I was hoping Vilsack or the next Democrat(s) do something of the sort. In the next year and a half that should get close to 100,000 voters elegible and registered in the state- and Democrats won't lose Iowa again in the foreseeable future. There's quite a quiet, background, campaign to deal with this grotesque problem and relic of the past- this move in Iowa follows on Nebraska repealing its law and giving 54,000 people the vote back. I hope the next Democratic governor of Florida, and maybe one in Nevada, and perhaps even Warner in Virginia, do likewise- basically automatically pardon people.
Iowa was the second-to-last major holdout in the historical North in this aspect of this major civil rights problem. Washington State still remains the last great annoyance- all the other major offenders in the North and West have eased their laws in the last five years, and a progression toward the reenfranchising of people on probation and then those on parole tends to follow.
The South remains...different. The ex-felon disenfranchisement law in Florida is the fundamental reason Gore came up short there. Just look at the numbers- ex-felons typically vote at a rate of ~10%. It is the single greatest residue of segregation, Jim Crow, and/or Reconstruction that remains instituted in the South. It spread to the North as blacks moved North and the immigrant waves of the 1880s and 1920s hit the country, but was largely reversed during the 1960s.
Then Rehnquist saved the disenfranchisement laws that remained by the travesty that was the 1974 verdict in Richardson v Ramirez. That was just part of the wave of conservatism that took another 20 years to crest. States have slowly been discarding these laws again, in various increments. Florida has been particularly horrid about opposing change, but as you can see, the rest of the South is generally bad.
http://www.righttovote.org/state.aspIn places where the overt ex-felon disenfranchisement was discarded, state judges have re-created the effects by giving ridiculously long probations. Basically, the parolee and probationer disenfranchisements are also bad law and greatly abused. In some places state judges impose long probations as a matter of course (In Rhode Island, 30 years for a 5 year drug sentence is not unusual). In places like Georgia it has a way of getting disenfranchisement levels to similar to Florida. Mississippi is also pretty bad- it gets listed as a 'partial' disenfranchising state, but the list of crimes for which people lose the right to vote gets longer every year. It's all a Republican game, of course. People who have been through prison tend not to vote at a high rate, but when they do they vote Democrat.
There's a lot of information about this at The Sentencing Project website.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues_03.cfmAs I see it, Democrats' two major civil rights issues of the present are gay marriage and ending disenfranchisement of felons who have returned to society. Gay marriage is novel but settles issues far beyond its narrow scope. Disenfranchisement of criminals is an older story and is the last relic of the institution of slavery.
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