The specific legal rationale is that Cali law prohibits felons currently in prison or on parole from voting, many are being transfered to county jails, which aren't prisons, and obviously jails have typically allowed voting... there was flap about that in Cook County in 2010, people freaking out because absentees were being given to people there, forgetting that jail usually is where people go prior to being convicted of anything... anyway there are a lot of state's that have fairly explicit language about that matter just to prevent denying people awaiting trial or sleeping off a misdemeanor being disenfranchised, especially against fears someone might lock a bunch of people up on election day. It's got about a snowball's chance but this is Cali we're talking about.



Personally, and I like to think I'm speaking as objectively as I can without regard to who such votes would favor (improbable put who knows?) I think a waiting period post parole and incarceration is legit, as is something like a 200 word essay as opposed to an application, though I'm biased since I used to use essays as a punishment in lieu of screaming and I felt it worked better, people think about stuff when writing about it. If my opinion were asked I would actually say view it as a coin flip, calculate based on the given variety of offense the usual odds of recidivism and pick the midway point to when that takes place, if they make it past that period I feel they can officially be qualified as better than even chance of going on the straight and narrow, that just seems more logical to me, something along those lines, but I think so long as they can't vote in prison (or Jail while serving a felony) and have at least some non-ridiculous path back to vote, then it's okay, and that appears to be the case in most places.



If I remember FL's situation correctly the governor wanted to re-institute the five year after rule they used to have until about a decade, and have a 200 word essay as opposed to a 1 page application (yeah 200 not 2,000, half a page) that's from memory so grain of salt and all.



Yeah, lowest bid jokes... the other one we did a lot in the Army was to joke on how our stuff was made by the blind, Skil-Craft and all, not that they don't provide perfectly quality stuff but the jokes are generic and don't have to make sense. Well it's certainly true you get what you pay for, except when you don't even get that because you got scammed, and the gov't has a crap history on both fronts and the voters have generally been partially responsible for a lot of that, though any candidate who ever made the mistake of pointing to the truism that in a democracy you've only yourselves to blame would be out on their ass in a heartbeat.

This is why I'm increasingly demarchist, rule by jury basically, I think we need a lot more done at the democratic level but we can't get into depth for everyone and so we should assemble panels of random persons to dip a bit deeper into stuff, not criminal just efficiency and such, I think we'd see less scapegoats that way at least. You know, grab a dozen random persons to look into something like how we do school lunch funds and let both sides present a case and if they can pick something 10-2 or better, just roll with it.