Calif. lawsuit seeks to restore prisoners' votes
Source: SF Chronicle
Tens of thousands of low-level felons sentenced to county custody or supervision under Gov. Jerry Brown's "realignment" of California's penal system should keep their voting rights, advocates argued Wednesday in a suit against the state's top elections official.
The lawsuit, filed in a state appellate court in San Francisco, challenged Secretary of State Debra Bowen's decision in December that felons in custody are not allowed to vote even if, under the new rules, they were sentenced to county jail instead of state prison.
Under state law, felons are ineligible to vote if they are "imprisoned" or on parole. At issue in this case is whether "imprisoned" refers only to the state prison system or, as Bowen's office contends, to county jails as well.
The suit claims Bowen is illegally disenfranchising 85,000 Californians - 30,500 jail inmates and another 54,500 released prisoners who will report to county probation departments rather than state parole officers. The figures are based on state estimates for June 2013.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/08/BAPD1NHDRN.DTL
