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A can of worms was opened last week, the much vaunted US democratic process turns out to like most things American, all packaging and promises and no delivery. Turns out that Florida was karmically perhpas the best state to have a close race requiring further investigation. Of the many huge misnomers to voting in the sunshine state, one of the many shadows is that 31% of the state's African American men are denied the vote. The permanent disenfranchisement of over 400,000 ex-offenders in Florida is likely to have determined the outcome of the presidential election, two non-partisan research and advocacy groups said today. Almost one third of the African American men in Florida were unable to vote because of a felony conviction at some point in their past. Florida is one of only thirteen states that deny the vote to ex-offenders who have fully served their sentences. A 1998 report- Losing the Vote:The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United Statesby Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project estimated that 436,900 former felons were disenfranchised in the state. Among Florida's African American residents, the impact of the state's disenfranchisement laws is particularly dramatic: 31.2% of black men in Florida --more than 200,000 potential black voters -- were excluded from the polls. Assuming the voting pattern of black ex-felons would have been similar to the vote by black residents in Florida generally, the inability of these ex-offenders to vote had a significant impact on the number voting for Vice President Gore. In their 1998 report, Losing the Vote, Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project documented state by state the impact of disenfranchisement laws across the country. Among the report's findings: Nationally, one in fifty adults, an estimated 3.9 million Americans, were not able to vote because of a felony conviction. 1.4 million of these are ex-offenders who have completed their sentences and are not in prison or on probation or parole. And the worms keep crawling out.
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