,
Actually, the regional disparity in rules about felon voting goes back to before the Civil War, when blacks in the South were slaves and no one even thought of them voting. Free blacks mostly couldn’t vote in the North, either. [
, ProCon.org, June 25, 2013].
This regional disparity is caused by the same thing that causes many regional disparities different cultures, based on patterns of settlement, which go back to the regional disparities in the British Isles. David Hackett Fischer’s
Albion’s Seed (subtitle: “Four British Folkways in America”) says that the South differs from the North in terms of what historiographer Fischer calls “Order Ways” and “Freedom Ways”, not to mention “Religious Ways”, which means that the South has a different “honor culture” than the North.