Absurdity = Clarity

Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas appeared on Fox & Friends on September 28, 2004, to discuss fair elections. A commentary on her remarks includes the following statement:

Notice that Hutchison's biggest concern was not with whether the votes that are cast are counted, but with keeping people from voting who may not be eligible.

In an article on National Review, David Lampo cites a study by sociologists Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Jeff Manza of Northwestern which shows that felons vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — at a rate approaching 70 percent. (In fact, this estimate may be low. In some Florida counties more than 80 percent of the felons who voted illegally were registered Democrats.) Therefore, had Florida's felons voted in the 2000 presidential election at a rate comparable to the rest of the Florida electorate, Al Gore would have won the state by more than 60,000 votes.

This same article goes on to say to point out that overwhelming public opposition has not deterred felon-vote advocates. They've simply resorted to a receptive judiciary to achieve their objective. Several recent lawsuits throughout the country assert that state felon-disenfranchisement laws violate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and the equal-protection guarantees in state constitutions. Typical among these suits is Farrakhan v. State of Washington, a case that had been dismissed by the U.S. District Court in Spokane, but revived a short time ago by the Ninth Circuit. Farrakhan was brought by minority inmates challenging the state of Washington's constitutional prohibition against voting by imprisoned felons. The inmates maintain that racial disparities in the state's criminal-justice system effectively result in a denial of the right to vote on the basis of race. The court noted that while constituting only 3 percent of the state's population, blacks represent 37 percent of those adjudicated "persistent offenders." The Ninth Circuit remanded the case to the district court for a full hearing on the issue of whether racial bias in the criminal-justice system, combined with the denial of voting rights to inmates, violates the Voting Rights Act.

This is the battle we face ladies and gentlemen.