SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B3
MYTH NO. 1People with felony
convictions can’t vote.In 2016, former South Carolina state
treasurer and “Southern Charm” star Thomas
Ravenel posted his endorsement of then-
candidate Donald Trump: “I can’t vote in the
Presidential race because of my conviction
but you can.” Last year, activist April Reign
lamented on Twitter that Kelley Williams-
Bolar “can’t vote in 2020” because she served
nine days in jail for using her father’s address
to enroll her children in a preferred school.
It’s true that in most jurisdictions,
incarcerated people can’t vote. But in 15
states and D.C., voting rights are restored
upon release. In 21 states, voting rights are
restored after the completion of parole or
probation. In a handful of states, there’s an
additional waiting period. Maine and
Vermont don’t ever strip voting rights, even
from those who are currently incarcerated.
In 2008, Ravenel was sentenced to 10
months’ confinement plus three years’
probation on a federal drug charge. Under
South Carolina law, he was automatically
eligible for reinstatement of his right to vote
upon completion of that sentence — at least
one 2016 report found that he had already re-
registered. Williams-Bolar can vote in her
home state of Ohio as long as she’s not in
prison. Only one state, Iowa, bans all felons
from voting for life. But Republican Gov. Kim
Reynolds promised in June to re-enfranchise
people who’ve come home before the Nov. 3
election.MYTH NO. 2Disenfranchisement laws are
relics of Reconstruction.Felony disenfranchisement laws are often
characterized as ancient anachronisms. In a
2014 speech, then-Attorney General Eric
Holder said that “well over a century has
passed since post-Reconstruction states used
these measures to strip African Americans of
their most fundamental rights.” The New
York Times also described the practice as
“guided by the ghosts of the post-Civil War
era, when disenfranchisement laws were
aimed at newly freed blacks.”
But not all states adopted these policies as
a reaction to the 15th Amendment. In fact,
only 13 states enacted felony
disenfranchisement statutes during the post-
Civil War Reconstruction era. Fifteen states
did so after Reconstruction, and of those 15,
nine were passed during the 20th century.
Massachusetts passed its version less than 20
years ago.MYTH NO. 3People with felony
convictions are liberals.In a 2015 interview, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)
said that Democrats “fight to give the right to
vote to convicted felons” because they “know
convicted felons tend to vote Democrat.” In
2017, “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade
reported that “Democrats have a new secret
weapon to win the hotly contested Alabamastudy of former inmates in Florida who had
their voting rights restored under Republican
Gov. Charlie Crist found that while 87 percent
of Black voters in this group registered as
Democrats, among non-Black voters,
registration was 40 percent Republican,
34 percent Democratic and 26 percent
unaffiliated. Amendment 4, the 2018 Florida
constitutional amendment that re-
enfranchised 1.4 million people, is under
review by an appellate court. But a year after
it passed, the Florida Times-Union reported,
“Democrats’ voter registration advantage
over Republicans is slimmer than it was in2018 or 2016, when Republicans won the
state, and it’s significantly slimmer than in
2012 and 2008.”MYTH NO. 4Felony disenfranchisement
swung the 2000 election.Writing for the Guardian in 2012, Harry
Enten estimated that if disenfranchised
felons had been allowed to cast ballots, Al
Gore “would have increased his margin over
George W Bush by at least 500,000 votes.” In
2004, in the Perspectives on Politics journal,
researchers Jeff Manza and Christopher
Uggen stated: “It is certain that ex-felon votes
would have helped Al Gore carry [Florida]
and thus the election in 2000.” The title of
Sasha Abramsky’s book “Conned: How
Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and
Helped Send George W. Bush to the White
House” speaks for itself.
When margins are so slim — Bush won
Florida (and thus the state’s electoral votes
and the presidential election) by 537 votes —
many factors could have caused a different
result. Scholars overestimate the turnout rate
among disenfranchised ex-offenders, if they
were allowed to vote, and underestimate how
many would have voted Republican. Manza
and Uggen’s study pegged the turnout rate
at 35 percent, when some studies have found
that it’s closer to 10 percent. And in Florida,
the majority of former prisoners in 2000
were white men — a group that tends to vote
for the GOP. Northwestern University
political scientist Traci Burch found that
Gore would have needed 36 percent of white
men with felony records to vote for him,
which she deemed “implausible.”MYTH NO. 5Felony disenfranchisement
is voter suppression.In a 2018 survey of voter suppression
efforts around the country, the Center for
American Progress included a section on
“Disenfranchisement of justice-involved
people.” One page on the website of the
organization Let America Vote is titled
“Felony disenfranchisement is voter
suppression. Let’s fight it.”
While suppressing votes may be
disenfranchisement’s purpose, it’s not its
effect. For felony disenfranchisement to
suppress people, they have to be voters. Most
people with felony records simply don’t show
up at the polls, even if they’re eligible to vote,
even when their rights are explicitly restored.
According to researchers Marc Meredith and
Michael Morse, in the six states they studied,
only between 8 percent and 14 percent cast
ballots in the 2008 and 2012 presidential
elections after having their rights restored. In
Maine and Vermont, where no one loses the
right to vote regardless of their carceral
status, few people in prison vote.
Twitter: @ChandraBozelko
@4ryanloChandra Bozelko, a nationally syndicated
columnist, was formerly incarcerated. Ryan Lo, the
founder of UnLabeled Digital Media, was formerly
incarcerated.By Chandra Bozelko and Ryan Lo
From Nevada to Colorado to Louisiana to Kentucky, thousands of people with criminal records be-
came eligible to vote for the first time in 2019. Californians will soon decide whether to restore the
franchise to parolees, and Washington, D.C., is on the verge of becoming the first U.S. jurisdiction
to re-enfranchise incarcerated people. At the same time, in July, the Supreme Court refused to hear
a case related to the restoration of voting rights to Floridians with criminal records, despite passage
of a 2018 ballot measure that re-enfranchised them. An assortment of American laws limit voting
rights for the incarcerated, but it’s less clear how they affect our democracy. Here are five myths
about felony disenfranchisement.FIVE MYTHSFelony disenfranchisement
CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCKMiami-Dade
County Elections
Department
workers test voting
machines last
month. Florida and
other states
recently expanded
voting rights f or
people with
criminal records.Senate race” between former judge Roy
Moore and former U.S. attorney Doug Jones:
“convicted felons.” Last year, National
Review’s Kevin D. Williamson argued that
“the push to allow felons to vote is more
about gaining Democratic voters than
rehabilitating people.”
But people with criminal records are not a
monolith. According to the Atlantic, more
than 6,000 inmates in Puerto Rico, about
one-sixth of all ballots cast, voted in the 2016
Republican primary. A New York state parole
officer told WNYC radio that some of his
supervisees supported Trump in 2016. A 2018before the latest theories about men and
women had overtaken the cultural climate, so
my protagonist was beyond reproach. But the
book’s interest in erotic fixation and female
abjection now looked inescapably retro-
grade. And on top of which, it would land in
an environment where activists consistently
sought to silence dissenting views.
It was, to be sure, partly the obdurate
contrarian in me — my wish to expose
complexities ignored by absolutists of all
stripes — that urged me to go forward. But
the world had also grown more tolerant since
I first embarked on my novel, welcoming
different sexual persuasions, gender identi-
ties and erotic habits, presumably becoming
more shockproof in the process. “50 Shades
of Grey” had introduced millions of readers
to a toned-down consumerist version ofsadomasochistic play; my novel no longer
seemed beyond the pale. What’s more, my
youthful vanity all spent, I’d grown too old to
care about other people’s criticism of me as
much as I once had.
Most important, I wrote fiction for the same
reason I read it: to hear one lone voice express
itself above the din of political slogans and
groupthink. I had always trusted in the power
of fiction to illuminate the interior world in
which we all reside, to reveal its secret joys and
terrors and to highlight the quirks of an
individual sensibility over a streamlined col-
lective consensus. “22 Minutes of Uncondi-
tional Love” (I abandoned “The Discovery of
Sex,” the title I’d first proposed to Poseidon
Press all those years ago) is about a woman
facing her own complex desires, desires that
don’t always fit neatly together. But it’s also
about my conviction that inconvenient truths
and unwieldy wishes need to be aired — in the
hope that other women, entirely different
from me, might recognize a buried piece of
themselves in it.
Twitter: @DaphneMerkinDaphne Merkin is a cultural critic and author.
Her latest novel is “22 Minutes of Unconditional
Love.”A
ll the same, I went off to write the novel
on the basis of a generous advance. For
three years, I wrote steadily, drawing
partly from my own experience: I gave the
protagonist a job as a book editor, about
which she felt passionate but also skeptical,
never quite sure if she should have aban-
doned the world of academia for the world of
marketing photogenic authors. I also began
the arduous task of developing an intention-
ally pernicious love interest whom I based in
part on a man I had once been involved with.
This man had treated me as his whims
dictated — as deeply desirable one minute
and disposable the next. I wanted the reader
to dislike him but also to understand the
magnetic (if malevolent) spell he cast.
Everything seemed to be going well; my
editor liked what I’d drafted and urged me to
finish quickly. And then I screeched to a halt.
My inhibitions, despite my best efforts to
ignore them, had effectively defeated me; I
put the novel aside. Decades passed, and I
wrote essays and criticism and a memoir,
“This Close to Happy.”
Meanwhile, however, I was unable to leave
my novel alone. I went back to it on and off,
almost surreptitiously, experimenting with
different points of view and different styles. I
tried giving my story what I thought of as a
Gallic twist, narrating it in a cool and distilled
tone. I liked that version, mostly because it
seemed to separate the teller from the tale, but
I got stuck around Page 70. Finally, three or
four years ago, I bit the bullet and went
through all the versions I had accumulated
over the decades — amounting to more than
1,000 pages — in an effort to figure out how to
circumvent my conflicts and fears. Instead of
telling the story in media res, as it was taking
place, I decided to frame it by having an older
version of the protagonist, Judith Stone,
married to a decent man and pregnant with
her second child, narrate the passionate but
abusive liaison of her youth in flashback. This
shift to the long view, in turn, allowed me to
bring her out of her obsession in one piece. A
solution was in sight.
Then came Harvey Weinstein and the
# MeToo movement, which detonated just as I
was revising my book. I had mixed feelings
about the campaign from the start — particu-
larly its draconian separation of men into
congenital predators and women into victims
without agency. I watched the frenzy to
denounce a wide range of male figures
(particularly ones who wielded power) and
the lack of nuance, the assumption of guilt
before an alleged perpetrator could say a
word, as happened with Aziz Ansari or those
named on the “S---ty Media Men” list. True, I
had set my novel in the 1990s and 2000s,Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, a fascinating,
little-known writer named Edith Templeton,
an early novel by Jenny Diski, the infamous
Marquis de Sade, the theatrical “Story of O,”
and badly produced paperbacks with
cramped print and titles such as “Sexual
Variations” and “S-M the Last Taboo.”
And then there was, perhaps most illumi-
natingly, the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s
controversial “Sexual Excitement,” which
posits that in large part erotic frisson is
caused by an undercurrent of hostility
stemming from humiliations endured in
both partners’ pasts. Stoller’s Freudian-in-
fluenced theory spoke to a carnal attraction
predicated precisely on a lack of parity
between the sexes, derived from fantasies of
total control or total submission. Power is
often a natural aphrodisiac, of course, yet
sometimes it has less to do with a man’s
status in the real world (in the form of
wealth, say, or fame) and more to do with a
woman’s subconscious wish to be abject, to
surrender her inner force to a man who will
tell her what to do. Paradoxically, the issue
of who is controlling whom becomes an
increasingly murky one: Is it the one who
dominates or the one who submits?
I chose an unfortunate moment to explore
these themes, which had gone underground in
the 1970s and 1980s. Now feminist doctrine
held that we were supposed to want nurturing
men who washed the dishes and cheered us on
as we advanced (even past them) in our
careers. Women were meant to embrace
“power dressing,” carry briefcases and emu-
late the male work ethic. But to my mind, the
current dogmas serenely overlooked the reali-
ty of psychological conflict, in which primitive
fantasies and irrational yearnings might con-
tinue to flourish beneath the surface of even
the most enlightened women. Would my
vision of a professionally ambitious young
woman captivated by a dominating man — a
woman who resisted the siren call of libera-
tion and its accompanying insistence on
sexual equality between the sheets — go over
poorly in the doctrinaire 1990s?
I also wondered whether writing about sex
would automatically mark me as less serious
than other authors, no matter how many
essays I had written about Virginia Woolf or
V.S. Naipaul. At a moment when novels were
tackling post-colonialism and family dys-
function, would my concerns with derailed
erotic journeys suggest I was a frivolous,
self-indulgent creature, someone unlikely to
be a good mother? (Not that writing about sex
had compromised either the reputations or
the moral standing of male writers like
Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip
Roth.)I
remember the precise moment in 1992
when, having arrived at Page 212, I
abandoned the novel I was writing.
Poseidon Press had already given me a
contract, and I’d set about composing
the story. At this particular moment, a man
was asking a woman to crawl naked across
the floor to prove the extent of his domina-
tion over her. I could envision the scene
exactly in my head, and I wrote it in
Technicolor detail: the reluctant shedding of
her clothes, her awkward getting down on
hands and knees, the feel of her breasts
scraping the floor.
And then I stopped dead. One reason was
that I couldn’t find a way to rescue my
self-destructive protagonist from her dilem-
ma — her search for love from a man who had
none to offer — except through some kind of
melodramatic device. Could a woman who
entered this overheated and dangerous terri-
tory manage to leave it behind without killing
herself (as Anna Karenina does), becoming a
dehumanized slave (like the title character
does in “Story of O”) or going nuts (as
Ingeborg Day does in her memoir, “Nine and
a Half Weeks”)? Was this kind of deus ex
machina inevitable?
The other hindrance was that, like my
protagonist, I was still struggling with this
sort of dilemma, reliably heading straight
into the arms of the wrong man who’d looked
right at first. I wasn’t alone, either: Several
friends of mine had at some point exercised
“bad taste” in their choice of a male partner.
Such men typically mistreated these women
but held their affection anyway, usually
because of their sexual allure — until, finally,
one day, the women would break free, with
the help of a therapist or their own willpower,
and go on to make more suitable matches. As
for me, I’d spent more than a decade in such
twisted relationships. All the paid hours of
psychotherapy discussing my past — from a
distant, volatile father to a mercurial and
controlling mother — had not succeeded in
loosening their grip on me. Understanding
my choices, or my fictional alter ego’s, would
require a clarifying self-awareness and a
literary legerdemain that were beyond me at
the time.
I originally sold my novel in the late 1980s
based on a conversation with two editors in
which I expressed a long-standing wish to
explore my fascination with the entwined
subjects of erotic obsession and sexual sub-
mission. I understood them on some theoret-
ical level that all the same didn’t seem to
affect my behavior, and I wanted to know
what writers on sadomasochism, and the
psychopathology that drives it, thought.
There were Theodor Reik, George Bataille,How literature can mirror our complicated desires
Primitive fantasies and irrational
yearnings might continue to
flourish beneath the surface of
even the most enlightened
women.
There’s
inequality in
real-life
relationships,
essayist Daphne
Merkin writes.
Art shouldn’t
hide that.