Should Iowa restore voting rights to 52,000 felons? Advisory board says yes.

Jason Clayworth | The Des Moines Register

Show Caption Hide Caption Florida elections: Former felons get to vote Florida voters pass Amendment 4 - restoring voting rights to former felons.

Iowa felon voter rights should be restored, a legislative advisory board recommended Wednesday.

It’s a proposal that could affect about 52,000 Iowans.

After Florida voters on Nov. 6 approved an amendment to their state's constitution that automatically restores the voting rights of felons who've completed their sentences or go on probation, Iowa and Kentucky are the only remaining states that permanently ban all felons from voting unless the governor individually restores their rights.

“Iowa has been a leader on a whole range of civil rights issues; this is not one of them. Iowa is in the back of the line on this one,” Daniel Zeno, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, said Wednesday to Iowa's Public Safety Advisory Board.

Iowa had a longtime policy that generally prohibited convicted felons from voting until 2005, when former Gov. Tom Vilsack issued an executive order that restored voting rights to those who had completed their sentence.

Former Gov. Terry Branstad reversed Vilsack's order shortly after he resumed office in 2011.

Multiple civil rights and voter groups, including the League of Women Voters of Iowa, have compared the voter prohibitions to Jim Crow laws enacted by white-dominated legislatures to enforce racial segregation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

"We really want Iowa to continue to move forward and get out of that one or two states" that don’t allow felons who have completed their sentences to vote,” Karen Person, a member of the Iowa League told the advisory board Wednesday.

The Iowa Legislature created the board about eight years ago to analyze current or proposed criminal laws. It is comprised of 16 voting and six non-voting members that include four lawmakers.

Doug Wolfe, an employee of the Iowa Department of Human Services, was one of the group’s members who spoke in favor of the recommendation.

“My perspective is largely from working with teenagers and young adults in the foster care system,” Wolfe said. “What we’ve learned about those young people is they make a lot of mistakes. Some of it is part of normal development … we know from science that their brains aren’t fully developed until maybe 26 years old.”

Wolfe and the other members of the advisory board voted to recommend lawmakers restore the voting rights of offenders. Details such as whether that would begin after completing prison or making restitution would be left to lawmakers to decide.

No members opposed the recommendation, which was taken via a voice vote Wednesday.

An Oct. 17 report from the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for criminal justice, shows that roughly 2 percent of the state’s population — or 52,012 people — are unable to vote because of the lifetime felon voter ban.