August 31, 2006

Published February 8, 2006

Ex-felons Fight for Vote
ACLU court challenge awaits ruling

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

While King County continues to figure out how many ex-felons are entitled to vote, Daniel Madison isn’t counting on getting the right back any time soon.

Madison is a homeless Seattle man who has served his time for a 1996 assault conviction.

At the time of his sentencing, he was ordered to pay $583 in restitution and victim fees. After going to the King County Courthouse every month to make a payment of $15 to $20, Madison still has a debt of more than $200 and a load of bureacratic snarls keeping him from the ballot box.

Madison is not alone. In 2001, the Department of Corrections estimated that 46,500 ex-felons couldn’t vote in Washington solely because of a financial debt to the state — a situation that ex-offenders are fighting in Olympia and in court as a blanket disenfranchisement of the poor that’s unconstitutional.

The lawsuit’s main contention is that the only difference between ex-felons who haven’t paid their debt, and those who have and can vote, is wealth. The state’s demand for payment, the ACLU argues, is in essence an illegal poll tax.

“When I go to the poll, does the poll worker ask me, ‘Are you all paid up on your financial obligations?’” asks Joseph Garcia, head of a Corrections Education program that works with ex-felons at South Seattle Community College.

With the state adding 12 percent interest from the day of sentencing, the loss of voting rights can be permanent for poor people such as Daniel Madison. He is one of five homeless people the American Civil Liberties Union is representing in a Washington lawsuit argued Jan. 20 and awaiting a ruling in King County Superior Court.

“It doesn’t matter if you you pay $10 or $1,000 a month,” says Jennifer Shaw, legislative director of ACLU Washington. “It means you’re never going to pay it off because you’re never going to catch up.”

Especially if you get lost in the system, as Madison did. In 1999, according to filings in the lawsuit, Madison notified the Department of Corrections that his mailing address had changed. When his statements stopped arriving from DOC, Madison thought his debt was paid — only to discover much later that he had a warrant for non-payment.

Even if the debt is paid or none was ever owed, says Willie Robinson, co-founder of Seattle’s JusticeWorks, an ex-offenders’ advocacy group, it’s nearly impossible to get voting rights restored — a situation the ACLU says gets worse as incarceration mounts each year in the United States.

In Washington, for example, 32,000 people were released from prison or to parole in 2004, but only 970 ex-felons got certificates of discharge for their debt. The document is required to have voting rights restored.

But few do, Robinson says. That’s because an ex-felon’s certificate of discharge often gets lost or buried in the circuitous route it must make from the DOC, to the court, to the county clerk, to the county auditor in charge of voting.

A state bill that would have automatically restored the voting rights of ex-felons upon release from prison is already dead this year. But Shaw says two other bills that would reduce the 12 percent interest rate (HB 1359) and create a task force to study ex-felon voting rights (HB 3276) remain active in the legislature.

“I went in at 17,” says ex-felon Terry L. Shanklin, who, at 40, has a 7-year-old son but has never voted. “I’ve finally gotten my life together, and I’d like to get a clear understanding of what’s going on — mainly to make a difference in my son’s life.”