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Supreme Court rejects Massachusetts felons' voting rights challenge[]

Massachusetts prison inmates have lost a bid to regain their voting rights after claiming that a state referendum diluted black and Hispanic political clout because of the higher proportion of minorities in the commonwealth's prison system

The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear the case of three inmates who sued the Commonwealth of Massachusetts after a 2000 referendum stripped incarcerated felons of the right to vote.

The inmates filed suit in federal court claiming the action violated the federal Voting Rights Act because it had a disparate impact on the political power of minority voters across Massachusetts.

This is so, the lawsuit said, because African Americans and Hispanic Americans are over-represented in Massachusetts prisons. The overrepresentation is caused, in part, by “considerable racial and ethnic bias, both direct and subtle, in the Massachusetts court system,” the lawsuit said.

The Voting Rights Act bars states from passing measures that undercut the opportunity of black and Hispanic voters to elect representatives of their choice. The law is designed to ensure that the political process is equally open to certain protected groups regardless of race or color.

The dispute began in the late 1990s when a group of Massachusetts prison inmates decided to take civic involvement to a new level.

They passed a referendum (60 percent to 34 percent) that changed the Massachusetts Constitution, stripping convicted felons in prison of the right to vote.

Massachusetts joined 47 other states that bar prison inmates from voting. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, permit inmates to vote while serving felony prison terms.

But the dispute did not end there. The three inmates, an African-American, a Hispanic-American, and a Caucasian-American, filed a lawsuit claiming the action violated the Voting Rights Act. They also claimed the measure amounted to illegal extra punishment in violation of the US Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws.

A federal judge threw out the ex post facto claim, but ruled that the voting rights challenge should proceed to trial. A three-judge panel of the First US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston disagreed and threw out the entire lawsuit.

The Second Circuit in New York and the 11th Circuit in Atlanta have ruled that the Voting Rights Act does not apply to disenfranchisement of convicted felons. But an appeals court panel in the San Francisco -based Ninth Circuit ruled that it does.