PUBLIC POLICY: Votes for Felons.

GOV. PAUL CELLUCCI discovered a couple of years ago that a group of Massachusetts prison inmates were organizing a political-action committee. Cellucci moved immediately to quash the group. He issued an executive order and then went a step further, filing a state constitutional amendment to deny inmates the vote. Massachusetts is expected to join 47 other states soon in an outright ban on prisoner voting.

Liberals gnashed their teeth over Cellucci's move. It "sends the wrong message," said an ACLU lawyer to the Boston Globe, as if letting a bunch of felons lobby the legislature and mail checks to candidates sent a really positive message to society. A key leader of the Massachusetts Prisoners Association was a convicted murderer.

But if Massachusetts jailbirds lose some political freedom, those in other states may win a bit more-because of an embryonic nationwide campaign to liberalize the voting rights of people enmeshed in the criminal-justice system. Thirty-two states currently forbid people on probation or parole to vote, and, in 14 states, a felony conviction can mean disenfranchisement for life. As a result, about 4 million Americans- one in 50 adults-won't be eligible to vote in this year's fall elections. And since more than a third of them are black, voting rights for felons is emerging as one of the Left's hottest civil-rights issues. Republicans may have their neo-cons and paleo-cons; now Democrats are trying to organize a voting bloc of their own, the ex-cons.

In the last twelve months, at least nine states have considered the matter, and Congress held a hearing for the first time on a bill that would override state laws and grant voting privileges to felons on parole, probation, or in halfway houses.

This is a tempting strategy for Democrats on the lookout for new race- baiting opportunities. Human Rights Watch estimates that 13 percent of all black men can't vote today because of current or prior felony convictions, a rate that balloons to 20 percent in ten states. "In the next generation of black men, we can expect as many as 40 percent of them to lose the vote for some or all of their adult lives," says Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project. During a Martin Luther King Day debate, Vice President Gore was asked what he intended to do about this. "I will review it," he promised gravely.

Voting-rights issues have always been racially charged, and southern blacks were systematically prevented from voting until the 1960s. That memory lingers, and Democrats try to take advantage of it today, even though black and white turnout rates are nearly identical. When Gore speaks to black audiences, for instance, he often mentions that his father supported the 1965 Voting Rights Act (true) and lost his Senate reelection bid because of it (false; his GOP opponent also supported the bill).

Indeed, there's an urban myth among African Americans that they won't be able to vote starting in 2007, because that's the year a portion of the Voting Rights Act comes up for reauthorization in Congress. This fear is expressed so frequently on black radio stations and in black newspapers that the Department of Justice has posted disclaimers on its webpage rebutting it. But the concern won't go away, partly because Demo crats won't let it. When Bill Bradley repeatedly said during the primary debates that he would press Congress to make the Voting Rights Act permanent, he was deliberately exploiting black paranoia.

Liberal civil-rights leaders have embraced the ex-con crusade; they will grasp at virtually any cause they can find to sustain their movement in an increasingly non-racist society. Their efforts diminish the achievements of their predecessors, who, of course, toiled to win poll access for law-abiding citizens. They also approach self-parody: "Felony voting restrictions are the last vestige of voting prohibitions in the United States. When the U.S. was founded, only wealthy white men were allowed to vote. Women, ethnic minorities, those who were illiterate, and the poor were excluded," said the NAACP's Hilary Shelton in House testimony last October. "Yet I have faith that the morally correct path, blazed by the inspiration of a more democratic union, shall ultimately prevail, and that this imperfection in our society too shall be corrected."

Advocates of felon enfranchisement like to suggest that the U.S. is unusually oppressive when it comes to criminals and voting. France, Germany, and other industrial countries allow inmates to cast ballots. And the guilt-ridden Left, always in search of a racial angle, loves to point out that South Africa's highest court ruled last year that inmates could vote in national elections. They are somewhat less interested in acknowledging that Yitzhak Rabin's assassin has voted in Israel (a fact that Rabin's widow has called "an unprecedented scandal").

There's actually a good argument to be made in favor of voting rights for felons who have completed their sentences. "When you pay your debt to society, the government ought to get off your back," says Charles Sullivan of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants. This logic makes special sense in the case of nonviolent offenders.

But even stronger arguments can be made against the idea. For one thing, denying the vote to felons is rooted in non-racist historical experience. Bans on it are as old as the Constitution. Unlike a literacy test in 1965 Mississippi, this form of disenfranchisement doesn't grow out of malign intentions. Furthermore, it's plausible that communities with a large share of ex-felons receive better representation when these people can't vote. Texas state representative Harold Dutton, a Democrat who plans to launch a voter-registration drive targeting former criminals in Dallas and Houston, makes this point, albeit unwittingly: "40,000 ex-felons with registration cards is more of a threat than 40,000 ex-felons with guns." In many jurisdictions, sheriffs and judges are elected.

If Democrats were truly committed to extending the franchise to people who have served out their sentences, rather than using the issue as an anti-GOP bludgeon, their bill in Congress, introduced by John Conyers of Michigan, could attract Republican co-sponsors. It has none. Getting a few ought to be easy; Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries, one of the most effective evangelical lobbying organizations on Capitol Hill, supports its content. "We agree with it, but we're concerned about the partisan way it's been handled," says Pat Nolan of the Justice Fellowship, the public-policy arm of Colson's outfit. "It looks like their objective is partisan advantage rather than changing the law."

Contrast this urgent crusade to give felons the vote with the broad support for an existing restriction on ex-cons. Convicted felons-even nonviolent offenders-are forever barred from possessing firearms. Under federal law, they face a mandatory five-year sentence if they're caught with one. That means accountants who've spent six months in the pokey can't go hunting. The National Rifle Association thinks that's okay. At the same time, liberals are stressing the moral necessity of letting murderers and rapists vote after their release from prison.

It's a topsy-turvy scenario, but an important case study of politics today.