As with every presidential election cycle when the Iowa caucuses approach, voters elsewhere have been left to wonder why such an unrepresentative state plays an outsize role in American democracy. Iowa voters are more rural than the national average, but the most notable demographic difference is Iowa’s whiteness: 90.7 percent of the population is white, compared with 76.5 percent nationally.
Yet the Democratic caucuses on Feb. 3 are going to be even whiter than that disparity suggests, because the state practices a de facto form of racial disenfranchisement: a lifetime voting ban for anyone ever convicted of a felony.
Just 4 percent of Iowa’s population is black, but blacks make up 26 percent of the state’s prison population. In 2016, a study by the Sentencing Project ranked Iowa third worst in the nation for its 1 in 17 incarceration rate of adult black males; the white/black differential was 11 to 1, also third worst nationally. (The disenfranchisement of Latinos is less pronounced; they make up 6.2 percent of Iowa’s population, and the Latino/white imprisonment ratio is 1.7 to 1.)