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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."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday February 05 2018, @03:31AM
Yes, you're being racist. That's the classic expression of the racist ideology that was historically used to justify slavery. The slightly longer version of the same argument that was common from around 1500 to around 1900:
And yes, the people who ended up on slave ships would in fact have been much better off had they been able to stay in Africa. For starters, 1/5 or so of them who boarded the boat didn't make it off the boat. And if they were part of the majority of slaves who went to the Caribbean and Brazil, something like 1/3 of new arrivals didn't survive 10 years of slavery there. Now, that does mean the slaves in the USA were probably better off than the slaves elsewhere in the Americas, but that doesn't mean that it was good to be a slave.
So why did you think they might have been better off in the Americas than in Africa? Well, because things suck in Africa now. But the reasons things suck in Africa now have very little to do with mistakes by Africans and a lot to do with the Europeans barging in and taking over pretty much all of Africa by force. And Europeans still largely own most of the mineral wealth of Africa, so most of the money from gold mining, oil drilling, diamonds, etc is not going to Africans.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.