One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

The state, for example, had had no problem sending out mailers telling citizens “they were ineligible to vote because of a past conviction, when they were in fact eligible.” Yet, despite the May 2017 law that finally defined “moral turpitude,” John Merrill refused to “spend state resources” to correct the error or clarify the new law. Meanwhile, there was a dangerous double-dare in this manufactured ambiguity: the “Alabama voter registration form requires applicants to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a qualified voter, but it does not include a list of crimes that are disqualifying.” Merrill, however, said the notion that people would be “scared away from filling out voter applications” because they might get charged with a felony because their conviction was for a crime that actually constituted “moral turpitude” was nothing but a “well-laid excuse by liberal minions from around the world.”