----- Original Message -----
From: "Keaney Michael" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>In a previous post it was mentioned that the Florida law barring ex-felons
>from voting was passed in 1868! Where were the Florida Democrats, and
>especially the civil rights-minded Florida Democrats, prior to this
>particular episode? Is racist disenfranchisement only an issue when
>Democrats lose to more overtly racist Republicans? It is incumbent upon
Gore
>supporters who invoke the Voting Rights Act and other federal civil rights
>legislation to explain why a Gore victory backed by a legal ruling that
>would effectively entrench the doctrine of states' rights would be good for
>people of colour.
Where were the Democrats? In a lot of states working to end this
disenfranchisement. Since the problem of disenfranchisement got a lot of
play due to research reports by the Sentencing Project, there has been a lot
of mobilization on this issue. Legislation has been proposed in states
including Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland,
Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia to ease voting for ex-felons. In
April of this year, the Connecticut House of Representatives actually
approved and sent to the state Senate a bill that would allow felons to vote
while on probation. The current state law outlaws felons from voting until
they complete their sentence, including parole and probation.
And don't play the rhetorical game of equating Democrats of 1968 with today;
most of the old Dems of the South who ran their states a generation ago are
the GOP people running them today, while the Dems down south are
increasingly black and progressive. Sure, more moderate Dems are not
reacting as strongly as they should, but most heavily Democratic states
don't disenfranchise former felons.
As for a bad precedent on this issue, unfortunately unlike any other voting
rights issue, the US constitution in the 14th Amendment specifically gives
states the right to disenfranchise people if they commit a crime. National
legislation through economic incentives to states could overcome the
problem, but no court case will, so there is little worry about the court
precedent.
But what precedent people should worry about is a situation where 200,000
Floridians, disproportionately black or latino, have their votes thrown out
for various "errors" and the GOP is able to uphold this as "fair" because
the voters involved are too "stupid" to deserve the vote if they couldn't
deal with bad machines or confusing ballots.
Folks here are so gunning for their own polemical reasons to create moral
equivalence between the Dems and GOP that they will actually oppose the
campaign under way, supported by black, labor and latino organizations, to
have those votes counted. It just illustrates the racial blind spot the
original article noted.
-- Nathan Newman
