<B>The criminal disenfranchisement that affects millions of American citizens.</B><br/><br/><I>"It seems when you're convicted of a felony, the scarlet letter is there. You take it everywhere with you."</I>Jamaica S., a twenty-five-year-old on probation in Tennessee who lost her right to vote<br/><br/>More than four million Americans, mainly poor, black, and Latino, have lost the right to vote. In some states, as many as a third of all African American men cannot take part in the most basic right of a democracy. The reason? Felony disenfranchisement laws, which remove the vote from people while they are in prison or on parole, and, in several states, for the rest of their lives.<br/><br/>Award-winning journalist Sasha Abramsky takes us on a journey through disenfranchised America, detailing the revival of antidemocratic laws that came of age in the post-Civil War segregationist South, and profiling Americans who are fighting to regain the right to vote. From the Pacific Northwest to Miami, with stops in a dozen states in between, Abramsky shows for the first time how this growing problem has played a decisive role in elections nationwidefrom state races all the way up to the closely contested 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.<br/><br/>With a new national Right to Vote campaign having just helped to overturn Iowa's felony disenfranchisement laws and similar campaigns under way in eight other states, this book comes at a time when many Americans have begun to recognize these laws as a fundamental threat to democracy.<br/><br/> In Alabama and several other Southern states, where power has shifted decisively toward the Republican Party in recent years, as many as a third of all African American men may be disenfranchised.<br/> In Virginia, over 300,000 are without the right to vote.<br/> Between half and three-quarters of a million Floridians are voteless because of past felony convictions. Had 1 percent of these individuals voted in 2000, splitting sixty-forty for Gore, the Democrats would have won the White House.<br/> In Washington, where the 2004 governor's race came down to a handful of votes, almost 200,000 are voteless.