disenfranchisement

Discrimination ‘08: Ex-Offender Disenfranchisement

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

America has a long history of depriving entire groups of people the right to vote. Before the Civil Rights Act, black citizens were ridiculed, threatened with lynching, and even given a disposable paper ballot when they expressed interest in making their voices heard.

With a candidate such as Barack Obama running for president in this election, one would think we’ve come a long way. But some argue that the new target of government-sanctioned discrimination is the growing class of convicted felons who have served their time and paid their fees, but still can’t vote.

The Sentencing Project reports that an estimated 5.3 million Americans—1.4 million of whom are black men—are denied the right to vote because of felony convictions. Of these, 2.1 million are ex-offenders who have fully completed their sentences and probations.

Nowhere is this problem more evident than in the state of Florida, which was the center of controversy during the 2000 election.

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Delegate math: Why the nerd story still matters most!

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

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On Tuesday, Keith Olbermann invited NBC News human delegate calculator Chuck Todd on to Countdown to discuss the latest tallies from the Democratic Primary. Todd said that “last week” Barack Obama magically earned four more delegates in California than previously reported. The way he phrased his statement made it sound like lollygagging election officials in the Golden State took their sweet time getting around to counting things like provisional ballots. “California,” he said, “they always have a lot of late votes to count.”

Todd’s gloss-over was exactly the kind we’ve come to depend on from our media experts. Yes, thank you, please spare us the details. Except that the details of the delegate pledging and counting are still more likely to affect the outcome of the Democratic primary contest than any of the personality stories filling the front pages.

Turns out the California Secretary of State’s office issued the revised results less than two weeks after the Super Tuesday vote on February 5. In other words, Obama picked up the extra four delegates almost a month ago. Back then, blogger David Dayen was all over it at his blog Calitics. But none of the major media gurus like Todd bothered to notice until this past Monday when the Wall Street Journal column “Numbers Guy” cited Dayen’s reporting.

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