to Restore the Vote, praised the Court’s decision: “The
court’s ruling protects the voting rights of the most vulnerable among
us, particularly when those voting rights should not have been lost in
the first place.”
Author: NAACP Legal Defense Fund
www.naacpldf.org
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