"The Brennan Center for Justice said that in the previous clemency system, of the people with a felony crime on their record who received voting rights restoration, only 14% went on to register. Of that 14%, they voted 75% less than the statewide average of all registered voters."
if 14% of the bigger estimate of 800,000 eligible felons register, that's about 110,000. If we use a high estimate of 50% turnout, that would mean a predicted voter turnout by felons of 13%, or 14,000. If the felons vote four to one Democratic, that will mean a net increase of 7,000 votes-- not much. It will take a huge effort at voter registration and Get Out The Vote effort to change THAT reality.
It could be that the angry white felon voters could play a more powerful role than the potential Democratic voters. That will be determined by how smart the Democratic leaders are. By their past history it's certainly not clear that they'll turn this potential opportunity into anything significant, even though, if a significant portion of the re-enfranchised felons they could turn the state blue. After all, the margins of statewide victories by recent Republicans have been by less than 70,000 votes.
If I were an operative planning to win Florida elections in 2020, particularly the presidential general, I'd be starting registering those felons before the final votes are counted in the disputed Gubernatorial and senate races.
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)