Ex-Felon Disenfranchisement In Virginia

In Chapter 10 of Why Nations Fail Acemoglu and Robinson highlight the beneficial and inclusive impact of the introduction of adult white male suffrage in Australia over 150 years ago. Here in Virginia, that has still yet to be achieved. Virginia is one of four states in the Union that permanently denies ex-felons their right to vote. Ari Mebler writes in an article on msnbc.com, that in the most recent Virginia election "over 300,000 citizens will be missing from the voting rolls – including 20% of the state’s black population". 

This problem goes deeper than mere felony disenfranchisement, it's a matter of racial marginalization. Nationwide this figure is even more stark with 1/3 of the Nation's African-American males being denied the right to vote, largely due to our country's "war on drugs". Acemoglu and Robinson often use America as the poster-child for inclusivity, but seeing the correlation between the states that currently enact restrictive voting laws that disenfranchise African Americans and the states with strong histories of slavery, segregation, and discrimination, it's clear that these legacies are persistent and we aren't as far from the days of Jim Crow as we'd like to think.