Voting Rights - Former Felons - NYTimes.com The United States maintains a shortsighted and punitive set of laws, some of them dating back to Reconstruction, denying the vote to people who have committed felonies. They will bar about 5.85 million people from voting in this year's election. In the states with the most draconian policies - including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi and Virginia - more than 7 percent of the adult population is barred from the polls, sometimes for life. Nationally, nearly half of those affected have completed their sentences, including parole or probation. Policies that deny voting rights to people who have paid their debt to society offend fundamental tenets of democracy. But the problem is made even worse by state and local election officials so poorly informed about the law that they misinform or turn away people who have a legal right to vote. In Minnesota last week, the State Supreme Court issued an order that clarified a state law that denies the vote to people with felony convictions until they have their voting rights restored. The case involves a Ramsey County woman who pleaded guilty in 2010 to felony possession of marijuana but received a "stay of adjudication," which meant that she was placed on probation. The woman says the probation office wrongly informed her that she was ineligible to vote in the upcoming election. In an affidavit, a local lawyer told of questioning prosecutors, county elections officials and others about the voting rights of similarly situated people without getting a definitive answer. This kind of problem is not uncommon. A 2005 study by the Sentencing Project, a Washington research and advocacy group, found that 37 percent of public officials surveyed in 10 states either misstated a central provision of the voter eligibility law or were unsure about what the law said. Disenfranchisement and restoration policies represent a kind of "crazy quilt" of strictures that differ not just among states, but among counties, cities and towns as well. Some states even ban people convicted of misdemeanors from voting. With so much confusion among those who administer the laws, it is no surprise that people who are legally entitled to vote either don't try out of fear that they would be committing a crime or are wrongly turned away. The Minnesota Supreme Court made clear that the woman was eligible to vote because she had not been convicted of a felony. By the time the court issued its order, the woman had been informed that she was eligible to vote and the county had released a detailed memorandum explaining the law to election and corrections officials. That's a good first step that all states should take until they simplify the rights restoration process so that every ex-offender who completes his or her sentence automatically goes back on the voting rolls.