More Florida election fuckups coming ...

[Vympel]

Delays, Purge Hit Voter Rolls

[Aaron]

What's the reason behind this law? After you serve your prison time you shouldn't be punished continuly afterwards, this definetly sounds unconstitutional.

[MKSheppard]

What's the reason behind this law? After you serve your prison time you shouldn't be punished continuly afterwards, this definetly sounds unconstitutional.

Different states, different laws, Taxachussets allows people in prisons to vote; while in MD you can't vote in prison

[Joe]

Tough shit, they shouldn't have committed felonies. There is nothing unconstitutional about states denying the vote to convicted felons.

[MKSheppard]

Tough shit, they shouldn't have committed felonies.

But But, they're DEMMMYCRATS! This is unconstitutional action by the Republicans to keep DEMMYCRATS from voting!

[Aaron]

Tough shit, they shouldn't have committed felonies. There is nothing unconstitutional about states denying the vote to convicted felons.

Yes, but they've served their time. Why continue to punish them after that? BTW I think up here in Canada, prisoners can vote.

[Col. Crackpot]

i thought ALL states prevented felons from voting? hmmm.... And Shep, AFAIK Massachusetts does NOT allow incarcerated felons to vote.

[MKSheppard]

i thought ALL states prevented felons from voting? hmmm.... And Shep, AFAIK Massachusetts does NOT allow incarcerated felons to vote.

It was another state, I forget. one of the loony northeastern states

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

Felons lose the right to own guns, and serve on juries as well as vote in my state.
I see nothing whatsoever wrong with this. It is considered part of the penalty, by statute, on the books. Felons are forbidden from holding government jobs, or working on classified manufacturing as well. Military spare parts, and items. It will get you fired from Boeing, Raytheon, Colt, ect...

[Col. Crackpot]

i thought ALL states prevented felons from voting? hmmm.... And Shep, AFAIK Massachusetts does NOT allow incarcerated felons to vote.

It was another state, I forget. one of the loony northeastern states

Vermont i'm willing to bet. Asscrack of New England filed with armed hippies.

[Skelron]

But the state government is concentrating on removing as many former felons from voting rolls as possible, even though critics charge that it risks disenfranchising some who are legally entitled to vote. Meanwhile, those critics charge, the state is dragging its feet on restoring those wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000.

Note the wrongly removed in better detail basically people who had commited no Crimes not No Felonys no Crimes. In actual fact the search requirements used to generate the list of people that Florida took of the records could only give I believe an 80% accuracy and many people where removed who had never even been inside a Court because they shared a surname.

One person removed from the voting records for example, and not told till the day of the last election was the local organiser for the Polling center...

[Skelron]

Another post-2000 lawsuit, by the NAACP, forced the state to use stricter criteria in producing its felon purge lists.

The lists are produced by matching lists of felons, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and other sources, against the statewide voter roll. In 2000, state officials purposely used loose matching criteria to capture as many names as possible, even knowing it would result in ``false positives'' - people who didn't actually have felony records, said Emmett Mitchell, former counsel of the Division of Elections.

They relied on local election supervisors to ensure accurate matches before removing the voters. But some supervisors, with limited time and staff to complete the task and little expertise in investigations, simply sent letters to everyone on their lists, and then purged those who didn't respond or couldn't provide proof they weren't felons.

Heh because people are going to ask for evidence for my assertions above and I am not sure where said evidence is (It exists but in a book and maybe a book I lent out to friends so)... luckily most of it can be found here in the article itself.

[Glocksman]

Somewhat OT, but the number one thing we could do to combat election fraud is to require the presentation of a state issued picture ID (such as a Driver's License) when voting.

Christ, you can't even buy cigarettes without showing an ID, yet you can vote merely by walking in and signing a list.

And as for purging convicted felons off the rolls, states have pretty broad discretion to set voting procedures up as long as they don't violate civil rights laws by doing so.

AFAIK, convicted felons aren't a protected class under the Civil Rights Acts.

[Skelron]

Glocksman what about the innocently struck off the list people, people who have not commited any Felonys but are still not back on the election roll in Florida, because as the article points out it can take YEARS to sort out the mess...

And while they still havn't sorted out the last fiasco they go and produce a new list 6 months before the election, and how long do you think it will take to sort out that mess? Likely more than 6 Months so...

The problem is just going to keep on growing that is the main point of the article as far as I am concerned, I don't think it's right anyway, once your out of prison you have paid your debt to society and should be treated like anyone else... (Barring obvious sensible precautions you don't allow a convicted bank robber to be a Bank Security guard )

[Skelron]

Crud didn't mean to post that just then.

However even accepting that Florida has the right to bar Felons it dosn't until it can be sure it is not going to Bar any non-Felons by mistake, and until it has got back onto the rolls all the people who where mistakenly stricken last time round... Thats just simple common sense.

[phongn]

Somewhat OT, but the number one thing we could do to combat election fraud is to require the presentation of a state issued picture ID (such as a Driver's License) when voting.

Florida requires this.

[EmperorChrostas the Cruel]

No Skelron, once you are out of prison you have NOT fully paid your debt to society. You are on parole for 2 to 7 years. If you were convicted of a sex crime, you are a registered sex offender for LIFE. Both of these things limit your civil rights to less than a full citizen's.
Losing your right to vote permanently was part of the punishment, AS WELL AS your prison term. GOT IT? This is both constitutional, and wise.* The "criminal vote" shouldn't be a factor in making, enforcing, or judging law.
There is also paying restitution, which not doing will result in a NEW charge sending you back to prison.
The prison term is NOT the only bad thing that doing a felony gets you!
It is ONE of the bad things, and the most obvious.
Once you commit a felony, you are NOT a full citizen again until pardoned, or statute limitations of your rights expire.
Only full citizens get to vote, own guns, and serve on a jury. Be you immigrant or felon, you don't DESERVE these things. In some cases you are permitted to though.



*Case and point. A gang of thugs gets big enough to be a majority voting block in a "war zone" part of the city. (Compton, Watts, ect...) Do you want these people on the jury deciding the guilt or innocense of one of their fellow gang members? Or deciding who gets to be a judge, police chief, or mayor? This is a separate issue from the government of Florida being inept in it's execution.

Do not attribute to malice, what incompetence can acount for.

"Hi I'm from the government, and I'm here to help!"
Flee for your lives!

[Skelron]

Hmm good points, as I said through that matter isn't something I am going to get upset about. Yes there are going to be restrictions on Felons after they are released, I would prefer Voting not to be one of them but... Thats something that falls into the remit of the Government and people to decide. But at least make sure it actually works before you implement it and continue to implement it... Thats all that is asked really, haver it actually WORK, if one or two Felons slip through the net fine, better than thousends of innocent people get punished!

[Durandal]

No Skelron, once you are out of prison you have NOT fully paid your debt to society. You are on parole for 2 to 7 years.

Except that this law applies to anyone who has been a convicted felon, not just felons on parole. Honestly, some of the people in that article had been out of prison for over 15 years and still hadn't gotten their right to vote back. That's just absurd.

But all of that is immaterial, because Florida has a proces in place by which felons can get the right to vote back. Honestly, this "permanent branding" shit is just a little Draconian. I can see cracking down on repeat offenders, but the people in that article lead respectable lives now. The state dragging its feet in getting them their rights back is wrong, no matter which way you slice it.

[Elfdart]

The laws that prevent convicted felons from voting are a holdover from the days of Jim Crow. Because blacks, hispanics, poor whites and immigrants were more likely to be convicted of felonies, and these groups weren't as likely to vote for right-wing, pro-corporatist politicians; and they were becoming more numerous, something had to be done to prevent them from voting out the Good Ole Boys.

One way was to simply bar them from voting. This could involve bands of thugs in white sheets stringing up uppity minorities and firebombing churches or it could be subtler methods. One was the poll tax. Large numbers of people in the South didn't have two dimes to rub together, let alone money to pay to vote. The Constitution was ammended to stop this.

Another tactic was "literacy tests", since education in the South wasn't as available as elsewhere (the boys in white also firebombed schools that taught blacks and lynched the teachers), this was somewhat clever. The problem was that racist rednecks were no more literate than black sharecroppers, so the "grandfather clause" was built in: If Gramps could vote, so could you. This was another way to screw blacks since when this exception was passed, the grandparents of most blacks were slaves and the grandparents of immigrants were back in Ireland, Italy, Poland or wherever else.

Another tactic is the legal system. Even though slavery was abolished, the planters devised another way to get blacks to pick their crops without paying them. Laws were passed that made numerous petty crimes (such as vagrancy) into felonies punishable by stints on prison "farms" -which were nothing more than balmy gulags in which malaria and cholera, rather than sub-zero temperatures did much of the killing. Parchman Farm in Mississippi was so brutal that judges didn't even bother to sentence anyone to more than ten years hard labor: Very few lived that long. Inmates were rented out to businesses for labor.

Of course, this disgusting system might have been abolished had the state legislatures not added the provision that convicts (even after serving their sentences) could not vote. You'll notice that for the most part, the states that don't allow convicts to vote are the same ones that had slavery until 1865, had Jim Crow, had poll taxes, mass lynchings, etc, etc...

The desire to purge the voting rolls is just another way to continue Jim Crow. A disproportional number of felons are minorities. So a purge of felons is a good way to knock them off the rolls. The computer program used by Jeb Bush in 2000 (which helped steal the election for his brother) doesn't just kick known felons off the list. If you have a similar name, the same birthdate, a similar SS#, driver's license# or other attributes, you also got removed. Like most southern states, the "race" of the voter is listed on his or her registration. And face it, how many white "Washingtons" are you going to find?

Of course, the people illegally removed have no real recourse. They don't find out they've been kicked off until they actually try to vote. At that point, it's too late. They've been disenfranchised. Even if they do sue and win (as the NAACP did after 2000), their votes weren't counted and there's nothing to prevent Grand Imperial Wizard Jeb from Klu Kluxing the vote again as he's doing right now.

[Xenophobe3691]

Somewhat OT, but the number one thing we could do to combat election fraud is to require the presentation of a state issued picture ID (such as a Driver's License) when voting.

Christ, you can't even buy cigarettes without showing an ID, yet you can vote merely by walking in and signing a list.

And as for purging convicted felons off the rolls, states have pretty broad discretion to set voting procedures up as long as they don't violate civil rights laws by doing so.

AFAIK, convicted felons aren't a protected class under the Civil Rights Acts.

Florida requires photo ID nowadays. I just got a letter in the mail a few months ago about it...

[Glocksman]

Indiana doesn't.

All I do is walk in, give them my name, sign the roll, and then go and vote.


Of course an ID check won't do much good with the 'motor voter' law and some states passing laws to let illegal immigrants get DL's.


What's the next step, multilingual ballots?

[Vohu Manah]

Hope Florida doesn't end up another battleground state, otherwise look forward to a repeat of the 2000 Elections. Odd though, one would think (and quite frankly expect) Florida to have gotten it's act together in the four years since that fiasco. Guess they'll never learn, or apparently they did (which is why they are doing it again).

[Xenophobe3691]

What's the next step, multilingual ballots?

I dont' understand why you're against multilingual ballots, there is no official language of the United States.

[Glocksman]

There's no official language de jure, but English is the de facto 'official language, and proficiency in it is a requirement for naturalized citizenship.

If a naturalized citizen claims that he needs a ballot in his native language then he should be stripped of his citizenship because he isn't proficient in English and obtained his citizenship under false pretenses.