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country. To me, not voting is not right; it lead to a lot of frustration, a lot of anger. My son’s in Iraq. In the army just like I was. My oldest son, he fought in the first Persian Gulf conflict. He was in the Marines. This is my baby son over there right now. But I’m not able to vote. They say I owe $900 in fines. To me, that’s a poll tax. You’ve got to pay to vote. It’s “restitution,” they say. I came off parole on October 13, 1999, but I’m still not allowed to vote. Last time I voted was in ’88. Bush versus Dukakis. Bush won. I voted for Dukakis. If it was up to me, I’d vote his son out this time too. I know a lot of friends got the same cases like I got, not able to vote. A lot of guys doing the same things like I was doing. Just marijuana. They treat marijuana in Alabama like you committed treason or something. I was on the 1965 voting rights march from Selma. I was fifteen years old. At eighteen, I was in Vietnam fighting for my country. And now? Unemployed and they won’t allow me to vote.48

Drake’s vote, along with the votes of millions of other people labeled felons, might have made a real difference in 2004. There is no doubt their votes would have changed things in 2000. Following the election, it was widely reported that, had the 600,000 former felons who had completed their sentence in Florida been allowed to vote, Al Gore would have been elected president of the United States rather than George W. Bush.49

Four years later, voter registration workers in the South encountered scores of ex-offenders who were reluctant to register to vote, even if they were technically eligible, because they were scared to have any contact with governmental authorities. Many on welfare were worried that any little thing they did to bring attention to themselves might put their food stamps at risk. Others had been told by parole and probation officers that they could not vote, and although it was not true, they believed it, and the news spread like wildfire. “How long you think it take if someone tells you you can’t vote before it spreads?” asked one ex-offender. “It’s been years and years people telling you you can’t vote. You live in a slum, you’re not counted.”50

Even those who knew they were eligible to register worried that registering to vote would somehow attract attention to them—perhaps land them back in jail. While this might strike some as paranoia, many Southern blacks have vivid memories of the harsh consequences that befell their parents and grandparents who attempted to vote in defiance of poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices adopted to suppress the black vote. Many were terrorized by the Klan. Today, ex-offenders live in constant fear of a different form of racial repression—racial profiling, police brutality, and revocation of parole. One investigative journalist described the situation this way: “Overwhelmingly, black people [in Mississippi] are scared of any form of contact with authorities they saw as looking for excuses to reincarcerate them. In neighborhood after neighborhood, the grandchildren of the civil rights pioneers from the 1950s were as scared to vote, because of prisons and the threat of prisons, as their grandparents were half a century ago because of the threat of the lynch mob.”51 Nshombi Lambright, of the Jackson ACLU, concurs. “People aren’t even trying to get their vote back,” she said. “It’s hard just getting them to attempt to register. They’re terrorized. They’re so scared of going back to jail that they won’t even try it.”52

Research indicates that a large number of close elections would have come out differently if felons had been allowed to vote, including at least seven senatorial races between 1980 and 2000.53 The impact on those major elections undoubtedly would be greater if all those deterred or prevented from voting were taken into account. But as ex-offenders will hasten to emphasize, it is not just the “big” elections that matter. One ex-offender put it this way: “I have no right to vote on the school referendums that ... will affect my children. I have no right