There’s a political action group called “True the Vote,” which ostensibly worries about in-person voter fraud and pushes for onerous id requirements. The organization, of course, is a voter suppression group and an arm of the conservative movement.
I taught an American Government class to prisoners in Soledad Prison, a maximum security prison in the California system. Students who passed the class received three credits from San Jose State University. I was told never to ask what the students had done to get into Soledad, but I assumed it must have been pretty bad. Only a small minority of the prisoners even qualified for the program; the average reading level at the prison was fourth grade.
It was the Fall 1984 semester, the time of the Mondale-Reagan race. The election was a hot topic, and in the course of the semester, I discovered the students, who were roughly1/3 Latino, 1/3 African-American, and 1/3 Anglo, were also overwhelmingly Democratic in orientation. Of course, they couldn’t vote while they were in Soledad, but after they had served their sentences, they could.
Not so in Florida. Florida leads the nation in the number of disenfranchised voters. Approximately 1.5 million of its citizens, more than the population of 11 states, are not allowed to vote because criminal records. It doesn’t matter if you were in for murder or for driving with a suspended license, you can’t vote in Florida unless the governor grants clemency.
The governor is Rick Scott, a Republican. Very few released prisoners are granted clemency.
If “True the Vote” cares about the voting franchise, they ought to get on that.
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