I am dead set against those serving time in jail getting the right to vote. But even if you see jail as pure punishment and not a place where a criminal pays a debt to society, once someone has been released, I believe their right to vote should be restored.

Many of the laws that prevent ex-convicts from voting were passed long ago when it was thought that convicts had forfeited their rights in many areas because of their transgressions against society. In the south, such laws were used to depress the number of African American voters.

Today, many states recognize that it is patently unfair to deny someone the right to vote because of what they did in their past:

Felony disenfranchisement - often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests - affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups. But voter registration and advocacy groups say that recent overhauls of these Reconstruction-era laws have loosened enough in some states to make it worth the time to lobby statehouses for more liberal voting restoration processes, and to try to track down former felons in indigent neighborhoods.

"You're talking about incredible numbers of people out there who now may have had their right to vote restored and don't even know it," said Reggie Mitchell, a former voter-registration worker for People for the American Way. In Florida, "we're talking tens of thousands of people," he said. "And in the 2000 election, in the state of Florida, 300 people made the difference."