A story originally appearing in the Associated Press (“AP”) complaining about the lack of felon voting rights in Mississippi is being amplified by a variety of other news outlets.
The story is the product of a left-wing desire to normalize the effort to give voting rights to convicted felons.
The reasoning is simple: felons vote for Democrats, according to a study from the left-wing Brennan Center for Justice at NYU law. The findings were that 70% registered as Democrats and 24% registered as Republicans. Other studies show somewhere between a 20-40% preference for Democrats by those with a prior felony conviction.
The story quotes Kenneth Almons who served 23 years in state prison for armed robbery. It mentions that armed robbery is one of Almons’ felonies, it does not list out what his other charges putting him behind bars were.
The story does mention that Mississippi only restricts voting rights for people convicted of a certain list of 22 different felonies. It doesn’t list out what those other felonies are, but here’s the list from the Attorney General’s website.
Felons lose their obligation to serve on jury duty when called in every state except Maine. Felons lose their gun rights under federal law in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), federal firearms rights are lost upon conviction of a “crime punishable by a imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.”
CNN in 2020 estimated that 5 million people with felony convictions are not currently voting.
The wide variety of far-left groups advocating for the restoration of voting rights don’t seem as concerned with the restoration of jury duty obligations, even though juries are chronically undermanned nationwide, nor the restoration of firearm ownership rights.
Here are the far-left groups involved in this advocacy:
- American Civil Liberties Unions
- Brennan Center for Justice
- Campaign Legal Center
- National Conference of State Legislators
- The Sentencing Project
The Associated Press does not identify a single opponent of the bill, and does not focus on any possible negatives to the proposed legislation. In fact, the news piece quotes a far-left group, the Brennan Center.
Previously, the AP editorialized and said that the restoration of felon voting rights was ‘bipartisan’ and offered a ‘rare’ chance for change. The improper advocacy by the news outlet is matched by the unbalanced coverage within the story, where only one side of the argument and debate is being presented. The obvious partisan implications of the bill are also ignored, to the benefit of the party that would want to hide its electoral agenda and strategy.
This kind of advocacy within the news, along with the corruption of the mainstream media that presents far-left policy agenda items as ‘bipartisan’ efforts, is part of a 50-plus year center-right criticism of systemic bias in the media that promotes mindless conformity to left-wing ideology.
A simple search of Google reveals the headline of the article is repeated exactly the same in 40 different news outlets. It’s a close version of this formulation:
headline: Mississippi legislators won’t smooth the path this year to restore voting rights after some felonies
These outlets are simply repeating the wire service copy, copying-and-pasting the headline and the text of the story as given to them.
The reporter at the Associated Press who wrote the original story was Emily Wagster Pettus. In her article, Pettus writes from an entirely left-wing sympathetic point of view. Her article toes a hard-left political line. Pettus claims in her article, citing to the attorneys in the case from left-wing groups, that blacks are more likely to commit felonies, especially the felonies listed above, than other races.
She refers to the prohibition on felon voting as coming from a “Jim Crow era” of the state’s history. Reporter Pettus makes an argument for guilt-by-timeline and guilt-by-association as the laws in question were passed at the wrong time and in the wrong place to be considered valid.
This despite the fact that many other states, including many other southern states, allow for felon voting rights restoration. Not to mention that many other states with similar rules, Iowa, Connecticut, Wyoming, Arizona, never had ‘Jim Crow’ laws nor were they in the Confederacy. 
The beginning of Pettus’ original story reads as follows:
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Kenneth Almons says he began a 23-year sentence in a Mississippi prison just two weeks after graduating from high school, and one of his felony convictions — for armed robbery — stripped away voting rights that he still has not regained decades later.
Now 51, Almons told lawmakers Wednesday that he has worked hard and remained law-abiding since his release, and he wants to be able to vote.
“It would mean I am no longer considered a nobody,” Almons said. “Because when you don’t have a voice, you’re nobody.”
Mississippi is among the 26 states that remove voting rights from people for criminal convictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Mississippi’s original list of disenfranchising crimes springs from the Jim Crow era, and attorneys who have sued to challenge the list say authors of the state constitution removed voting rights for crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit.
The restoration of felon voting rights, letting the votes of rapists to cancel out their victims, and for murderers to double-outvote their victims, has opponents that the Associated Press could find if they had tried.
