BlogWood: MT Archives

Florida: proudly barring blacks from the polls for 140 years!

Having spent $2 million to create and defend a secret voter purge list of black Democrats, only to abandon it as the light of day exposed its many flaws, the state is still fighting with the NAACP to keep over 1,200 ex-felons from the polls. You’d think that they woulda learned by now, but with the stakes this high, I guess they’re willing to keep looking foolish as long as it helps Jeb!’s brother get reSelected.

This particular group should never have been barred from voting in the first place, since they moved to Florida having served their terms in states that restore voting rights to felons who have paid their debts to society. 43 states automatically grant these rights. Florida is one of only 6 other states that still cling to the racist reconstruction era practice of keeping felons from the polls.

Federal courts have ruled repeatedly that Jeb! must not interfere with these ex-felons’ voting rights, and Jeb! has repeatedly ignored these court rulings. The NAACP sued the state to force it to return about 3,000 people to the rolls whom it illegally barred from voting in the 2000 election. The NAACP won, but now the process is being dragged out, many say quite deliberately, and 1,249 folks are still waiting for the state to comply with the agreement to restore their rights.

All 1,249 were convicted in states that automatically restore voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences.

Administrators of the Florida Division of Elections say they have worked hard to repair mistakes from the 2000 election, and they have already reinstated more than 1,700 out-of-state felons. But efforts to restore the rest have been stymied by other states slow to respond to requests for information, records show.

''We have been very diligent, and we've worked very hard to get this done,'' said Dawn Roberts, director of the Division of Elections. ``We've been writing and calling every one of those states. It is not an easy task, and we have acted in good faith all along.''

But civil rights lawyers who extracted the agreement from the state as part of a legal settlement two years ago say election officials are plodding unnecessarily, and the names should be restored automatically.

SIMPLE CALL

''We thought they would call the states in question, verify they indeed were automatic restoration states and give people their rights back,'' said Elliot Mincberg, attorney for the civil rights foundation People for the American Way.

''Instead, they decided that each and every name must be researched by the other state,'' he said. ``In some cases, that's not happening. Again, the state continues to err on the side of exclusion instead of on the side of the voter.''

Poor Dawn: she calls and calls, but those mean other states just wont call her back.

The state is going to lose this argument, just like it lost the argument over the purge list, but it’s going to take time and effort to force Jeb! to do the right thing. Jeb! knows this, and he knows that as long as he’s keeping us busy and distracted with all of these important little battles that he increases his chances of slipping some well planned Republican friendly irregularities down our collective throat come November.

Lots more on the purge list and other Florida problems at BlogWood.

Update - NYT has an okay overview of Florida's 2004 election problems, but they missed the out-of-state felon thing. Just another sign that there is almost too much to keep track of.