ORLANDO, Florida — Desmond Meade doesn’t want to talk about Florida Governor Rick Scott. Nor does he want to talk about partisan politics or racial sentencing disparities. Most of all, he doesn’t want to talk about himself.
That might seem odd for the head of a group devoted to restoring the franchise to 1.4 million Floridians with felony convictions, whose voting rights are automatically stripped under a Scott administration policy.
But that’s the Florida Rights Restoration Commission’s goal: complicating the public understanding of who is affected by felon disenfranchisement, and who enforces these policies. For the FRRC, it’s not a question of Republicans trying to suppress Democratic votes or the stain of the Deep South’s Jim Crow legacy or arguments over being weak on crime. Their focus, they say, is on basic civil rights.
[For more on this story by Allegra Kirkland, go to https://talkingpointsmemo.com/...e-ballot-in-november]
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