Should people with felony convictions automatically regain voting rights after serving their sentences?

These laws were not written for the reasons their defenders cite today. After Reconstruction, states like Mississippi rewrote their constitutions in 1890 to disenfranchise people for crimes the delegates openly associated with Black citizens, while leaving crimes associated with white citizens off the list. The Brennan Center has traced how that design spread, which is why the racial gaps in disenfranchisement today are a feature, not a bug. Defenders now talk about the seriousness of punishment, but the architecture was built to shrink the Black electorate, and it still does. A policy born as a tool of white supremacy does not become neutral with age. Automatic restoration would finally retire a mechanism whose original purpose we all claim to reject. Brennan Center