This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 16th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Kentucky's new governor Andy Bashir restored the voting rights of more than 140,000 former felons in Kentucky.

Guy Hamilton Smith is one of those people.

We spoke earlier this month about voting rights and Kentucky's own recent history with clemency.

Andy Bashir is the new governor of Kentucky.

It was sworn in December.

And one of his first acts as governor was to restore voting rights to 140,000 people

who had served their sentences. You were one of them. How does that feel?

You know, it's funny because I spent so long like disenchanted and disenfranchised about politics that I didn't

think it would actually matter that much to me when it you know if I ever got my rights to vote back. But it was

actually kind of emotional for me to know that you know I have again a voice you know I haven't voted since you know since I was

18 so I'm 36 now so it's been a good chunk of my life that I haven't been, you know, a member of the, you know, a member of the franchise.

What were you convicted of?

Well, so in my teenage years I had a really bad problem with internet pornography and I downloaded essentially everything that I came across.

Some of those images were illegal and my girlfriend at the time she found them and went to the police and you know I was I cooperated and I was eventually convicted, pled guilty to, you know, possession of, you know, possession of child pornography.

And from that, I wasn't, I was very fortunate in a lot of respects

because that allowed me to get honest and get treatment and it also gave me an interest in law because prior to that point I

had actually been in grad school for clinical psychology and that you know I withdrew from you know this was

back in 2006 and I ended up having to withdraw from school, but then going through the legal process I kind of got

interested in law and I asked my lawyer, can you go to law school to felony conviction? So then I went to law school and kind of

started on this whole whole journey of, I mean it's a long story, but you know being involved in various aspects of the

...