Nearly six million Americans are kept from voting due to former incarcerations, and Eric Holder wants that to change. At a Georgetown University symposium on Tuesday, the U.S. attorney general compared the laws keeping ex-felons from voting to "a time of post-Civil War discrimination," saying they disproportionately marginalize minority communities. The laws, Holder noted, "have their roots in centuries-old conceptions of justice that were too often based on exclusion, animus, and fear.”
