GOP members of the state legislature had resisted for years any change to the state’s disenfranchisement law, which denied voting rights to roughly 1.4 million former felons. Of the 6 million or so disenfranchised ex-convicts in the United States, about a quarter of them are in Florida. For years, other U.S. states have been doing away with disenfranchising former felons, a noxious feature of a blatantly racist past that departs from Western international norms. Terry McAuliffe (D), who restored voting rights to more than 170,000 of them. Amendment 4 in Florida constitutes the biggest single expansion of voting rights in the United States since poll taxes and literacy tests were abolished a half-century ago.

Source: Washington Post May 06, 2019 23:27 UTC