Timely New York Times piece on felon disenfranchisement

Today’s New York Times, the last one before the latest “most important election ever,” has this effective editorial headlined “Wrongly Turning Away Ex-Offenders.”  Here are excerpts:

The United States maintains a shortsighted and punitive set of laws, some of them dating back to Reconstruction, denying the vote to people who have committed felonies.  They will bar about 5.85 million people from voting in this year’s election.

In the states with the most draconian policies — including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi and Virginia — more than 7 percent of the adult population is barred from the polls, sometimes for life.  Nationally, nearly half of those affected have completed their sentences, including parole or probation.

Policies that deny voting rights to people who have paid their debt to society offend fundamental tenets of democracy.  But the problem is made even worse by state and local election officials so poorly informed about the law that they misinform or turn away people who have a legal right to vote….

A 2005 study by the Sentencing Project, a Washington research and advocacy group, found that 37 percent of public officials surveyed in 10 states either misstated a central provision of the voter eligibility law or were unsure about what the law said. Disenfranchisement and restoration policies represent a kind of “crazy quilt” of strictures that differ not just among states, but among counties, cities and towns as well.  Some states even ban people convicted of misdemeanors from voting.  With so much confusion among those who administer the laws, it is no surprise that people who are legally entitled to vote either don’t try out of fear that they would be committing a crime or are wrongly turned away.