Florida Republicans Passed A New Poll Tax To Keep Ex-Felons, Primarily Blacks, From Voting

Florida has 29 electoral votes, same as New York. The only states with more are California (55) and Texas (38). There really is no path to reelection for Trump that doesn’t include Florida. Winning Florida doesn’t guarantee him a 2020 victory but losing Florida guarantees him a 2020 loss. And Florida has been the swingiest of swing states in presidential elections in recent years. In 2016 Trump beat Hillary 49.02% to 47.82%— a margin of 112,911 votes (our of over 9 million cast in the state) and just 1.2%. Obama beat Romney in 2012 by 0.88% and beat McCain in 2008 by 2.81%. In 2004 Bush was reelected with a 4.01 margin but in 2000, Bush beat Gore 2,912,790 (48.847%) to 2,912,253 (48.838%)— 537 votes (0.009%) out of nearly 6 million cast.

On November 6, 2018, Floridians turned out massively (7,977,265 voters) to approve Amendment 4— the Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative, a state constitutional amendment.

• Yes- 5,148,926 (64.55%)
• No- 2,828,339 (35.45%)

Let me put those numbers in some context. On that same day there, Floridians elected Ron DeSantis governor and Rick Scott to the Senate. DeSantis won with 4,076,186 votes (49.6%) and Scott, the out-going governor won the Senate seat with 4,099,505 votes (50.1%). In other words, Amendment 4 got over a million more votes than either of them.

The purpose of the amendment was to restore the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence (including parole or probation). That meant that on January 8, 2019, around 1.4 million ex-felons became eligible to vote, just like in almost all American states. The original intent of banning ex-felons in 1868, after the Civil War, was to disenfranchise as many former slaves as possible. Florida’s Black Codes restricted freedoms for African Americans and led to mass incarceration for blacks. Today Florida's disenfranchised felons constituted 10% of the state’s adult population, and 21.5% of the adult African American population. Are you keeping in mind how close presidential elections are in the state?

This week, Trump ally, Governor Ron DeSantis is going to sign a bill that will lessen Amendment 4’s impact on elections and make sure the Jim Crow intent of the original ban has a new life. The bill passed by the Republican-led Legislature requires felons to pay off restitution, court fees and fines before registering— a move that voting rights advocates say will have a chilling effect.

“There’s just no way to get around the fact that the Legislature did everything it could to undermine Amendment 4,” Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “I don’t think it’s consistent with the will of the voters, and it’s not consistent with the text of Amendment 4.”

…On a recent Saturday, 20 lawyers and paralegals gathered in the back room of an Orlando church to learn how to help ex-convicts overcome the obstacles. Leading the session were representatives from the League of Women Voters of Florida and a Latino advocacy group called Latino Justice.

Former prisoners could simply pay off their court fees, fines and restitution, said Cecile Scoon, first vice president of the LWV. But in some cases that may add up to thousands of dollars and be unrealistic. Aside from that, the bill would allow them to petition a judge to waive the costs or convert them into community service hours at a rate of $12 to $15 an hour, she said. Motivating people to go to court will take some work, she acknowledged, because some haven’t voted in years and “those muscles have atrophied.”

Some civil liberties advocates in Florida call the requirement that former convicts pay their financial obligations before registering discrimination. The U.S. Constitution’s 24th Amendment, passed in 1964, prohibits the levying of poll taxes, which had been a prerequisite to voting in some states and effectively disenfranchised many blacks and poor whites.

“This is tying your ability to vote to your ability to pay, which is a poll tax,” the ACLU’s Kubic said.

It’s not clear how many of the estimated 1.4 million felons still owe money to the courts or restitution to their victims, and the state’s supervisors of elections are counting on Florida leaders figuring out a way to determine who owes how much, said Ron Labasky, general counsel for a trade group of Florida elections supervisors.

…The Brennan Center for Justice, a research and advocacy group in New York, looked at three months of data from Florida and found that about 2,000 formerly incarcerated Floridians registered from January to March, although that may understate the total somewhat because of incomplete data. That’s far higher than the 250 felons who had registered each year in prior years. However, it’s a tiny fraction of the 1.4 million who may be eligible to register.

“That’s 2,000 people that were not eligible for it and now are eligible, and that’s a good thing,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. “But in terms of moving the needle in an election, that’s a drop in the bucket.”

It’s also not clear that a majority of those people would register as Democrats, Jewett said, although the Brennan Center found that African Americans who often vote blue comprised 44% of the new registrants. In April, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner said he had seen data showing more felons in Florida were registering as Republicans than Democrats, although he didn’t provide evidence.

Still, the Democratic Party of Florida is working to help former convicts register. It’s hoping to register as many as 200,000 voters this year, including many ex-inmates, said Juan Penalosa, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party.

Alan Grayson, a former Florida congressman from Orlando was the first Member of Congress to introduce a restoration-of-rights constitutional amendment. This morning he told me that this is “the Florida GOP way. When the voters voted for high-speed rail, rather than implementing that, the Florida GOP manufactured a vote to repeal it. When I put up a paid-sick leave initiative in Orange County, and it passed with 62% of the vote, the Florida GOPers in the legislature retroactively prohibited it. When the voters voted $1 billion a year for conservation, the Florida GOP ignored it. When the voters voted to give convicted felons a second change, the Florida GOP wouldn’t even give them a first chance. Now, they’re trying to shut down constitutional initiatives, so that they can ignore us pesky voters entirely. Someone needs to inform them that there is this thing called democracy…”