WRONG TO VOTE

Restoring Felons' Rights Portends Political Shift In Florida, Nation.

Hold onto your voter-registration card: Felons have opened another front in
Florida's electoral battleground.

A group of criminal-rights activists convinced a circuit judge in
Tallahassee last week that 125,000 Florida felons hadn't received
appropriate state assistance and advice to restore their civil rights -
including the right to vote.

Now, the Department of Corrections expects that 30,000 felons will regain
those rights this year, with many more to follow. And make no mistake:
That's good news for the Democratic Party, which lost the Florida
presidential election and the White House by a mere 537 votes in 2000.

Overall, 410,000 Floridians have been barred from voting because of their
past felony convictions. Of that number, more than one-third are
African-American.

"Because African Americans vote Democratic 90 percent of the time, they
could make a big difference in a close election," says Jim Kane, an
independent pollster and publisher of Florida Voter in Fort Lauderdale.

And that's not all. Other election watchers - noting that ex-cons,
regardless of race, tend to favor Democrats - figure a half-dozen U.S.
Senate races could hang in the balance across the country.

The politically minded National Organization for the Advancement of Colored
People knows this, and has made restoration of felons' voting rights a top
priority. In doing so, the NAACP and its running mates at the American
Civil Liberties Union are unabashedly playing the race card, likening
Florida law to the Jim-Crow era.

Florida is one of six states that deny ex-felons the right to vote unless
they take steps to have their civil rights restored. Their petitions are
decided on a case-by-case basis and, so far, Gov. Jeb Bush opposes a
"carte-blanche" restoration of voting rights.

But last week's court decision, which ensures state assistance in the
petition process, could provide the wedge that pries open the ballot box to
more murderers, rapists and other assorted merchants of mayhem.

Felon-rights groups are becoming more vocal here and nationally. One Web
site, (VotingExCons.com), calls for, among other things, hiring preferences
for "qualified" ex-felons and an end to the "drug-war hoax."

Meantime, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has introduced legislation to sweep
away the state laws and grant felon voting rights across America. His bill
would cover 4 million U.S. felons who have "paid their debt to society."

In a not-so-thinly veiled threat, Randy Berg of the Florida Justice
Institute declared, "If you don't restore their civil rights, they will go
back to a life of crime."

Could this be what the founders had in mind when they penned the Bill of
Rights and created the world's greatest representative democracy? At this
rate, the 2004 election will be most interesting indeed.