Looks like a lot of them will be able to vote in the 2008 election:

Crist's office said that of the 628,000 felons listed in state law enforcement databases, 515,000 committed less serious crimes and many could receive their rights within a few months.

They'll be able to vote when they find out about the change and they do whatever is needed in the process. Which basically means that unless they're reached, most of them won't try to get registered at all.

African-American voting notes from Florida.

14.6% of Floridans are African-American, 12% of Floridian registered voters are African-American.

Counties of note (where the disparity is higher than 5.25%):

Bradford- 13% of reg voters, 21% of population
Calhoun- 9% of reg voters, 16% of population
Franklin- 8% of reg voters, 16% of population
Hamilton- 30% of reg voters, 38% of population
Lafayette- 6% of reg voters, 9% of population
Liberty- 9% of reg voters, 18% of population
Sumter- 5% of reg voters, 14% of population
Union- 11% of reg voters, 23% of population

A map showing those counties (in red), along with counties that had disparites between 4% and 6.25% (in orange), and counties where the disparity suggests that less than 2/3rds of African-Americans are registered (in yellow):

Basically, there's a lot of North Florida in that map.

One formula I used was (percentage of population/percentage of registered)*registered African-American voters minus registered African-American voters. This is an inprecise way to calculate how many voters could be added.

My count for the orange and red counties is around 27,000.

Although you'd get high numbers for the same thing in Broward (18% reg, 21% pop), Orange (15% reg, 18% pop), Palm Beach (10% reg, 14% pop). If you add those counties to the orange/red counties, then you get almost 90,000.

Now, I think the former restrictions aren't 100% responsible for these disparities, but these disparities should be tackled too.

One more thing: None of the orange/red counties on that map are covered by the Voting Rights Act.

Ron Gunzberger, the blogger at the site politics1.com, lives in Florida and he has written a couple times about how Gunzberger is pissing off the (Jeb) Bush backers and other wing nuts by supporting legislation that is supported by the Democrats.

YEah Crist is acting more like a moderate Democrat than a Republican...

If he keeps up like this, he may be someone to keep an eye on nationally, in case he has higher ambitions...  Know they opponents.

The first two are a complete sham.  He will not succeed on the insurance crisis, and the property tax stuff is a loaded gun pointed directly at the Florida Public Schools.

Have to give him credit for the last two.

Abrams pled guilty to misdemeanors to avoid the felony charges. North's conviction was overturned on appeal thanks to Congress's grant of immunity. So I don't think either has any problem voting.

You may want to get in touch with the Brennan Center

http://www.brennancenter.org/

This is the picture of what they're involved in:

http://www.brennancenter.org/subpage.asp ?key=38&proj_key=9042

Have a look at the Johnson v Bush lawsuit- that was the attempt, in 2000-2006, to try to get the Florida disenfranchisement overturned pretty much on the grounds you note.  As poll tax, as VRA violation, as 14th and 15th Amendment violations.

(You have to click on the 'Johnson v Bush' link at that last page to see the record of litigation and the briefs, it doesn't have a distinct URL I can list here.)

But the federal courts refuse to see it that way and duck behind the last standing major Rehnquist travesty/verdict, Richardson v Ramirez (1974).  

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/ge tcase.pl?court=US&vol=418&invol= 24

The majority verdict is awful, weaseling, logically insulting, and full of problems.  It's all about getting the result and deliberate mangling and denial of Section 1 14th Amendment rights in the name of 'state rights' and 'states' interests'.  (Which is the essential point of "strict constructionism" and "originalism".)  The thing worth reading is the dissent by Marshall and Brennan.  

If you read the Johnson v Bush briefs and verdicts, the truth of the whole Johnson lawsuit is that it's (necessarily) at bottom a reargument of the points and assertions made in Richardson v Ramirez.  But the federal courts in 2001 to 2005 weren't willing to read the 14th Amendment aspect in any way other than Rehnquist said they should, i.e. Section 2 overrides Section 1.  (Brennan and Marshall say it's the other way around, and they are right.)  That, and all the twists and turns in earlier litigation in attempts to duck behind or avoid the slew of bad technicalities in the 30 years of precedents (reall awful reads), leads to all the sophistry in these briefs- horrible contortions and bizarre technical pseudoarguments about strict scrutiny.

Ultimately the Johnson case was appealed to the Supreme Court just after Rehnquist died, but the application for appeal was turned down without comment.  Basically, the Court's message was: we can't overturn Richardson v Ramirez just yet even though every fool knows it's a travesty.  Try again when the political climate is settled, or better yet, get Congress and the President to amend the VRA.

One thing the Florida plaintiffs greatly lacked were records showing the intents of their Constitutional convention delegates in the 1968 VRA-caused rewriting of the Florida Constitution, which basically kept the disenfranchisement amendment in it intact.  But at the time it was general knowledge that the major flaw in the VRA was that it ignored those statutes, and that those statutes were invariably abused to net disenfranchise non-whites.  Florida had a record of felonizing crimes that were largely committed by black people and usually considered misdemeanors, i.e. stealing corn.  Florida also had curious procedures for dealing with crimes where defendents could avoid getting recorded as convicted, i.e. disenfranchised, if the (white) prosecutor so chose.

The effort to achieve reenfranchisement in Virginia is, to the extent that I've followed it, a backdoor affair kept very quiet.  The two Democratic governors have balked at going very far with it- but last year governor Vilsack in Iowa essentially mass pardoned their lifetime disenfranchised, and now Florida's governor Crist is going the same route, so there is pressure to follow that route.  Maybe you can get in touch with someone in Virginia government about whether the plan is to continue to tread softly.  I suspect it is until Democrats there have majority control of a chamber of the Virginia legislature- which they need to block a backlash bill by Republicans should the governor choose to do as Crist and Vilsack have.  Given how close Virginia is to tipping Blue- by trend it should be voting 48% or 49% for the Democratic Presidential nominee in November '08, or maybe even a little higher...

I've looked at the matter quite a while and I think there's essentially a correlation with the R/D percentages in large states.  When a large state is 45% or less Democratic-voting recently, lifetime disenfranchisement for all former felons is acceptable and pushed for.  There's a whole range of intermediate stages with all kinds of artificial, ultimately pointless, criteria and distinctions in the intermediate percentages.  But at solid 52% or 53% Democratic-voting levels the large states remove all lifetime disenfranchisement.  Probationer reenfranchisement tends to follow that, with D voting in the mid fifties.  Parolee reenfranchisement is murky; it seems to take a D vote level over 60%.

Disenfranchisement runs differently in very small states- most deviate from their R/D split in liberal fashion (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, the Dakotas, Montana, Utah, Hawai'i, Alaska, arguably Arkansas and Nebraska).   Small states resistant to this so far are Wyoming and Delaware.  Delaware perhaps because it's not a small society unto itself, as the others are, but socially continuous with rural/Eastern Shore Maryland and southern New Jersey.  Wyoming perhaps because of relatively large white right winger inmigration.

One of the solutions nationally is the CEVA bill (Count Every Vote Act) being sponsored by Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, and John Lewis.  Part of it is an extension of the VRA to overrule state level lifetime disenfranchisement laws.

the first Florida was passed in 1868.

It was re-enacted in '68 to "clense" the law of its obvious rascist intent.  That is why Florida's law does not run afoul of the '84 act.

If you study the other states, my guess is you will find they did something similiar.

Good point. The Sentencing Project calls in "voting rights restoration".

guys like Graham and Chiles never invested political capital in trying to change the law. Everytime it came up, it was a political loser.

Hey, this is Florida.

Yep.  Those 'court fee' and 'penalty' and 'restitution' payments are being used as de facto poll taxes to block poor ex-offenders where states are rolling back disenfranchisement statutes.  This is/was a problem and dispute in Iowa, Washington, and iirc Delaware.  In a lot of cases it's at most a few hundred dollars that stands between people and their ability to vote, but since they can't get out of hand-to-mouth starvation wage hell and are in shit with their relatives, they rarely if ever pay it off.

I wish some better off Democrats would pool some big money and just help a slew of these folks simply pay off that stuff.  Found a nonpartisan nonprofit that they can apply to that pays up to some set amount straight to the courts.  Since hard fought campaigns are spending $150 or $200 per vote they get these days, that may be a cheap way to get 1,000 more swing voters per district registered and impressed that there are people out there who are willing to help them regain rights and dignity.

A bunch of states have conservative judiciaries that sentence people to remarkably excessive probation terms after completion of their 'real' sentence.  That was one of the problems in Rhode Island- one typical drug offender got a four year prison sentence (serving about two) plus thirty!!! years of additional probation.  Georgia nominally doesn't disenfranchise people who have completed incarceration, but apparently sentences drug offenders to addition terms of probation in the 20-30 year range, I've heard- which achieves the same thing.

It's a horror out there.  Ending disenfranchisement and politically based excessive sentencing and the trickery of government set up to prevent restoration of rights is such a priority to activists because it's fundamental, fundamental to turning the penal system and its outcomes from punitive (which is just about all it is these days- a cattle yard) to genuinely rehabilitative in the long run.

I love this tidbit:

I asked Crist during a phone interview on Monday morning if he had ever had sex with Jordan.

"No," he said. "I don't recall the name."

Dont feel bad Charlie.  I cant remember the names of half the people I've had sex with.  Ah.. does love have no bounds?

The prison population is disproportionately African-American largely because the prison population in any nation tends to be disproportionately drawn from the poor and those with no stake in society. The poor as a whole are a Democratic-leaning group.

This kind of action also prevents the vote scrubbing favoured by the Republicans whereby 'suspected felons' are scrubbed from the electoral register, even when evidence clearly shows that the felon in question and the names being removed are clearly separate individuals.

Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Jeff Manza at Northwestern University conducted a pretty thorough study on this question.  The basic premise:

"The net effect -- intentional or unintentional -- is to dilute African American voting strength. And because African Americans vote disproportionately for Democrats, an issue that affects African Americans is an issue that affects the Democratic Party.  Low-income voters are also overrepresented in prisons, and they too tend to vote Democratic. This effect is not just on the fringes. Our estimates show that at least seven of every 10 votes cast by these lost felon voters would go to Democratic candidates."

They account for lower voting rates, potential skews in a number of directions, and a host of other factors and conclude that full felon voting rights would have been enough to swing a number of presidential elections and a substantial number of Senate races.

I'm pretty sure the whole study is available on the interwebs.  It's harrowing stuff.

According to what I've read, studies of ex-felons in states that permit them to vote show them voting at an overall turnout rate of 10-15%.

The studies say that ex-felon voting is identical in rate and partisan split and age distribution to that of their socioeconomic class, ethnic group, and peers.  IOW, they are indistinguishable from the demographics they are part of at the ballot box.  

Republicans would have you believe otherwise, of course.