Subject: Fwd: ICYMI: Editorial: A Second Chance and the Right to Vote [New York Times]
From: "Wei, Shu-Yen" <[email-masked]>
To: Comm_D <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2016 08:30:25 -0700

Begin forwarded message:

From: Emily Bolton <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>>
Date: May 10, 2016 at 11:27:54 AM EDT
To: Emily Bolton <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>>
Subject: ICYMI: Editorial: A Second Chance and the Right to Vote [New York Times]

KEY QUOTE:

"They fail to point to any provision in the state’s Constitution or laws to support this claim, because there isn’t one. Virginia’s Constitution explicitly empowers the governor 'to remove political disabilities consequent upon conviction' for felonies. It places no qualifications or limitations on that power."

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Editorial: A Second Chance and the Right to Vote
New York Times
By Editorial Board
May 7, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/a-second-chance-and-the-right-to-vote.html?_r=0

Republican legislators in Virginia are threatening to sue Gov. Terry McAuliffe to block his executive order restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 residents who have completed their felony sentences. The lawmakers have no good legal case, and worse, such a suit would be affirming Virginia’s racist history.

Virginia is one of just four states — along with Iowa, Florida and Kentucky — that continue to impose a lifetime voting ban on people convicted of felonies. In recent years, both Democratic and Republican governors have worked to lift this burden, either by streamlining the application process for individuals or trying to restore rights to specific classes of people, like those convicted of nonviolent felonies.

Mr. McAuliffe took a bolder and more just step last month by restoring those rights to all people with felony convictions. Republican lawmakers say this action “overstepped the bounds of his authority and the constitutional limits on executive powers.”

They fail to point to any provision in the state’s Constitution or laws to support this claim, because there isn’t one. Virginia’s Constitution explicitly empowers the governor “to remove political disabilities consequent upon conviction” for felonies. It places no qualifications or limitations on that power.

The executive power of clemency is generally very broad, so state constitutions are clear when they intend to restrict it — say, by requiring an independent board to sign off on a governor’s decision. Virginia’s Constitution places some limits on the exercise of other forms of clemency, such as granting pardons or canceling fines, but none on restoring the right to vote.

Mr. McAuliffe’s order is also an important moral step, too long delayed. Virginia’s voting ban, like most of the others that collectively disenfranchise about six million Americans, is a 19th-century relic rooted in racism — a direct reaction to the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote.

Politicians in Virginia were blunt about their motivation. In 1902, when Virginia’s voting ban was expanded at the state’s constitutional convention, Carter Glass, a state senator, said its purpose was to “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county of the Commonwealth will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.”

Before Mr. McAuliffe’s order, one in five black Virginians was permanently barred from voting because of a past felony conviction. Aside from its profound racial disparity, the lifetime voting ban has served to marginalizepeople who have already paid their debt to society.

Virginia’s ban is an embarrassment to the state and to the country. Rather than fighting to preserve it or grumbling about Mr. McAuliffe’s alleged political motivations, Republican lawmakers should be working to win the votes of the hundreds of thousands of Virginians who have been unfairly barred from exercising democracy’s most fundamental right.