Fletcher restores voting rights to 733 felons

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July 17, 2006

Advocates hope governor speeds up process to thousands waiting

By ROGER ALFORD The Glasgow Daily Times Mon Jul 17, 2006, 11:01 AM CDT

FRANKFORT — Unlike so many other Kentuckians who don’t bother to vote, Tayna Fogle desperately wants to go to the polls in the next election.

First though, the Lexington woman who served prison time after a felony drug conviction has to get Gov. Ernie Fletcher to restore her right to vote.

In Kentucky, convicted felons automatically lose their voting rights, but they can have the privilege restored by the governor after they’ve completed their prison sentences. Fletcher has restored that right to 733 ex-cons since he took office.

Fogle, 46, of Lexington, submitted an application to Fletcher’s office on Wednesday, the first step in the restoration process, and she has high hopes that she will be among those who win the governor’s approval.

Advocates for restoring voting rights to ex-convicts have been urging Fletcher to speed up the process, saying people who have completed their sentences should be permitted to take part in elections.

In states like Kentucky, where Republicans and Democrats are feverishly competing to register new voters, convicted felons could be viewed as a pool of potential new voters. The question is whether they would be more likely to register as Democrats or Republicans in the push by both political parties to build their ranks.

Kentucky has 1,553,442 Democrats, up by 16,053 over the past year, according to records from the secretary of state’s office. Republicans number 993,356, up by 24,744 over the same period.

Although no one has tracked which party most ex-convicts register with nationally, the widely held belief is that they are more apt to become Democrats, said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that supports automatic restoration of voting rights.

“It seems to me that it’s highly inappropriate for either party to view this issue in partisan terms,” Mauer said. “This is fundamentally a question of democracy, fairness and the right to vote. We should decide public policy based on what we think is appropriate, and not how we think any particular group of people might vote.”

Fletcher’s top lawyer, Jim Deckard, said some 2,000 people in Kentucky have applied to have their voting rights restored since the governor took office in December 2003. Some have been rejected because they submitted incomplete applications. Others because they had outstanding legal issues, like unpaid fines or pending charges.

However, Deckard said the governor has granted voting rights to at least a third of the people who have gone through the application process. Deckard said he’s not the judge of whether that’s good or bad.

“It is what it is,” he said.

In comparison, former Gov. Paul Patton, a Democrat, restored the rights of more ex-convicts in his last year in office than Fletcher has in more than 2 1/2 years. In 2003, Patton restored rights to 1,150 felons out of 1,216 who applied.

Kentucky is one of three states in the nation — Florida and Virginia are the others — that permanently revokes the voting rights of people convicted of felony offenses, according to The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that supports automatic restoration of voting rights.

The right to vote can be restored on an individual basis in those states.

State Rep. Jesse Crenshaw, D-Lexington, introduced legislation in the General Assembly earlier this year to try to get lawmakers to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot so that voters could decide whether felons should automatically have their right to vote restored when their sentences are completed.

The measure died in committee, but Crenshaw said he isn’t giving up, saying sometimes it takes several attempts over several years to get a bill through the legislature.

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