Defense attorney? 
I certainly think that the enormous number of people who have been locked up to provide rationalization for the DEA and the prison industry are different than burglars, muggers, rapists, and murderers. (YMMV, I suppose.)
Recovering addict. Many of fellow recovering addicts have done time for drug offenses and robberies.
I understand the recovery. Trust me. I just don’t have a lot of sympathy when an addict puts my loved ones at risk. And I’ve had many an occassion where I could have blamed the booze for what I did, I just decided not to do it.
But kudos for your recovery, I honestly hope I can someday be where you are.
It doesn’t, necessarily. But it does create a lack of a paper trail; a felon could, conceivably, call the hotline, schedule a hearing, then show up at court two months later to be told that he couldn’t have one because he didn’t schedule one in the first place. And, of course, he has nothing to challenge the notion, unless he recorded the conversation with the person on the other end of the phone, which is illegal because Florida is a dual-party consent state:
Only 7 states permanently disenfranchise felons. The other 43 don’t seem to be in utter chaos and lawlessness because ex-felons can vote. They’ve paid their debt to society. If they’re not breaking any other laws, let them vote; it’s one of the few choices one gets to make in this country.
Andros X, thanks for the cite. Cleared up a few things. But brought up another point. The link says 1.4 African-Americans are out of the running to vote, while over 2 million whites (no mention of continental origin) are out of the loop.
Is the US really that predjudiced agains European-Americans? (Yeah, it’s snarky, but let’s put some meaning back into the words)
Well, the beauty of our dual-sovereign system is that different states may make for themselves different rules. Florida (and Virginia!) feel that committing a felony is serious enough that it warrants loss of voting privileges even after the full sentence is served. Maine and Vermont allow inmates to vote while still incarcerated. I would never dream of telling Vermonters they should be overruled by a general federal rule forbidding inmates from voting, any more than I would accept the wisdom of the opposite sentiment directed at Virginia. Each state gets to decide what’s best for that state. This is why we have fifty states with meaningful distinctions.
Vermonters wishing to live in a state that doesn’t give inmates the same franchise as law-abiding citizens should move, or work to change their laws.
Floridians that wish to live in a state that ignores previous felonies when considering voting rights should work to change their laws, or move. (I understand Vermont is nice).
- Rick
Can someone who is defending this action please explain to me why it’s okay to disobey an order of the Court just because you slap the label of “streamlining the government” on it? Because I honestly don’t know how that works.
Of course, one could also say that they never received the documentation you sent in the mail. Or that it got misfiled, or is at the bottom of the Inbox, and will be taken care of “just as soon as we can.” There are all sorts of tactics one could use to delay and prevent people from getting reinfranchised.
The mere fact that Florida is going to use the phone rather than letters for the first step means nothing. Those who choose to believe the worst will see this as a sign of evil. Those who do not will see this as nothing more than an administrative change.
From the article linked in the OP:
- Rick
I assume you meant 1.4 million there. And the whites disenfranchised, according to a 2000 study, tend to be lower-class:
What this means, Bricker, is that it’s not as easy for them just to pull up their stakes and move to another state. They need jobs and housing. And with no high school education, they’re not exactly going to be in high demand. Either way, the study also showed that they’re more likely to vote Democrat:
As it happens, all of the states that disenfranchise ex-felons, except Iowa, went to Bush in 2000. An interesting coincidence, no?
True, but there are countermeasures to that, such as sending the application by Registered or Certified Mail. It could be notarized. You could hand it to them in person, with an insistence that they sign a note confirming receipt of the application. It can be leaked to the press if the authorities were uncooperative (especially if you got a receipt). Such things are not possible with a phone call; leak a tape that you surreptitiously made getting a court date to the press, and you’d be made a felon again.
The point is accountability. It’s easy to deny a phone call being made to schedule a hearing. It’s harder to deny a paper application being misfiled or not received, especially if there were a lot of them that people or groups like the ACLU could look into. It’s much harder to deny your signature on the acknowledgement of a receipt of an application. The point is making it harder to cover up.
Now this is the part that puzzles me. Supposedly, our system works sorta like this:
Someone commits a crime serious enough to be considered a felony (Martha?).
That person is convicted.
That person goes to prison for a specified time as punishment and to be rehabilitated.
After a given amount of time, that person is deemed to either have served his time or to have been rehabilitated.
That person is then released.
Now, if this process has been followed, why do some states continue to punish the offender, even though he/she has processed through the system? Granted, the rate of recidivism is high, but aren’t we supposed to operate under the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ premise? It’s a good system, but it seems inconsistent to me.
yeah, I noticed I forgot the million in my response. But you did bring up a point I wanted to make, but figured would come up sooner or later.
Are you arguing about race or education? If all the whites are trailer-trash no-goods that didn’t know how to vote, how does that tie into the black vote? If the blacks were “disenfranchised”, how do dumb whites figure in? In Florida we’ve all heard how blacks were dismissed somehow in voting. (I swear, if anyone asked for a cite for that, ignorance will be proven). What about the votes of some dumb-ass whites? Surely you will afford idiocy to all races in an election, right?
Because you misconstrue “punishment.”
Part of the punishment of being a convicted felon (in these states) is the permanant loss of your voting rights, subject only to special re-instatement procedures. In other words, a “punishment” may be a fine, imprisonment, probation, a halfway house… I assume you wouldn’t quail at someone being on probation after serving five years in prison – if the sentence is “five years in prison and five years supervised probation,” you wouldn’t object to the supervised probation portion of the sentence on the grounds that they had served their their time in prison, right?
The law simply provides that loss of voting privileges is part of the punishment.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is certainly applicable. They were proven guilty, and are no longer entitled to the presumption of innocence.
So what? So, it’s difficult for them to move? What of it? There is no guarantee of ease of movement for citizens of a state that don’t like their state’s policies. I offered the “move option” as an option, not a guarantee. If they lack the resources to move, that’s too bad for them, in the same way that a construction worker in one state may be stymied by the lack of employment opportunities there but lack the resources to move to another region where there are more opportunities in construction. Yes, sure, it’d be nice if that obstacle didn’t impede him, but the state is under no obligation to change its policies to conform to his liking simply because he lacks the resources to move.
- Rick
This response is so weak that it constitutes a sly way of saying, “You’re right, I’m wrong.” So that’s what I’ll take it as, a covert admission of wrongness.
duffer, are you being deliberately obtuse?
It’s demographics. People vote in their interest. People who’ve seen first-hand how educational shortcomings have limited their options are more likely to vote for folks with more generous policies for school. People with limited employment opportunies are more likely to vote for those who think raising the minimum wage is a good thing.
Demographically, there are more felons who are racial minorites, or poor, or both. If they vote, they’re much more likely to vote democrat.
Except hispanics-- and elections officials knew of the glitch which could leave hispanics’ abilitity to vote intact since 1998, and how. But they forgot. Whoopsie! And they forgot to scrutinize the list to make sure it looked kosher. And a Republican-controlled senate, embarassed by the kerfuffle over the jiggery-pokery with the felon’s list in the last election, had quickly passed a statute to blocked public access to it, and it was only subjected to proper scrutiny after the courts ruled that statute unconstitutional.
It stinks. What the hell?
duffer: I’m arguing that ex-felon disenfranchisement (EFD) laws affect those people who tend to vote Democrat. I’m arguing that the EFD laws are partisan.
The key term there is “if.” If the sentence included probation. The difference between the EFD laws and part of a sentence is that sentences are handed down by a judge or jury. These people don’t have to worry about reelection. Legislators who make laws like the EFD laws do. By the same token, mandatory minimum sentences are also unfair.
No, but in most states (at least 43 of them), it is guaranteed that the people living in a state can vote to affect their state’s policies no matter what their past criminal record. That’s called a democracy. By disenfranchising a class of people – that is, a group of people with something in common – they become second-class citizens, subject to the will of those who still have their voting rights. What if the voters passed, by a narrow majority, a referendum to round up all of the ex-felons in the state and have them all shot? If the ex-felons could vote, this might have gone the other way, and their lives would be spared. But the people have spoken – except, that is, those who are immediately affected by this decision. That’s wrong, and it’s not in the spirit of democracy.
Got it.
It seems odd, though, that somehow a governing body was able to come to the conclusion that further disenfranchising someone by taking away his ability to participate in the democratic process is somehow going to make him less likely to be a repeat offender and more likely to be a model citizen. It’s not logical thinking.
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1
Under the guise of taking felons off the voter rolls, the Florida election committee improperly disenfranchised black voters in 2000. But NOW, you guys want us to believe that this is just a “streamlining” administrative change that has nothing to do with influencing the vote. I say, if they HADN’T influenced the vote in 2000, then we could give them the benefit of the doubt. But they’ve already shown their true intentions.
You have it backwards. It doesn’t follow, it’s simply a statistical fact. Most clovers have three leaves, but some have four. There is nothing intrinsic to being a clover that says it must have three leaves, it just happens that most do. The fact that more ex felons vote Democrat is something that happens to be true, and allows unscrupulous Republicans to gain advantage from a statistical happenstance.
Greg Palast says it’s 90 percent:
This is silly. The debate here is not whether ex-felons should be allowed to vote, but rather whether those in charge of the elections are improperly preventing and/or making it more difficult for potential Democratic votes to be cast.
So in your view, every single crime should potentially punishable by zero-to-x years in prison? No minimum sentences at all?
Well, good luck with that.
Your hyperbolic example would be restrained by the federal constitution, which prohibits, among other things, ex post facto penalties. The rule about voting rights already existed before the crimes were committed. The new rule you envision would retroactively punish people who had already committed the crime.
There are plenty of things that are “not in the spirit of democracy”. Wyoming’s 501,242 people are represented by TWO U.S. Senators. California’s 35,484,453 people are also represented by TWO U.S. Senators. Is it fair to the people of California that their voices are so diluted in the Senate? Is not a Californian as valuable as a Wyomingite? Yet the poor Californian’s voice in the Senate is only 1/70th as strong as his Wyoming brethern. How can we let this outrage continue?
[/sarcasm]
We don’t live in a pure democracy, Andros, you nut. We live in a representative republic. Our system of government is based on self-governance as expressed through the actions of our elected representatives. There is nothing inherently antiethical to that system in disenfranchising felons.
Now THIS is a fruitful line of inquiry. “Does it make sense to do?” is a much better avenue than “Waaah, this is unfair!”
I’m of two minds about it.
As long as the process of regaining voting rights is not unduly onerous, I’m for it. It suggests a very real separation from orderly society that is the natural result of felonious behavior, and that a certain amount of effort and determination, apart of merely serving time, is required to regain that societal bond. Waiting on hold, or having to send registered letters, seems to me like the sort of activity that will cement a value in the applicant’s mind. For this reason, I oppose an automatic reinstatement or even a “make-it-easy” punchcard forms supplied upon release.
If the process becomes SO onerous that it discourages a reasonably-determined applicant, then it’s gone too far.
- Rick