Political Science major Michael Morse unravels the “crazy quilt” of ex-felon disenfranchisement laws in the South.
There are many ways to lose the right to vote in this country, and, as Michael Morse, C’13, has discovered, the path back can be prohibitive and obscure, especially in the South. In the United States, disenfranchisement—the loss of voting rights—is a penalty that is frequently imposed on convicted felons, but the types of offenses resulting in disenfranchisement and when, or whether, the right to vote is regained vary widely from one state to the next. Morse, a political science major, has spent most of his undergraduate career tracing the machinations of state policies, using public information to track ex-felons through the system.