Should people with felony convictions automatically regain voting rights after serving their sentences?

In 2000, Florida's presidential result came down to 537 votes while more than 600,000 Floridians with past convictions could not vote, a gap the Sentencing Project's Locked Out report has documented as larger than the margin itself. That is not a thought experiment, it is the actual recent history of the state most associated with this debate. Disenfranchisement does not fall randomly either; it concentrates in the same communities whose votes are already hardest to cast. When the excluded population dwarfs the deciding margin, the law is not just punishing individuals, it is quietly editing the electorate. Automatic restoration would not guarantee any outcome, but it would stop the state from choosing its voters quite so aggressively. Sentencing Project