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Jeb!’s whimsy is felons’ last chance

Florida leads the nation in tasered children and disenfranchised citizens. 500,000 people in Florida are disenfranchised. 200,000 of those have been disenfranchised since Jeb! took office, and they will stay disenfranchised until Jeb! sees fit to lavish them with their most basic right of citizenship.

Used to be, a felon would be released from prison, and the restoration of rights process would begin and most ex-felons, having served out their sentences, having paid their debts to society, would end up regaining their right to vote.

Jeb! changed the rules. In fact, according to a recently retired Parole Board employee,

They're making rules that are stopping almost everybody from voting.

Now, 85 percent of released prisoners must go through a lengthy and extremely demoralizing process that involves waiting for years and traveling hundreds of miles only to have the Governor look them in the skin eye and render a decision that need not have any basis in reality whatsoever.

Florida’s Parole Board operates in secret, compiling dossiers on supplicants who come begging for the right to vote. Errors are common, but supplicants are not allowed to question the wisdom of the secret file, or even to have a peek inside it.

Because clemency records are inaccessible to anyone outside the system -- including other state agencies -- there is little accountability or oversight. Computer glitches, for example, went undetected for nearly a decade and dropped more than 100,000 felons from the process before they even had a chance to be considered.

The Herald asked Bush to use his executive powers and make the records available for review. Bush declined, citing a statute that exempts clemency records from the state's public records laws.

Do Jeb!’s Storm State Troopers, er investigators, include such information as political affiliations or leanings? There’s no telling, but Jeb! may well simply rely on visual clues, since he alone can simply give the thumbs down, no explanation needed, and an appeal will take another 3 years or more.

In the meantime, the frustrated supplicant is left to survive as something less than a full citizen, being taxed without representation, and being denied the opportunity to enter any field that requires a state license. Jobs such as hair dresser and exterminator, as well as hundreds of others, are all out of reach for those who cannot be legally licensed due to a loss of their civil rights.

But the real story lies with the vast majority of ex-felons who either look at the process and give up in confusion, or who don’t even know where to begin to go to get help. 200,000 just since Jeb! was elected, and only a handful of those have applied for a hearing before the Governor.

Jeb! changed the rules to make sure that most of the prisoners released on his watch would never be allowed to vote while he was in office (or while his brother was running for president.)

As Bush once told a crowded hearing room: ``I'm here trying to look into people's hearts and make a decision.''

These are not the famed purge list felons - those were names that the state claimed were on the voting roles when they shouldn’t be - these ex-prisoners have never been allowed to register since serving out their time. Their names have never made it onto the rolls to be purged, and if Jeb! has his way, the vast majority never will make to back to full citizenship.

Florida's removal of civil rights and broken system for restoring rights make it the state with the greatest number of disfranchised people -- 500,000 -- and they are disproportionately black. This has led to numerous lawsuits, including one pending in federal court that could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

It charges that Florida's voting ban on ex-felons discriminates racially and calls on the state to automatically restore ex-felons' civil rights, a remedy that we advocate. Florida's clemency system does little to rehabilitate people while keeping ex-felons from being whole members of our society.