Friday, April 06, 2007

In a Break From the Past, Florida Will Let Felons Vote

MIAMI, April 5 — Gov. Charlie Crist persuaded Florida’s clemency board Thursday to let most felons easily regain their voting rights after prison, saying it was time to leave the “offensive minority” of states that uniformly deny ex-offenders such rights.

The change is a major step for Florida, which bans more people from the polls than any other state, but it did not go as far as Mr. Crist had hoped. Two of his fellow Republicans on the clemency board rejected his original plan to grant speedy restoration to everyone except murderers and sex criminals.

Florida has as many as 950,000 disenfranchised ex-offenders — far more than any other state — the vast majority black. Other states have repealed or scaled back similar bans in recent years, but roughly five million felons remain barred from the polls nationwide.

The Jim Crow-era ban, added to Florida’s Constitution in 1968, has been the subject of especially bitter debate since the 2000 presidential election. Some legal voters were removed from the state’s rolls that year after being misidentified as felons, adding to the drama of a recount that gave George W. Bush a razor-thin margin of victory over Al Gore.

Only two other states, Kentucky and Virginia, constitutionally require all felons to forfeit their voting rights. A federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Florida’s ban made its way to the United States Supreme Court in 2005, but the court declined to hear the case. ......

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