Abstract

Truly, the right to vote is the most sacred pillar of a democracy. The history of the United States is decorated with triumphs of civic liberties as the franchise has been expanded from land-owning white men to nearly all American
citizens. Despite public sentiments, however, the history of the expansion of the right to vote has not been linear. In fact, de facto enfranchisement has ebbed and flowed with time and with degrees of domestic social tension. While social scientists have long posited that felon disenfranchisement benefits the GOP by removing large portions of minorities and low-income Americans from the polity, little definitive research has been performed to understand the impact of felon disenfranchisement. This analysis attempts to better understand the 2016 political landscape by analyzing the relationships between felon voting laws, racial inequities, and political outcomes. State-level trends from the 2016 election year reveal
that states with large racial disparities in disenfranchisement tend to be red states with small minority populations and
below average, overall rates of disenfranchisement. Moreover, Trump tended to win by a larger margin in states that had
higher proportions of people of color. Voter information from the 2016 election was used to estimate the voting patterns of the disenfranchised population in each state and the election outcome was then recalculated with the projected votes
of the disenfranchised included. The simulated change in vote margin revealed that eliminating disenfranchisement
laws would benefit Democratic candidates and that the disenfranchised would have enough political power to influence
elections with narrower margins than the presidential election in 2016.