I guess half a loaf is better than none.
OTH Rethugliklans are not likely to win another elected position for anything in Florida now that ex-cons will have their voting rights restored. Poor bastards.
It all depends on the lengths of sentences for the would be felons among the current Republican officeholders.
FYI, in the TPM voting rights series, there is an article on the FL issue. According to a linked article which got data from the Sentencing Project, a majority of those felons are white. So, how many will vote D if they vote at all? It’s an interesting turn of events and rightfully so because the old system was broke.
The hand recount of the entire state is what I’ve wanted. Let’s see it happen. Elias will make sure that all valid ballots get counted.
I agree!
If GOPers stick w/this trumpism BS, they can forget it! Eventually the suffering is going to be felt by his puny supporters and soon the GOP will have only the few 1%ers left supporting them!
Florida STILL won’t let them vote until they pay “fees”.
Kinda sounds like a poll tax to me.
So I’m a little confused. The claim this afternoon was that Broward and Palm Beach counties had not gotten their recounted totals in on time. My understanding was that if the recounted totals weren’t accepted than the count would revert to what had originally been reported. So now when a manual recount occurs what is the baseline? The recounted totals that allegedly weren’t accepted or the old totals? Does anybody know how different these were?
For counties unable to complete a machine recount in the time given the baseline is the initial count numbers.
I saw an article that said that the felons who got their voting rights restored by Scott were mostly white, but does that also apply to the ones who were given the vote by the referendum? If the whole Florida ex-felon population got its vote back, I would expect most of them to be black.
Even if the majority is white, if the proportion that’s black is higher than the general population, and they vote at more or less the same rate as other felons, it’s likely to be a big net gain for Democrats. Even if relatively few actually register and vote, we’re talking around a million people. 10% of that is 100,000, more than enough to swing these tight races.
I can’t remember where I saw the analysis or who did it (though my impression at the time was that it was an honest and competent effort to produce a high-quality estimate), but I believe that the result was that restoration of voting rights was a net benefit to Dems, but only by low tens of thousands of votes.
Every bit helps. And, even if Dems don’t win any additional races, there will be some societal benefit to ending the practice of imposing a lifelong penalty on people who have completed their sentences.