Talk:Disfranchisement

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Contents 1 2 U.S. cases 2 Needs sourcing 3 2000 Presidential Election 4 move to disenfranchisement 5 Disenfranchisement of the American Colonists 6 Disfranchisement after the Civil War

[edit] 2 U.S. cases

Not sure if this belongs here or elsewhere, but there are currently two cases in the U.S. courts challenging disenfranchisement of felons: Locke v. Farrakhan in Washington State and Hayden v. Pataki in New York. The NAACP LDF is involved in both cases. Hope that's useful to someone. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:13, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

I think the above information is appropo to this article. Also, I believe there should be a history portion of disenfranchisement in the U.S. that would include white unlanded men, women, blacks and other minorities that have been disenfranchised either by federal or applicable state laws in the U.S. Additionally, one might want to add the disenfranchisement that occurs with modern immigration and those unable to establish residency. Stevenmitchell 19:30, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

I also had to edit the part that said Puerto Rico is subject to "all U.S. laws" which it is not. I don't know if Puerto Rico is subject to the draft when it is implemented, but I do know that Puerto Rico pays no federal income tax (that may apply to other federal taxes) and that they are ineligible to receive certain government distributions. Stevenmitchell 19:41, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Needs sourcing

Looking more closely, I suspect that this edit, which I reverted, was not vandalism, though it was at least partially mistaken. The reason I thought it was vandalism was the following change "In 1348 U.S. states, persons convicted of a felony—that is, a crime punishable with a year's imprisonment or more—are denied the vote only while serving sentence in a state prison." Clearly, there are a lot more than two U.S. states that continue to deprive ex-felons of the vote after they've served their sentence. But I've now come to suspect that this anonymous editor just overlooked the word only in that sentence and was intending a correction. The other change was "FourTwo states—Maine, Massachusetts, Utah and Vermont—allow prison inmates to vote unless disfranchisement is meted out as a separate punishment." I now suspect that was correct. Neither the old version nor the new gave any citation, so it's hard to be sure, but [1], which looks like a reasonably credible source, bears out the change, so I will restore it with that citation. In general, the article needs citations. -- Jmabel | Talk 08:16, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I suspect that a lot of the U.S. material could be sourced from documents at [2] on the site of The Sentencing Project. Does someone want to take this on? -- Jmabel | Talk 08:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] 2000 Presidential Election

It is alleged in the widely available DVD "Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" that tens of thousands of Democratic Party members in Florida, most of them black, were intentionally disenfranchised because their names were similar to other people's names who had been criminally convicted. It is shown, for example, that some white guy in Ohio was convicted and, as a result, a black guy in Florida was deprived of his vote. In the close election of 2000, this had the effect of swinging the choice for president to the Governor of Florida's brother. {{subst:unsigned|71.252.4.167|25 June 2006}

The fiasco of Florida's effort to cleanse the voter rolls of felons has been much written about, certainly in sources more authoritative than a partisan DVD. See United States presidential election, 2000#Florida election results for discussion of this. I don't think that one particular incident would merit discussion in this article, but I could imagine a more general discussion of how people can be incorrectly "caught up" in category intended to be disfranchised. - Jmabel | Talk 02:04, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] move to disenfranchisement

why is this called "disfranchisement"? certainly the form with -en- is far more common; i'd never even heard the non-"en" version, and google lists the -en- term as more than 10 times as common as the other. similarly, my dictionary (Webster's New World) has the -en- version as normal, and the other as a pointer to it.

Benwing 23:23, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

If you Google "disfranchisement" and look at the first 5 results (ignoring Wikipedia) they are:

1. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
2. A dictionary entry on a site from Cal Tech
3. An article on the site of the Virginia Center for Digital History
4. An article on the Digital History site of the University of Houston
5. The NAACP

For "disenfranchisement" it's:

1. Human Rights Watch/The Sentencing Project
2. The Sentencing Project itself
3. The NAACP-LDF
4. A personal site called "Failure is Impossible"
5. PrisonSucks.com

If you keep looking down the list, you will see that the academic sites pretty much all fall in the first camp; the NGOs are split down the middle; the big numbers for "disenfranchisement" probably come from more informal use. But the trend may now be in favor of the latter. FWIW, my 1904 Merriam-Webster (an interesting baseline to see how the language is evolving) lists both, but for "disenfranchise" it just says "To disfranchise. To deprive of the rights of a citizen", with the fuller definition at "To disfranchise". So you may be right about where the language is trending, and the academic uses may be more linguistically conservative in this respect. I find "disenfranchise" a little weird etymologically, since it has two prefixes that pretty much contradict each other.

All of that said, I won't scream if we move it. - Jmabel | Talk 20:15, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

But please, let's keep the article title and the article text in line with one another. If we are going to change the wording, let's move the article. And if you wanted to open a discussion, you might have allowed more than 5 minutes (!) before you went and changed the article. - Jmabel | Talk 20:18, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

My opinion is that the Google counting ignores several grammatical and usage issues. One is that the "dis-" prefix is affected by the word to which it is added. Academic sites are likely to study the entire field or its history, using past tense and style guides such as [3]. Activist victim organizations are likely to be interested in present and future tense, for which "enfranchisement" is a shorter form than other phrases. Complications include trying to avoid confusion with the business meaning of "franchise" during the past 40 years, and that trying to get the vote often has a different word: "suffrage". (SEWilco 15:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Disenfranchisement of the American Colonists

The author states that the conflict leading to American independence “is a good example of the intentional disenfranchisement of a group of people (British colonists in America) by the government in Britain”. This sounds like Hollywood history.

A more widely held view is that, insofar as there was disenfranchisement of the American colonists, it was an incidental or even accidental result of the transfer of power from the British King to Parliament that had taken place in the 1600s and 1700s beginning with the English Civil War in 1640. -- Kjb 20:41, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Disfranchisement after the Civil War

Editing the additional U.S. history and details is invited at Disfranchisement after the Civil War. Please don't link articles to that article until it is somewhat more polished. (SEWilco 06:58, 25 February 2007 (UTC))