Jebus fucking christ with a hanging chad. Has this family no goddamn shame?
You are surprised?
Since they are scared shitless about losing…the repugnicans will try anything and everything to win.
That question was rhetorical, right?
Sam
What a fuckstick.
Looks like there is more then one way to steal an election.
You talkin’ to me? 
While this certainly seems to be a case of the Bush family penchant for scorning the civil rights of anyone unfortunate enough to fall into the criminal justice system, it hardly seems to be a case of attempting to steal this coming election. Once those one page documents are filed, each applicant must receive a hearing and the idea that “thousands” of applicants could get hearings scheduled before an October or September voter registry date (and have their rights restored as the result of a single hearing) are pretty much non-existent.
This is clearly an effort by Bush to “reduce costs” to the state of Florida by flouting the court ruling* and making such appeals much more difficult to submit, but it is hardly an effort to change the 2004 election.
- Real laws are only to support the “good” people as we get to define them.
In a state with a reported 400,000 persons on the ineligible list, the number could be substantial. Seems to me the vote count difference in 2000 was a matter of hundreds, was it not (I honestly don’t remember)? With a state that comes in that close, it would seem that any negated opposition votes would be desirable.
When old Jeb dies they’re going to have to screw him into the ground. I think Florida is going to need some international observers in order to get a fair election.
I think that the point was that anybody that is affected by this would never, ever, get through the bureacracy in time to vote in this election, regardless of how Jeb plays it. But as is reported occasional in our local papers, the Republicans here are making just about every effort possible to keep folks who have been disenfranchised from gaining their right to vote back. Even if there was no real reason to purge them from the voting rolls in the first place. Katherine Harris may have been a total bitch, but you really must admire the clever ways she found to giver her side an edge in the election, at least from a purely Machivellean standpoint.
537, to be exact.
Oh, boo hoo hoo. The poor put-upon felons aren’t being handed their applications for restoration of the right to vote when they leave prison. They have to (gasp!) put forth some effort.
I am unmoved. Why should the state make it easier for these ex-felons to vote? If the law permits it, fine. But why should the state bend over backwards to help them along this road?
If they were statistically likely to vote Republican they would be handed their applications on a silver platter as they walked out of the prison door. What stinks isn’t that felons aren’t given an easy road back to the polls, it’s that they are given a harder road merely because of who they’re likely to vote for.
That strikes me as an unsupported assertion.
But why, do you suppose, would criminals be more likely to favor the Democrats?
I’m confused. I thought felons lost their voting rights permanently.
Yeah, much as I’d love to have another reason to hate Jeb Bush, according to this (from the OPs link):
They still know that they need to fill out a form and go through a certain process before they can vote. It would be a different thing entirely if they just quit passing out the forms and never mentioned anything about it. I could entirely see a scenario, though, where “oops! I forgot to tell that guy about re-registering to vote - WINK!” becomes the norm.
Well, the most likely bet is that they wouldn’t vote at all.
But I do think there’s sufficient grounds to be suspicious of this as a politically motivated act. Given these assertions:
A disproportionate number of prisoners (compared to the overall population) are black.
Black disproportionately vote democratic.
Therefore increasing the difficulty of released prisoners to re-establish their voting rights will select for fewer democratic voters.
In 2000 the election in FLA was very tightly contested.
In 2004, as in 2000, the governor of Florida has both political and familial interests in decreasing the turnout of potentially democratic voters.
Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the governor is acting in such a way that conflict of interest appears.
But as I said…the most likely outcome is that they won’t vote at all. No politician, to my knowledge, has targeted the volatile ‘post-prison’ vote as the king-maker group.
Wasn’t Jeb Bush’s daughter convicted of felony drug charges?
Because generally criminals live in the lower income bracket and that bracket generally votes democratic.
Why do you suppose ice cream sales usually rise and fall with murder rates?
Their jail term is over; they’ve done their time. Why do they even need to apply to vote?