Historic Roots of Felon Disenfranchisement
Historically, governments have limited the voting rights of people with criminal records based on a belief that voting is not a right, but a privilege. The ancient Roman idea that civil death the loss of an individual’s civil rights, typically as punishment for a crime. In the U.S., being convicted of a felony can result in the loss of the right to vote was a severe punishment for those who broke the law set the standard for modern governments to define moral boundaries on the right to vote.
People who were convicted of crimes were unfortunately easy to label as having “low moral standards” which can imply that they were not trustworthy enough to vote.
Felon disenfranchisement preventing (a person or group of people) from having the right to vote took on an additional purpose in the United States after the Civil War, when Southern states used a combination of harsh criminal punishments and subsequent disenfranchisement of people with criminal records to remove African Americans from the voting polls.