A Florida state judge has ordered the state of Florida to release their current list of suspected felons which it plans to use to scrub voter registration rolls.
A similar purge list used in 2000 contained hundreds and possibly thousands of errors, barring some eligible Florida voters from the state’s presidential balloting. Republican George W. Bush gained the White House after winning Florida by 537 votes after a recount battle.
“This is good news for voters because now these records will be open and available for public inspection to help protect the right of every eligible voter in Florida,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, one of the plaintiffs.
All well and good, and it should prevent the problems from the 2000 election, where accusations were made that many potential Demoacratic voters were improperly disenfranchised.
Of course, now I’m waiting for someone to sue because their privacy has been violated …
I’m always surprised when I hear that US citizens convicted of a crime lose their right to vote after they’ve left prison and paid their debt to society.
Canada has flip-flopped on allowing prisoners to vote (I think we’ve gone back to not letting them vote while they’re in prison)but I don’t think we’ve ever taken that extra step of permanent disenfranchising convicts.
It varies from state to state. There’s any number of privileges of citizenship (e.g., the right to bear arms) that can be removed via conviction of a felony (not a crime in general). The idea (from English Common Law, I believe) is that a felon has put themselves outside of the bounds of the society through their crime, though given the expansion of the term (in the War on Drugs in particular), that’s become a more difficult for some folks to agree with.
More http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9062928.htm?1c “target=”new”>here.
Hrmmm…
Seems to need a registration, so here are the good parts:
Thousands of eligible voters are on felon list
BY ERIKA BOLSTAD, JASON GROTTO AND DAVID KIDWELL
More than 2,100 Florida voters — many of them black Democrats — could be wrongly barred from voting in November because Tallahassee elections officials included them on a list of felons potentially ineligible to vote, a Herald investigation has found.
A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.
But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names — including 547 in South Florida — shouldn’t be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state’s clemency process.
…
Florida — one of just six states that don’t allow felons to vote — has come under intense criticism over its botched attempts to purge felons since the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, when myriad problems prompted many elections officials to ignore the purge altogether.