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I guarantee they learned absolutely nothing from 2000. A fleet of lawyers is now mobilizing to descend on Florida. What I found fascinating is that in this election Florida passed a law allowing felons to vote. I believe the estimates are that there are over a million felons in Florida who this impacts (which also amazes me). In such close races, if these felons had been allowed to vote, they really could have moved the needle one way or the other.
African American males tend to be incarcerated at disproportionately high rates, for reasons we really can't go into without straining PPB guidelines, I suspect.
Africa Americans tend to vote Democratic at disproportionately high rates.
Florida is a very hotly-contested state, with a lot of electoral votes and congress people.
One does not need to have an advanced degree in political science to see the implications of this.
I know - I only have an undergraduate degree in Public Policy but I figured it out, but didn't want to open up a can of worms by stating it directly and send us down that path - I hoped everyone else would also reach that conclusion - I'm surprised it hasn't been discussed more in the media...
Putting aside the above, Democrats tend to favor sentencing reform which I assume may appeal to someone who has been the subject of the criminal justice system.
(To be fair, there are a number of Republicans that favor this too but it is divisive within the party -- see Jared Kushner and Senator Grassley who are currently pushing for it and Jeff Sessions who strongly opposed it).
Floridian here (in case it wasn't obvious), the majority of these felons are non-violent cases (think drugs). If I may quote from my sample ballot:
"This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses..."
Seems eminently reasonable to me.
The Governor could always restore them on a case-by-case basis, but that's been an issue because our current guy was disproportionately restoring Rs and white men. I could link an article if the board wants, but I don't want to get all PPB.
As another Floridian here, I would like to point out that Florida was one of only a few states that did not have an automatic process to restore voting rights to non-violent felons (Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia being the others). As pointed out, restoration was at the mercy of the administration in charge
Florida is soooo good at doing whatadoodle things, but I still find this hard to believe.
-Jason "the lawyers and the courts are about to become front and center in the Sunshine state" EvansQuote:
In Broward County, 695,799 people turned in ballots. But only 665,688 voted in the Senate race.
That's a 30,000 difference, a remarkable disparity given the stakes in this race and the name-recognition of these officials.
It's a degree of undervote that is non-existent in the other statewide races on the ballot. For example, more than 690,000 people voted in the governor's race. If the results as they stand are accurate, more people in Broward voted for Agriculture Commissioner than U.S. Senate.
And get this... Maricopa County Arizona just updated its vote totals and Kyrsten Sinema has now pulled ahead of Martha McSally for the first time in their Senate race. Here is the latest count:
Sinema – 914,243 – 48.9%
McSally – 912,137 – 48.8%
Some of these races are just absurdly close. Is there no way we can have Sinema serve a week and then McSally serve a week and so on for the next 6 years?
-Jason "sometimes I amuse myself" Evans
Have also been thinking of adding this, so here goes.
My city has about 41,000 residents. We have a mayor and 4 zones, so that should be roughly 10,250 people per zone.
The county elections department says the zone my friend was running in has 8,899 registered voters.
That's simply impossible. It's doubtful there are that many adults.
I started to get suspicious when there were over 5,500 votes cast in her zone. An adjacent city is split much the same (population/zone), and none of their races drew over 3,800 votes.
Not sure what to do about it however. But if we get recounts, I'm contacting the Senate and Governor's camps.