A little more detail on the voter purge situation in Florida:
Florida is also in the process of checking voter rolls for newly identified felons. The governor has made it more difficult for felons to regain their voter rights. In 2004, the state was forced to stop its search for felons on the rolls after the method it was using was found to be flawed. In the disputed 2000 election, state officials removed more than 173,000 people identified as felons or ineligible to vote from the rolls. Civil rights groups and county election supervisors said the lists contained many errors.
“Felon voting” is a big issue among GOP base voters. Here’s Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio lecturing Charlie Crist on it:
In their first U.S. Senate primary debate broadcast on FOX News Sunday, former state House speaker Marco Rubio continued to bash Gov. Charlie Crist’s conservative credentials.
“In addition to that, you worked with ACORN and groups like that to give felons voting rights in Florida.”
And sure enough, in 2007 Crist and two state Cabinet members — Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson, a Republican, and Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, a Democrat — agreed to relax rules that kept felons from voting. Florida at the time was one of three states that required all felons to go through a cumbersome process requesting clemency, which dates back to 1868, to regain their civil rights — which include the right to vote, serve on a jury, run for public office or apply for a professional license.
That policy shift towards treating felons like human beings with some shot at a normal life obviously could not stand or the Tea Party base would start sending a lot of angry emails. Rick Scott bravely and courageously came down hard on those post-release felons:
Florida Gov. Rick Scott and other Cabinet-level officials voted unanimously Wednesday to roll back state rules enacted four years ago that made it easier for many ex-felons to regain the right to vote. Now, under the new rules, even nonviolent offenders would have to wait five years after the conclusion of their sentences to apply for the chance to have their civil rights restored.
Rick Scott was involved in the biggest Medicare fraud case in US history. One would think his direct experience with lawbreaking and (presumably) rehabilitation would inspire some basic decency towards felons, “there but for the grace…”, like that, but, no. Maybe white collar crime is different.
Felon voting also came up in the GOP primary, where Mitt Romney followed his usual cowardly playbook. Romney, through his secret-donor PACS, attacked Rick Santorum for being one of three Republican Senators supporting a federal law that would have restored some voting rights to felons:
During Monday’s GOP presidential debate, Mr. Romney at times smugly touted his belief that the voting rights of defendants convicted of violent crimes should not be restored — even if they have served the requisite time behind bars and stayed on the right side of the law after release. “I’m not letting felons who had committed violent crimes to vote,” Mr. Romney said. “I think it’s a position that’s reasonable, and that’s the position I’ve got.” The statement garnered strong applause from the South Carolina debate audience.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine will endorse Rick Santorum this afternoon, Ohio Republicans confirm.
DeWine, a Romney endorser, will announce his decision to change endorsements in remarks at the Ohio State House in Columbus, OH. Santorum is currently leading Romney in the state, 42 percent to 24 percent in the latest Rasmussen poll. Sources inside the Romney campaign said DeWine was upset that Romney was critical of Santorum’s position on the felon voting bill, which is mentioned in an ad by Romney’s Super PAC and was brought up in a debate last month. DeWine and Santorum were two of only three Republican Senators who voted for the bill.
If you know anything at all about the criminal justice system in this country, you know that people who are convicted of a felony and serve their sentence have enough trouble just finding a job and keeping a roof over their head while wearing that scarlet F-for-felon after they’re released. They’re already marginalized and up against long odds. The last thing they need when they’re trying to get their lives together is one more state-administered kick in the face on the way out, but conservatives are bound and determined to deliver one anyway. Why? Because they can. The refusal to restore voting rights is just piling on, but the ungenerous, unforgiving and spiteful GOP base apparently demand a disenfranchisement sentence over and above a prison sentence.
Mitt Romney not only enthusiastically endorsed this gratuitous how-low-will-they-go nastiness; he gleefully exploited the issue to pick up a point or two in the primary.
karen
Florida Defies DOJ Order to stop purging voter roles
What’s the next move?
Kay
@karen:
County elections officials have some discretion to apply purges, or not. They chose “not”. This is pure political pandering by Scott. He’ll cover his ass with the GOP base, while shifting all the problems and heat to his county election supervisors. He’s a real prince.
Southern Beale
We just had a shooting near my house this morning. Apparently a woman showing up to work at her place of employment, a dentist’s office, was met by someone targeting her and shot to death in the office. Guessing it was a spouse or boyfriend but news hasn’t confirmed that yet.
Anyway, Tennessee has some of the most liberal gun laws in the nation. God forbid we should have some sensible gun laws to keep crazy people from getting their hands on guns. Nope free and easy access to guns is God=given RIGHT but if ONE felon, or immigrant, or dead person votes illegally it’s a fucking assault on the Constitution, and all sorts of restrictions have to be put in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. And if a few thousand brown-skinned liberals are disenfranchised in the process, ah well! That’s the price we have to pay for FREEDUMB.
Southern Beale
Not to be outdone, Texas targets 300,000 in its voter purge. Everything is bigger in Texas.
mcd410x
The Tea Party makes phone calls. People who answer the phone are forced to deal with them which makes them 1,000 times more potent. Stop writing letters or emails to the CEO of the company or the editor, call the CEO.
PeakVT
Florida at the time was one of three states that required all felons to go through a cumbersome process requesting clemency … to regain their civil rights
Maine and Vermont allow even incarcerated felons the right to vote
It seems to me there should be an equal protection issue here, but Florida’s rules are in force (again), so maybe not.
PurpleGirl
Rick Scott was involved in the biggest Medicare fraud case in US history. One would think his direct experience with lawbreaking and (presumably) rehabilitation would inspire some basic decency towards felons, “there but for the grace…”, like that, but, no. Maybe white collar crime is different.
Of course it’s different. Rick Scott made money
while committing his crimeswhile enabling his company to commit the crimes. He made lots of money. What did these petty criminals do, did they make lots of money, millions of dollars… no, they stayed poor. Clearly they are not in the same class as Rick Scott. (I hate Rick Scott.)Linnaeus
@Southern Beale:
The man who shot up a local coffee shop here in Seattle had a concealed carry permit. From what I’ve heard (though I haven’t confirmed this) his family tried to have the state revoke it, but to no avail.
Bubblegum Tate
Don’t you see? It’s *because* felons are marginalized and up against long odds that we can’t permit them to vote. Otherwise, they’ll just vote themselves some of MY HARD-EARNED MONEY!
/wingnut
Villago Delenda Est
If they’re so motherfucking concerned about felons voting, why the fuck did they install Lex fucking Luthor in the governor’s mansion?
MariedeGournay
@karen: Arrested for breaking the law, tried, sent to prison, made a felon, stripped of voting rights. At least if I ran the universe.
gene108
Conservatives, like Sith Lords, think in absolutes. The law states ‘x’ is a crime, therefore braking the law is bad and therefore the person is bad and therefore they must face eternal punishment and this righteous vengeance will make all the aggrieved parties feel better.
Strange part is the most vengeful minded folks are also laud themselves as deeply religious Christians. Didn’t Jesus say something about “turning the other cheek” and not retaliating?
ACS
I mostly lurk on this site, but I have to chime in here, since I worked on restoring the civil rights of felons when I was in law school. It’s one thing to know in the abstract how tough it is to resume a normal life after a felony conviction, but it’s another thing to meet people who are trying to do so.
I had one client who had a single felony DUI about 20 years ago. He was a retired grandpa of 14 who’d been married for over 50 years, hadn’t had a run in with the law since his DUI, etc. etc., but of course, in the infinite majesty of the law, he couldn’t go hunting with his grandkids, constantly had to deal with the conviction on rental applications, loan applications, etc. Technically, the law in my state allowed him to vote a few years after the conviction, but he had no way of knowing this.
And the law in my state actually wasn’t even that strict by national standards. Thinking about tighten these laws just makes my blood boil. think how many non-violent, drug-related felonies we have in the U.S. and you’ll get an idea of the scale of the problem. Not only does it inflict a huge cost on real people’s lives, it’s bad social policy.
Just think: if you’re trying to put your life back together after a conviction, and ten years out, you still can’t vote, you still can’t get a job, an apartment, or a car loan, you still can’t go hunting with your family like you used to do every weekend, and you can’t even apply for most professional licenses. What incentive do you have to keep walking the straight and narrow as a productive member of society?
When people talk about the GOP being a party of sociopaths, this is the kind of thing they’re talking about. Either guys like Rick Scott understand the actual problem and are fine with ignoring it to appeal to the rubes, or they are congenitally incapable of even thinking about ex-cons as anything other than an abstract group of bad people who deserve whatever they get. I’m not sure which is worse.
kindness
The right loves them some disenfranchisement. Stopping felons from voting wipes out a whole bunch of brown peoples votes. Republicans know this is reverse ballot box stuffing but more effective because it’s legal.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Elephant in the room:
“Felon” equals “Nigger.”
After all, those rules were enacted in 1868, after the previous negro-control-system had been eliminated.
Johnny Reb strikes again, the fucker.
Kay
@ACS:
Great comment. They’re full of shit, too, I might add. Nearly everyone knows a felon. I would think Republican politicians would be MORE likely to know a felon, personally, actually, than your average Joe. Romney’s outraged sanctimony is pure pandering.
Another Halocene Human
Felons (in prison) should also be permitted to vote.
What is everyone afraid of? Gubernatorial candidates hoping to pick up a few hundred votes by running on a platform of Oscar Meyer baloney instead of no-name brand?
Another Halocene Human
@Kay: Republicans know a lot of felony-committers who haven’t yet been caught.
Another Halocene Human
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: Bingo.
Another Halocene Human
@kindness: Funny how twice as many whites are arrested as blacks daily, but convictions and sentencing don’t pan out that way…
ant
as someone who bought a duplex a few years back and needs to screen potential renters, I get a bit jaded about the reasons people get stigmatized with these “felon/sex offender” labels.
Often these are people that were kids doing stupid shit that were charged as adults. Or were in consensual relationships that were frowned upon by the law.
I think there are a lot more people mislabeled than there used to be.
And yes, folks that finish their parole should be able to vote just like normal people.
Another Halocene Human
@ACS: Let the punishment fit the crime–DUIs should have their license to drive suspended, those who commit gun crimes should lose the right to own a firearm, and those who engage in election fraud–and none other–should lose their right to vote.
Kay
@Another Halocene Human:
The only halfway reasonable argument I have ever heard was that incarcerated felons could vote on laws that would allow early release, so a referendum or something.
Another Halocene Human
@Bubblegum Tate:
Only property owners should vote, and by that of course we mean top 3% land-owners, owning your burial plot or car or trailer obviously should not count. Bums like that have no skin in the game.
Bring back the Staaten-system!
Another Halocene Human
@Linnaeus:
Heaven forfend we put a roadblock against people with severe emotional or mental problems from carrying a loaded firearm. Of course, many states would indeed take away their right to vote for being “feeble”.
On this same note, a lot of states do not take away DLs even when the family is begging them to because of loss of vision/hearing or onset of dementia. My great-grandmother kept her license with cataracts!!! WTH!
Another Halocene Human
@Southern Beale:
If only instead of abstinence education and father-daughter purity balls they used that valuable classroom time to teach young men to never hit a woman, never shake a baby, and that their sexual and romantic partners are not property, and teach them appropriate outlets to explore and understand their feelings of shame and betrayal when they are rejected by a current or potential romantic partner. (And “punch a pillow when you get angry” is NOT a useful piece of advice. However, questioning why masculinity is connected to sexual prowess or success rather than virtues such as honesty, hard work, loyalty, and compassion would be a very good discussion.)
Girls need a class too, a class that is the opposite of “your value is what is between your legs”. Your value is what is between your ears.
ACS
@Kay: Thanks. I should add that I just realized I made a mistake in my post. The grandpa I mentioned actually couldn’t vote, since his DUI was charged as aggravated assault with a deadly weapon (i.e. his car), even though he just rear-ended someone at a stop light.
@ant: Yeah, that’s true about people potentially being mislabelled. The problem that most of my clients ran into was simply being labelled in the first place. A lot of times people won’t even look at what the conviction was, or if even if they realize that it was a long time ago, etc., who are they going to rent to if there’s a similar applicant with no felony listed? They’ll take the guy with the clean record every time, even if they don’t think the felony is likely to be a problem, because why take the chance?
Another Halocene Human
@karen: Apparently it’s to run around hair-on-fire style claiming that “illegals” are trying to vote in Miami-Dade County and keep pumping that “some people shouldn’t be allowed to vote” meme.
Got very angry at a coworker for that one. I told him my ancestors left Germany over tyrannical bullshit like that and universal suffrage is part of what the promise of America is all about.
ACS
@Another Halocene Human: I don’t disagree with you in principle, but these people with felony DUIs did have their license suspended, they just got a felony conviction too (and all that comes with it). License suspension isn’t usually permanent, but often a felony conviction (like a diamond) is forever.
EDIT: that was obviously in response to your earlier comment, not the one right above mine.
Another Halocene Human
If these dumbfuck Scots-Irish and English knew their damn history, they would know that their ancestors came to the Colonies in chains as indentured servants whose death sentences for debt, petty theft, or other “high crimes” of poverty and penury had been commuted on the condition that they never return.
Indentured servitude IS condition of slavery. Hundreds if not thousands of white indentured servants ran away from southern plantations in the centuries before the Revolution. Many traveled west of the Ohio River and married Indians.
Another Halocene Human
@ACS: I’m not disagreeing with you about that. It’s shocking, for example, how few employers will hire former felons. Usually it is small businesses who do so while the nation pursues an industrial policy of crushing small businesses into fine dust.
Another Halocene Human
@ACS: It’s liability. Easier to run a background check than make a judgment call. Part of it is our increasingly atomized and anonymized society where nobody knows anybody else. It’s also laziness, not calling references until well after the hire, for example.
It always makes me laugh that they put employees on “probation” then fail to fire their problem children anyway. They could have prevented the problem during the hiring process but don’t want to go through the bother because it’s too time-consuming/expensive. Retaining people longer would cut these costs, but then you couldn’t rule your department like a despot of old, and who wants that?
Another Halocene Human
@ant: The sex offender laws failed to distinguish between different types of sex offenses. I think some were legally challenged but fear and “think of the children!” ruled the day. In Mass while I was there they published names of hundreds of gay men charged with the crime of going to same-sex house parties during the Watch&Ward Society era.
They net people who were caught urinating in public after the big game or soliciting sex with other willing adults in the bushes behind a rest stop. Nuisance behavior, sure, but not even rising to the level of kiting checks or ripping the phone out of your girlfriend’s hands and beating her about the head with it, but those people don’t get stuck on a state registry.
State laws differ a lot. I check the sex offender registry in Florida from time to time and the number of grown men nabbed for raping a child under 13 is truly shocking. I haven’t seen drunk-in-public kind of convictions come up on those lists (they list the offense, if not the details). However, OHIO should be infamous forever for sending an 18-yo man to grown-up PRISON for a year for having sex with his 16 yo boyfriend, conduct that in that state would have been perfectly legal in the state of Ohio had his boyfriend been a girl. This was a decade ago, reported in Washington Blade but not in mainstream papers. (The sex was consensual on the part of the two involved, but not on the part of the younger boy’s parents. SICK.)
Person of Choler
Since the “crackdown” is politically motivated, I guess both sides of the issue agree that the felons are mostly Democrats.
Kay
@Person of Choler:
Am I to cower and cede your innate moral superiority on this? “Felons are Democrats, so there!”
Why do you care if the “felons are mostly Democrats”? Why are you so ridiculously devoted to disenfranchising people? What’s the reason for this? Don’t give me some round table, think-tanked vaguely religious moralistic bullshit. Give me a reason other than vengeance, and the chance for conservatives to strut around proudly proclaiming their moral superiority.
These people did their time, yet conservatives insist that they suffer further sanctions. Why are you barring them from voting?
gene108
@Another Halocene Human:
There are cases of hetro sex between teenagers that falls into the category of statutory rape and gets kids (I’m guessing mostly boys) labeled as sex offenders.
I think there was a case in Georgia, a few years back, that 17 year old kid got sent to prison for getting a blow-job from a 15 year old girl.
There are a lot of people in places of power, who seem to be there now because they didn’t get (a) get caught smoking pot or (b) laws against teenagers getting it on weren’t very strict/not enforced much, when they were kids.
isildur
Felons are mostly Democrats because felons are mostly people of color. That is, as previous posters have said, the real impetus behind disenfranchising them.
It’s a great system: you lock up minorities, thereby making them into political irrelevancies. You could stave off demographic shift for a generation that way!
PeakVT
@Another Halocene Human: Felons (and/or other lesser offenders) in prison voting could be and likely would be a problem in some local elections, where there might be as many people in a prison as normal residents of a rural township or county.
kay
@Person of Choler:
You should understand I’m not ashamed of ex-felons who vote. I call them “voters”.
I’d be ashamed of promoting a fraud like Colson, with his “prison ministry”, where he used vulnerable people to restore his reputation among conservative intellectuals, by faking stats.
Ben Cisco
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: Yeah, pretty much THIS.
Xavier Murello
This guy is like Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” mixed with Hannibal Lecter