[ExI] Do Ex-felons get back their constitutional rights after paying their debt to society?

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:56 PM 7/20/2008 -0400, "Gary Miller" <aiguy at comcast.net> wrote:


> >> I have no idea how it can be justified that felons should not be allowed
>to vote.
> >> It's not like they can harm anyone by casting a ballot...
>
>No, but if all the people who were jailed for drug offenses could vote for
>drug legalization, it is a pretty good bet it would pass.
>
>And pehaps the real reason...
>
>"But last year Alabama Republican Party Chairman Marty Connors stated a bald
>truth: "As frank as I can be," he said, "we're opposed to [restoring voting
>rights] because felons don't tend to vote Republican." He is right: People
>with low incomes, low education or minority status -- all benchmarks of
>convict populations -- vote Democratic 65 to 90 percent of the time."

Given the huge disproportion of blacks in jail, it's a handy device 
for keeping more than a tenth down the back of the bus.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040517/palast


April 29, 2004

Gregory Palast: On November 7 tens of thousands of eligible Florida 
voters were wrongly prevented from casting their ballots. Nearly all 
were Democrats, nearly half of them African-American.
  First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 
presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, 
in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election 
supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly 
ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of 
those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are 
innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black or 
Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, 
but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by 
Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA 
not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to 
implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable 
voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate 
Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers 
fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these 
lists of "suspect" voters.

The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 
2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP 
lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise 
from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly 
scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to 
the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the 
computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably 
tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught 
up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case 
was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. 
(My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close 
enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case 
to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.

The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won 
his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under 
suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb 
called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years 
in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his 
record: Steen remains an African-American.

If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, 
there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. 
Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what are 
called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be 
surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found 
widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My sources 
report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in election offices.

Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon. 
In Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some 
600,000 residents are legally barred from voting because they have a 
criminal record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation 
1.4 million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of 
the nation's black male population.

At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of 
1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote--but it did not 
guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in 
seven cases, they aren't.

Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has 
the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has 
the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on 
technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to 
Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is 
counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).

How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do 
it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his 
name. Their votes did not count.

Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the 
Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those 
spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in 
the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of 
black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. 
By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled.

Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused 
to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra 
applied to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, 
of the votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 
percent chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between 
Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these 
ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 
votes in Florida--162 times Bush's official margin of victory.

That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election, 
1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical 
reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. 
The reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious 
shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of 
Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of 
ballots spoiled was--county by county, precinct by precinct--in 
direct proportion to the local black voting population.

Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the percentage 
of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose 
ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times 
as likely to have their vote spoiled--not counted--as a white voter," 
explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's 
Harvard report. "National figures indicate that Florida is, 
surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white 
voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots 
spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."

So there you have it. In the last presidential election, 
approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their 
ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 
2004, efficiently, by computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform 
measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not 
address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote.

One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And 
when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political 
careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day.