Do felon voting rules affect criminal prosecutions?

Abstract

Felon disenfranchisement laws can alter the composition of the electorate. Accordingly, we argue that in states with such laws, elected prosecutors may be tempted to assign felon status strategically. We test our argument using criminal case data from Virginia and leveraging a sudden policy change—unexpectedly announced by the Governor on April 22, 2016—enfranchising all felons upon completion of their prison or probation sentence. Using well-known racial differences in partisanship as a measure of likely political alignment, we show that the announcement corresponded to an increase in criminal charge severity and sentence length for defendants who were politically unaligned with their prosecutors, and a decrease for aligned defendants. Evidence suggests that these changes may have been partially motivated by partisan concerns in the lead-up to the 2016 federal elections.