A report released earlier this month by the NAACP found that Florida is among the states with the “most restrictive” felon disenfranchisement “laws in the country” — one of many aspects of the state’s voting practices that will limit voter participation among minorities, according to the group.

The subject of voting rights in the U.S. has received renewed attention since sweeping changes to voting laws were passed in states across the country. Voting rights advocates in Florida have largely focused on new limitations on third-party voter registration, early voting days and ballot measure signatures. Little scrutiny, however, has been given to a rollback of voting rights for ex-offenders, also referred to as returning citizens.

According to the NAACP report (PDF), Florida is one of only four states in the country that “denies the right to vote permanently to all individuals convicted of any felony offense.”

The NAACP reports:

Florida imposed a mandatory five-year waiting period and petition process for the restoration of rights for individuals who have completed their sentences. In March 2011, Florida, which already had the largest disfranchised population of any state in the country (approximately 1 million), rolled back state rules enacted four years ago that eliminated the post-sentence waiting period and provided for automatic approval of reinstatement of rights for individuals convicted of non-violent felony offenses.

The previous rule was put into effect in 2007, allowing the restoration of rights to more than 154,000 people who had completed their sentences.

Under Florida’s new rules, all individuals who have completed their sentences, even those for non-violent offenses, must wait at least five years before they may petition the Clemency Board for the restoration of their civil rights, including the right to register to vote. Some offenders even have a mandatory seven-year period before they may petition.

Even worse, the five–year waiting period for individuals convicted of a non-violent offense to apply for restoration of voting rights resets if a person is simply arrested for a criminal offense—even if charges are eventually dropped or the person is acquitted of all allegations.

By most accounts, these new clemency rules make Florida’s the most restrictive felon disfranchisement approach in the country.

Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and a self-described “formerly convicted individual,” says that blame for the state’s poor voting rights for returning citizens goes “beyond political reasons.”

“This is more than just politically motivated,” Meade tells The Florida Independent. “These policies have been pushed by the prison industrial complex.”

According to Meade, private prison companies are “big campaign donors” that benefit from policies that limit former inmates’ rights.

“That’s how they make their money,” Meade says. According to Meade, keeping ex-offenders from having a say in political affairs limits proper accountability for legislators and institutions such as prisons — whether they are public or private. He also says that private prison companies have long lobbied for restricted rights of former inmates. As their influence grows, Meade argues, the rights of returning citizens shrink.

The power of private prisons in Florida has become increasingly visible in the past few years. According to reporting by The American Independent’s Yana Kunichoff:

GEO Group, the second-largest private prison operator in the country, is headquartered in Florida, and is already running the state’s largest private prison, the Blackwater River Correctional Facility in Milton. When the Corrections Corporation of America builds the largest private immigration center in the country, as it agreed with the town of Southwest Ranches and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to do earlier this year, Florida will become ground zero for private prisons.

The situation in Florida isn’t unique, but advocates say the scale of Florida’s plan is remarkable.

“It’s precedent-setting,” says Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the Private Corrections Working Group, a website that collects news and resources on the growing influence of the private prison industry.

Kopczynski says the proposed budget amendment and the planned ICE-contracted center “is the largest privatization effort in the U.S., if not in the world.”

The industry, Kunichoff wrote, has relied “on the goodwill of legislators” and groups such as the GEO Group have given hundreds of thousands in campaign donations to the Republican Party of Florida.

Meade says state policy-makers have favored prison companies, while simultaneously disregarding the rights of offenders and former offenders.

“We definitely feel that they are implementing their policies just to show they are being ‘tough on crime,’” Meade says, something he says this is done at the expense of actually “reducing and preventing crime.”

“This is all contrary to public safety,” Meade says. “There is no evidence that giving voting rights to returning citizens will negatively effect a community.”

He describes the rollback as an effort to block “people’s access to the polls.”

According to Meade, the new House Bill 4129 — which was introduced by state Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Shalimar, last month — would “create yet another obstacle.” According to a summary of the bill, 4129 would repeal a “provision that prohibits clerk or inspector from asking elector to provide additional information or recite elector’s home address after presenting picture identification that matches elector’s address in supervisor of elections’ records.”

“That is crazy,” Meade says. “I guess volunteers will decide who votes now.”

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Smithers7)

The office of Secretary of State Dianna Duran says that the names of 641 dead people are still on the voter registration rolls in New Mexico.

Ken Ortiz, Duran’s chief of staff, says they still don’t know whether anyone has voted using the name of a dead person because they need to check the dates of death against the dates when the names were last used to vote.

The review of voter registration records will be part of a report to the Legislature that Duran is compiling. As part of this review, Duran also announced that 2 non-citizen foreign nationals had confessed to accidentally registering to vote without knowing that it was illegal.

Duran has made pursuing voter fraud by foreign nationals a high priority, and earlier in the year announced that her office had identified at least 117 foreign nationals on the voter registration rolls, and that 37 foreign nationals had voted in the 2010 elections.

As Keesha Gaskins of the Brennan Center for Justice observed after Duran’s announcement, matching the names and birthdays of voters and lists of foreign nationals in the state is a bad way to check if illegal voting has taken place. Statistically, Gaskins points out, finding matching names and birthdays is quite likely when comparing lists with hundreds of thousands of names over long periods of time.

Finding mismatches between names and Social Security numbers on voter rolls is also a flawed method of identifying fraud, because it discounts the possibility that a Social Security number could be incorrectly entered into the system, either due to the voter’s error when filling out the form or due to an error during data entry.

At the time, Duran also claimed that there were up to 64,000 possible cases of voter fraud in the state. The ACLU of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Duran in July after she made this claim and refused to release documentation to back it up, which the ACLU argued was a violation of the state’s public records law.

Duran said this week that her office is asking some voters to re-register due to irregularities on their form. However, she also said that she would not be purging inactive voter files this year or next year because by federal law notices must be sent in advance to the voter’s address notifying them that their file will be eliminated, something her predecessor did not do.

The New Hampshire primary is particularly important for Johnson’s long-shot candidacy. He is pro-abortion rights, supports marriage equality and marijuana legalization, positions that make him anathema to Iowa’s social conservative caucus voters. His campaign has counted on performing well in New Hampshire, which is known for its libertarian bent.

In his most recent debate performance, Johnson gained brief national attention for joking that his neighbor’s dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than President Obama. He also repeatedly touted his proposal for a balanced budget amendment, no doubt in the hope that Republican voters would respond more to his fiscal conservatism than to his social liberalism.

According to Democracy in Action, Johnson has spent more time in New Hampshire than any other GOP presidential candidate, a total of 18 visits and 70 days total. His presence in the state has eclipsed even fellow former Gov. Jon Huntsman (Utah), another candidate distrusted by social conservatives who has spent a total of 42 days in New Hampshire.

The New York Times’ Michael Shear notes that had the early winter storm predicted for the East Coast this weekend “swept in 24 hours earlier, Mr. Johnson might have found himself out of luck.”

The PAC in question, Alliance for Better Classrooms, spent at least $300,000 in contributions on behalf of generally pro-charter, anti-teacher-tenure and anti-union candidates running for positions on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

The elections were this past Saturday, and though a couple of races are still inconclusive, state campaign finance reports show the business lobby, buttressed by Bloomberg dollars, far outspent groups aligned with teacher union positions.

Voters also re-elected Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) to a second term, whose likely selection for the state superintendent of education is John White, current superintendent of New Orleans-dominated Recovery School District and former deputy school chief of New York City’s public school system. RSD has overseen the aggressive closure of schools in New Orleans which has led to the city leading the nation in the percentage of charter schools that make up its school buildings — around 70 percent.

Mayor Bloomberg has been a staunch supporter of charter schools, and White helped the mayor roll out his reform-styled education plans in New York.

Interestingly, the largest Bloomberg Trust donation occurred four days before the election; other smaller $5,000 donations from the Trust came through even closer to the day voters headed out to the polls.

BESE officials work part-time and are unpaid, but implement the laws the state Legislature passes and preside over the Louisiana Department of Education. In recent years, BESE has become a battle ground for business-backed reform candidates, moderates, and progressives who seek to curb or protect teacher tenure laws and the presence of charter schools.

Implications and the money

The implications of this election are at first glance not deserving of the big money coming from the likes of an organization bearing the billionaire mayor of New York City’s name. But the 11-member BESE determines whether the politically conservative education reforms taking place in Louisiana will continue at an even greater pace, and whether big-business groups sympathetic to the now re-elected Gov. Jindal can have even greater sway in the state’s education system.

Alliance for Better Classrooms is backed by Lane Grigsby, founder and Board chairman of Cajun Contractors, Inc., a successful construction firm that in the last two years alone was awarded $300 million in civil projects from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A Times Picayune article indicates Cajun Contractors earns $400 million a year.

Also behind the PAC is Mike Wampold, a construction developer whose company builds luxury residential and large commercial properties.

Grigsby has gone on record complaining about teacher tenure in the Pelican State, saying not enough teachers have been let go. In the same Times Picayune article, the semi-retired businessman stressed performance is improved through competition, something of a rallying cry for education reformers who seek to buffer public education with a free-market sheen.

In total, Alliance for Better Classrooms donated $300,000 to what they call “pro-reform” candidates. The PAC received large donations from a few individuals and companies: $90,000 from Cajun Industries; $100,000 each from Grigsby’s wife Barbara Grigsby and the Bloomberg Trust; $25,000 from ISC Constructors; and four $20,000 donations from private citizens, including lawyer Michael C. Moran and Todd W. Grigsby, the elder Grigsby’s son.

Reform-style candidate, backed by business lobby, under scrutiny for loose ethics

Chas Roemer, son of former governor Buddy Roemer, is a BESE member squarely in the reform camp who benefited from the business community’s financial largesse.

The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), a self-proclaimed promoter of the “free-enterprise system” that benefits the business community, set up four regional PACs (West PAC, East PAC, North PAC, and South PAC) that each gave Roemer, an incumbent, $10,000. The state Republican Party gave nearly $34,000. Gov. Jindal, who needs a two-thirds majority in BESE so that his choice for state superintendent of public schools is appointed, gave Roemer $5,000 through his campaign committee.

Roemer’s membership on BESE has been a source of rancor for groups opposing his unabated support for charter schools. Roemer’s sister, Caroline Roemer Shirley, is executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools (LAPCS). The group advocates for expanding charter schools in the state and loosening restrictions on teacher tenure. In 2008, the state’s top ethics committee ruled Caroline Roemer cannot appear before BESE, but LAPCS is not restricted. Chas Roemer was not asked to recuse himself from hearings when LAPCS is present, though sections 1112 and 1120 of the Louisiana Code of Governmental Ethics indicate that he should.

A look at BESE meeting minutes in January of 2011 reveals (PDF) Chas Roemer voted on renewing the charters of multiple charter schools (Type 5 Charter Schools) that are members of the charter school association his sister leads. Some of those include the McDonogh schools, which belong to the KIPP and Algiers charter school networks.

Why Gov. Jindal cares about BESE

Jindal can appoint three BESE representatives; though the reform camp has a one-member majority, an additional member sympathetic to the pro-charter reform movement would put the coalition over the top. The governor’s likely selection for the top education position, White of the Recovery School District (RSD), is also an alumnus of Teach for America (TFA).

One BESE election that had the attention of many was between incumbent Louella Givens and the head of TFA in New Orleans, Kira Orange Jones. Neither candidate won a majority of the votes, and a run-off is set for mid November.

Jones is viewed as a potential member of the Jindal coalition on BESE.

Givens, known as a supporter of teachers unions and a constant critic of RSD and charter schools, took in $11,000 from the state affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. Another $2,000 came in from the Louisiana School Board Association (LSBA), an organization very critical of the state’s education policy moves.

Jones, meanwhile, received $40,000 from the four PACs created by LABI and $5,000 amounts from dozens of contributors, including the Bloomberg group, and donors from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

American Federation for Children, a non-profit that is regarded as the leading group in advocating for school voucher programs, donated heavily in the Saturday elections. It raised $100,000 from ISC Construction, $25,000 from Cajun Industries and $1,000 from a group called Friends of Bobby Jindal.

Charter schools are semi-autonomous education institutions with private school boards. In New Orleans, they operate as miniature school districts and remain popular among lawmakers despite incidents of poor student treatment, aggressive punishment tactics, lackluster academic gains and testing improprieties. National studies suggest the success of charter schools is limited, and more charter schools underperform compared to traditional neighborhood schools than those that compare more favorably.

However, parents have higher marks for charter schools, including in New Orleans, and prefer the experimental schools to traditional neighborhood programs.

“I am asking you to please make a generous contribution of at least $99 (donations of $100 or more are publicly disclosed), or whatever you can afford, to help us reverse this unjust law and hold the legislators who imposed it accountable,” wrote NOM President Brian Brown (also treasurer of NOM NY PAC) in a fundraising email sent to supporters Sunday. “When it comes to elections, money talks. … We must have the resources to hold these turncoat Republican senators accountable! We CANNOT let them get away with this!”

According to Brown, NOM NY PAC needs to raise $100,000 by tomorrow night in order to make a “down payment” on the $2 million NOM says it needs to “restore a pro-marriage majority in Albany next year.”

The NOM NY PAC was created in 2009 and has a physical location in Huntington, N.Y., according to the New York State Board of Elections.

According to state campaign finance disclosure reports, in 2009, NOM NY PAC raised nearly $2,900 (about 75 percent of which came from NOM’s national organization and anonymous, “unitemized” monetary and in-kind contributions); in 2010, the PAC raised approximately $6,600; and as of July 2011, NOM had raised about $25,000, of which $10,872, or 43 percent, comes from anonymous “unitemized” monetary contributions. Of the identified 105 individual contributions, about one-third were made from New York addresses. The rest came largely from California and other states across the country, as well as one $100 donation from Pinegowrie, South Africa.

This month, NOM released a web ad showing heavily pixilated New York state Sens. Roy McDonald (District 43), Mark Grisanti (District 60), Stephen Saland (District 41) and James Alesi (District 55) “dancing” while money rains down on them. A banner reads: “Same Sex Money Dance for the NY GOP Four – Fundraiser Sponsored by Billionaires.”

The ad was in response to an Oct. 13 fundraiser held for the aforementioned senators, hosted by Republican supporters of gay marriage, such as Mayor Bloomberg, hedge fund managers Paul E. Singer and Daniel S. Loeb and software entrepreneur and philanthropist Tim Gill, who founded the LGBT-rights organization the Gill Foundation in 1994. (Full disclosure: The Gill Foundation is a donor to the American Independent News Network.) The fundraiser was expected to raise $1.25 million.

In September NOM launched a billboard campaign across the state of New York featuring the respective senators’ names with the messages “Your Fired!” and, more recently, “You’re Next.”

“[M]any elected officials like Mayor Bloomburg [sic] and Governor [Andrew] Cuomo think that their legislative priority is imposing same-sex marriage, not creating jobs and fixing the economy,” Brown writes in Sunday’s email. “I promise you, we will not rest until we have repealed same-sex marriage in New York and stopped this wealthy minority from thwarting the will of the people!”

Last week, Grisanti told Buffalo’s WIVP.com his vote for same-sex marriage was not about money.

“It wasn’t, you know, ‘You vote this way and you’re going to see an influx of cash,’ or anything like that in your pockets,” Grisanti told the local news organization. “If I had voted no on this marriage equality bill,” said Grisanti, “I’d probably be getting money from the other side as well. So I don’t see why it’s such a big issue.”

New York is not the only state where NOM is using out-of-state resources to influence state Senate elections by pushing marriage equality as a wedge issue. Last week, NOM launched an independent expenditure campaign in Iowa with The Family Leader, an Iowa-based affiliate of the Family Research Council, to support Republican Cindy Golding’s candidacy for Iowa Senate against her Democratic rival Liz Mathis.

As ThinkProgress reports, NOM has already committed more than $15,000 into the Iowa Senate election.

“They’re wanting to go back to the good ol’ days,” said Rep. Jeff Steinborn (D-Las Cruces), sponsor of the 2009 House version of the bill that passed on a 49-17 vote . “They want to go back to being able to funnel as much money as possible through the state’s Republican Party.”

The law restricts individuals or entities from donating more than $2,300 to a non-statewide candidate in an election or $5,000 to a statewide candidate, a political party or political action committee.

The suit was filed with the support of James Bopp Jr., an attorney who claims to specialize in free speech cases out of his Indiana-based law firm Bopp, Coleson and Bostromin Terre Haute, and with the James Madison Center for Free Speech. The plaintiffs have cited Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in their suit.

Sen. Rod Adair (R—Roswell), the sole dissenting vote in the Senate during the law’s passing, is also one of the plaintiffs in the suit. “As long as there’s transparency in the process, I don’t see the need for the limits law,” he said, adding, “I’m glad there are people on the center-right who are willing to take on these issues. That it’s not just the ACLU or the George Soros empire filing lawsuit after lawsuit.”

It’s those other people on the center-right who have Representative Steinborn worried. “New Mexicans need to decide who’s elected,” he said. “Not the Koch brothers [Charles and David, the billionaire brothers who have vehemently campaigned against President Obama and funded various right-wing groups and causes, as well as the Tea Party] or Karl Rove or these outside interests, like the ones who donated $400,000 to Governor Martinez’s gubernatorial campaign. Before the law went into effect.

“They can throw around a modest amount of money here comparatively and win elections,” added Steinborn. “It’s propping up candidates that we maybe wouldn’t support otherwise. And you have to look at the timing of this too: we’re coming up on a presidential election, and we could be a swing state. It’s exactly what we sought to shut down with our bill, and we really wanted to get the big money out of the races. It’s very bad for New Mexico. Very bad.”

Mayor Berry’s “ABQ: The Plan” — the pairing of an improved interstate highway interchange and the construction of a 35-acre complex of sports fields and indoor courts, to the combined tune of $50 million — got nixed by voters. Although gracious in defeat of his proposal (a reaction perhaps assuaged by the possibility of dedicating a portion of the city’s $3 million annual operating budget to the interchange project), Mayor Berry said that the “voters spoke, and we’ll listen.”

In a vote that echoed sentiments voiced by other urban drivers throughout the country, 53 percent of Albuquerque voters cast ballots against controversial red-light cameras. Although the vote is not yet law, the results likely spell the end of the program — with a vote on a bill possibly as soon as tonight.

City councilor Dan Lewis, who had helped put the anti-camera proposal on the ballot, had called the devices a “scam,” and said after last night’s results that if those numbers hold true, he’ll introduce a bill to kill off the cameras altogether. The cameras, initially put in place to record drivers who ran red lights and later saddled with the even more contentious duty of issuing citations to speeders, could be gone in as little as sixty days. The cameras were first installed in two intersections in October 2004.

On a supportive note, voters did approve of the $164 million price tag for general obligation bonds, a program that provides money for libraries, storm drainage, parks, streets, and other amenities. And two incumbent councilors, Trudy Jones and Brad Winter, were also reelected.

The former New Mexico governor won the right to participate, according to Fox sources, by cracking 1 percent in the latest five national polls in which he was included—Fox News, CNN, McClatchy-Marist, ABC, and Quinnipiac—which was the criterion the network had set for inclusion.

Talking Points Memo reports Johnson has yet to receive final notification that he will participate in the debate, though he told TPM, “It would be good news if we get it.”

Johnson is a self-identified libertarian who differentiates himself from Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the more popular of the libertarian GOP candidates, with his support for abortion rights and his opposition to the construction of a border fence. He has attended one other GOP debate, where he was asked about his support for drug legalization and discussed his initial opposition to the war in Iraq.

According to Politico, Johnson’s inclusion in the debate came over the objection of the Florida Republican Party, which has excluded him from Saturday’s Florida straw poll.

If he does indeed receive a debate invitation, Johnson will have temporarily left the ranks of presidential candidates who have too little support to gain the valuable national airtime of a debate. These candidates include former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer (R), Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) and California Republican Fred Karger.

“Democracy demands that we get three more House seats,” said Rep. Antonio “Moe” Maestas, D-Albuquerque. “Where the seats come from is not a problem of the West Side.”

The West Side is responsible for about 40 percent of New Mexico’s population growth over the past ten years. Overall, the state has grown by about 200,000 people, or 13 percent.

The Journal adds that a “consensus” may be forming around giving the West Side at least two new House seats, possibly consolidating two Roswell districts and two Mid-Heights Albuquerque districts.

In the Houston Chronicle, Veasey complained that “statewide, 90 percent of the growth has been minority. …(Republicans) figured out how to draw another seat for voters who are shrinking in population.”

“Minorities accounted for almost all of the state’s population growth during the past 10 years, which resulted in Texas gaining four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives,” the Chronicle reported. Veasey’s suit argues the state’s map should include one new Hispanic-majority district, and one with an African-Americans majority.

Under the 1965 U.S. Voting Rights Act, any redistricting plan in Texas must be submitted for federal approval either to the Department of Justice or to a federal court, under a preclearance requirement of the law that’s increasingly contentious, as Stateline pointed out in an in-depth piece today.

That requirement, in Section 5 of the law, applies to Texas and at least part of 15 other states where, as the Pew Center on the States’ Stateline explains, there was a history of “low levels of voter participation and rules in place designed to reduce voter participation” — at least in the 1960s and 1970s, when the law took shape.

It’s the same process that Texas’ new voter ID law must clear. Those who’ll be challenging that law are waiting for Texas to submit it for federal preclearance so they can challenge it.

As Stateline explains, to clear the process, a state with a redistricting plan must prove it’s avoided watering down minority voting power in its new map. In the past, states would choose one path to preclearance or the other, but this year at least two states went for both at once:

This is a major change from previous rounds of redistricting and it comes with a politically loaded subtext: Conservative lawmakers mistrust the Obama administration’s Justice Department. They’re looking to either pressure Justice to approve their plans or to sidestep it in court.

Stateline goes on to explain why this year’s preclearance process has a whole new set of political issues at play, not least of all in Texas, where mistrust of the Obama administration runs deep:

For one thing, for the first time since the Voting Rights Act passed, a Democrat is in the White House during redistricting. While career staff in the Justice Department make preclearance recommendations, political appointees can overrule them — as George W. Bush’s Justice Department did for Texas and Georgia maps last decade. One of the big questions this cycle is whether the Obama administration will interpret the law differently than the Bush administration did.

Meanwhile, for the first time, most Southern states are firmly in the hands of Republicans: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas all are preclearance states and in all of them Republicans are in complete control of redistricting. Already, these Republican lawmakers are sparring with the Obama administration on health care, environmental rules and a host of other issues.

Texas hasn’t announced which route it’ll take to preclearance — Department of Justice approval, a federal court ruling or both.

Update at 4:29: Attorney General Greg Abbott just announced Texas had submitted its plan for preclearance today, doubling down and submitting plans to both the Department of Justice and U.S. District Court in Washington:

By informally submitting the State’s redistricting plans – along with relevant documents and data about those plans – to DOJ, the State is attempting to ensure that the Civil Rights Division and Attorney General Eric Holder have the information necessary to confirm that Texas has fully satisfied the Voting Rights Act’s requirements and is therefore entitled to preclearance.

While the federal government has approved two other states’ plans this year, Texas’ map is even “more complex” than others, Stateline writes:

The debate centers on Hispanic voters, but there’s no agreement on how many Hispanics have to be in one district to elect the Hispanic community’s candidate of choice.

While Congress extended Section 5, and the preclearance rule, for another 25 years pair, a pair of suits, in Shelby County, Ala., and Kinston, N.C., could force a Supreme Court decision that would put an end to preclearance entirely.