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Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has granted voting rights to as many as 60,000 convicted felons just in time for them to register to vote, nearly five times more than previously reported and enough to win the state for his long-time friend, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
McAuliffe sought to allow all of Virginia’s estimated 200,000 felons to vote, but state courts said each individual felon’s circumstances must be weighed. To get around that, McAuliffe used a mechanical autopen to rapidly sign thousands of letters, as if he had personally reviewed them, even as his office was saying the total was 13,000.
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Virginia’s recent political history has seen multiple races that were decided by tiny margins. The 2014 U.S. Senate race, for example, was decided by only 17,000 votes, while the attorney general’s race came down to a mere 165 votes.
Virginia just got a bunch of criminals released - gives you Virginians the warm fuzzies, doesn't it? Because your safety is a lower priority to them.
When TheDCNF pointed out that 60,000 could tip an election, Wheeler said “I am acutely and chronically aware of that.” She also noted that McAuliffe has explicitly asked felons to vote for Clinton.
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She also said that, while McAuliffe claimed to only be restoring voting rights of felons who had completed their sentences, his use of the autopen might not satisfy the court’s specific vetting requirement.
So just like the Syrian refugees, the felons released are not properly vetted. Go figure...
Its disgraceful that people get their right to vote taken away from them. We live in 2016, not in 1600! Lets hope all states get rid of this disgrace.
Together with for-profit prisons where prison corporations lobby to increase their customers/inmates this is something we can all agree on is appalling and needs to be abolished ASAP.
The ruling comes three months after McAuliffe stood on the portico of the state capitol and pledged to erase the last vestiges of Jim Crow-era laws that disenfranchised African American voters. Nearly a quarter of the state’s black population cannot vote because of felony convictions.
So much misleading information to convince Trump supporters that the election is rigged. The parolees to whom voting rights were restored had already served their prison terms and completed a supervised probation period, as required by law.
To date, approximately 21,000 of these former prisoners have registered to vote. However,
"For those felons whose voting rights have been restored, they need to first check their status to see if they are eligible to vote. If their information is not in the state system, they need to petition the state for approval and, if they're permitted to vote, they then need to register."
Most polls have Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump by 8 to 10 points in Virginia, so this is only a small dent in the total number of votes that have been or will be cast in this election. This is much ado about nothing (as usual) so the Trump people can cry foul.
"Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia used his executive power on Friday to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 convicted felons, circumventing the Republican-run legislature. The action effectively overturns a Civil War-era provision in the state's Constitution aimed, he said, at disenfranchising African-Americans." - New York Times, April 22, 2016.
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