Ex-Con Voting Rights

The New York Times wrote an interesting article about ex-felons and how they should have the right to vote. Virginia's Governor Terry McAuliffe had just signed papers stating that 13,000 ex-felons could gain their voting rights back on a case-by-case basis. As expected many conservatives were skeptical about this idea and Trump himself said that the democrats are releasing more violence into the polls. The majority of the fellows that gained their voting rights were nonviolent felons. There is however suspicion that this restoration of ex-felon voting rights was done to help Gov. McAuliffe ally Hillary Clinton win the presidential election. Most states ban felons from voting but will immediately retire their rights once they completed a prison term, probation, or parole. In some states it requires all three. This goes to show how much power both the federal and state governments both have and how they can overlap.