Currently around 30 percent of black men in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi are not eligible to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws. Meanwhile, these felony disenfranchisement laws create a new class of criminals: people who vote while ineligible.
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Even though ex-felons do not have a “right” to vote the arbitrariness and potential bias of the restoration process offend “two First Amendment rights; namely, free association and free expression.”
Trump has often said he would govern for the benefit of the middle class. But he blurted out the truth about which interests he actually represents when he told friends at his $200,00-a-year Mar-a-Lago club, “You all just got a lot richer.”
The unsealed materials confirm what many have suspected: Kobach has a ready-made plan to gut core voting rights protections enshrined in federal law.
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In nine states from Nevada to Tennessee, anyone who has lost been imprisoned and lost thier right to vote, cannot regain it until they pay off any outstanding court fines, legal fees and victim restitution. In Alabama, that requirement has fostered an underclass of thousands of people who are unable to vote because they do not have enough money.
From 2008 to 2016, GOP officials expanded early voting stations in Republican dominated Hamilton County, IndyStar's analysis found, and decreased them in the state's biggest Democratic hotbed, Marion County. The results were immediate.
While all Southern states have laws disenfranchising people while they are incarcerated and on probation or parole, Florida stands out with one of the nation's most restrictive felony disenfranchisement laws — one of only four states that impose a lifetime ban on voting for anyone convicted of a felony. The others are Virginia, Kentucky and Iowa.
Should anything go awry with the 2020 count, it could have political implications affecting how voting districts are drawn or how language minorities can access the ballot. Important funding decisions are also driven by Census data. Nationwide, nearly $600 billion in federal funding is allocated to states based on Census numbers, according to a recent report by the George Washington Institute of Public Policy. Southern states receive $179.2 billion of that total.
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