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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the process-improvements dept.

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker has ruled that Florida's system for restoration of voting and other civil rights to convicted felons is unconstitutional. Florida is likely to appeal the ruling:

A federal judge has declared unconstitutional Florida's procedure for restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time. In a strongly worded ruling seen as a rebuke of Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who is the lead defendant in the case, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said the disenfranchisement of felons who have served their time is "nonsensical" and a violation of the First and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Although nearly every state bars incarcerated criminals from voting, only Florida and three others — Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia — do not automatically restore voting rights at the completion of a criminal sentence.

Walker, an Obama administration appointee, decried the state's requirement that someone with a felony conviction must "kowtow" to a partisan panel, the Office of Executive Clemency, "over which Florida's governor has absolute veto authority" to regain their right to vote. "[Elected], partisan officials have extraordinary authority to grant or withhold the right to vote from hundreds of thousands of people without any constraints, guidelines, or standards," the judge said. [...] The judge cited one clemency hearing where Scott announced the panel "can do whatever we want" as evidence of its arbitrary nature.

Last month, Floridians for a Fair Democracy reached the signature threshold needed to get a constitutional amendment onto the 2018 ballot that would end the disenfranchisement of 1.5 million Floridians with past felony convictions.

Also at the Miami Herald and Orlando Sentinel:

Walker blasted Florida's process at length, writing that it makes felons "kowtow" to a board that can accept or deny their application for any reason. "A person convicted of a crime may have long ago exited the prison cell and completed probation. Her voting rights, however, remain locked in a dark crypt," Walker wrote. "Only the state has the key — but the state has swallowed it. Only when the state has digested and passed that key in the unforeseeable future, maybe in five years, maybe in 50, ... does the state, in an 'act of mercy' unlock the former felon's voting rights from its hiding place."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:34PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:34PM (#632946)

    OTOH, you walk into my office dressed like you don't care if I give you a job or not, you had better believe I will carefully take that into consideration, and not in a way that will accrue to your benefit.

    This is why I own my own business: To avoid dealing with shallow corporate rules. Why not just evaluate the candidate's skills rather than relying on shallow dress codes? Maybe they don't have the same sense of style that typical business environments ask of them. Maybe they don't like being mindless slaves who dress the way others want them to. Maybe they don't care about such aesthetics at all. In any case, none of it means they don't have the comprehension to do the job properly. None of it even so much as indicates such a thing. Plenty of con men and liars in general are able and willing to meet or exceed these dress codes, so good luck.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:44PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:44PM (#633017) Journal

    Why not just evaluate the candidate's skills rather than relying on shallow dress codes?

    Because how the person dresses is a highly visible flag of the person's mindset. You walk in wearing a Hell's Angel vest, we're going to take a signal from that. Likewise if you dress like a ghetto thug, or you smell really bad, or your hair is a mass of grease and knots.

    And there's no "rather", it's "and": of course we evaluate the candidate's skills.

    There's an entire raft of things that are unfairly applied in most operation's candidate testing that should not be: many of them have to do with history, which is past and most likely should be ignored in favor of an in-the-present skills evaluation; others are age, sex, family headcount, that sort of thing.

    Yet when you walk into an interview, how your dress, your manners, your level of cooperation all present – all of this is you as you are now and that's where we start. Do we want this person representing the face of the business? Will other people be able to stand being next to this person all day? Will business partners be put off by this person?

    These things all have real-life consequences, potentially financial ones, and so mistakes made here can impact everyone who works for the business. If an account or a relationship may be lost or damaged because we've got someone toxic on staff, that's going to matter. Not taking it into account is simply irresponsible to everyone else affected by the business.

    If your personal "thing" is so important to you – or everyone else's is so unimportant to you – then you need to be prepared to go it on your own, because your "thing" has made you less important to them as well. Society is very much synonymous with interaction, the smoother the better. And business exists grounded in the smooth operation of society. If you intentionally throw sand in the gears, people will take cues from that, and to expect otherwise is either blind or stupid.

    Maybe they don't have the same sense of style that typical business environments ask of them.

    Then they're going to negatively affect relations with other businesses on that same level if they're publicly exposed so it matters. Can you seriously not understand that?

    Maybe they don't like being mindless slaves who dress the way others want them to.

    As an employee, your whole thing is to do what others expect you to do. If you can't even manage that in an interview, why would it make any sense at all to expect that you would in the office, the lab, the field?

    Maybe they don't care about such aesthetics at all.

    Then they are going to be a problem unless they can be hidden off in a closet somewhere. Pretending there is no social aspect to a business in the lab, the office, the field is just disingenuous nonsense. If you look/smell/sound/act like a problem, the business takes a hit or hits, and so do your interactions within it.

    Plenty of con men and liars in general are able and willing to meet or exceed these dress codes, so good luck.

    That's a strawman. There is no distinction to be made by dress for "con men and liars", nor did I say there was one. But that doesn't mean there aren't other consequential distinctions to be made – and in fact, there are.