Lynne Sladky/AP Photo
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to reporters after a federal appeals court stayed a lower-court ruling that gave Florida returning citizens the right to vote, Doral, Florida, May 2020.
Any Floridian released from prison and eager to vote in the November general election has until midnight on Monday, October 5, to register, but under state law anyone with a felony conviction must pay off all fees, fines, and restitution first. Pulling up Florida’s online “legal financial obligation” database, the returning citizen notes the amount, gets the required documents together, rushes off to the county supervisor of elections’ office to get in under the wire. The newly enfranchised voter later emerges with a smile and an “I Voted!” sticker.
Except that’s Disney World–level fantasy. In real-world Florida, a statewide database does not exist. It’s not even close. Florida is working on one; it’s at least six years away, if not longer. Records that show what monies are owed currently are often hard to find, or, for older felonies, do not exist. And each of the county clerks has their own system.
Though organizers from the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition have raised millions of dollars and have enlisted citizens eager to vote, getting the fines paid and any kind of release that makes it safe to vote without fear of prosecution is an uphill struggle.
If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it is the 2020 counterpart of the games that registrars played on Black citizens before the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Florida’s voter suppression tactics are straight out of the Old South playbook of relentless legal perversions and social indignities designed to suppress votes, especially the ones cast by African Americans.
Amendment 4, the 2018 statewide ballot initiative, restored voting rights to former felons. But one year later, state lawmakers mandated that former felons repay all fees, fines, and restitution before registering to vote and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law. In May, a federal district court sided with returning-citizen plaintiffs challenging the law. But last month, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower-court ruling, leaving the 2019 Florida law in place. Since Amendment 4 passed, 85,000 people regained the right to vote. But a September federal appeals court decision means that more than 770,000 people cannot cast a ballot in 2020 unless they somehow pay all their fees and fines by tonight.
“The 11th Circuit has essentially said that it’s OK under the U.S. Constitution to put a price tag on voting to make people pay to vote,” says Sean Morales-Doyle, the deputy director for the voting rights and elections at New York University Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Not only that, but to do that for people everyone knows are unable to pay the price is to essentially make it impossible for those folks to vote because of how little money they have.”
The roots of racism and poverty, its next of kin, run deep in Florida’s voter suppression obsession. To rejoin the Union after the Civil War, the federal government required Florida and the other Confederate states to ratify the 14th Amendment, which enshrined the citizenship rights of the formerly enslaved people. Florida responded with a new state constitution shredding African American civil rights and criminalizing behavior. A crime was anything that a white person wanted it to be: Insisting on the right to register to vote could send a person to jail or worse. To underscore white politicians’ intent to destroy the newly bestowed African American franchise, anyone convicted of a felony lost the right to vote for life.
Those laws reverberate today for Blacks, Latinos, and whites. Betty Riddle, one of the plaintiffs in the federal district court case, owed $1,800 for her most recent felony convictions, but county records do not match Florida Department of Law Enforcement documents. Nor can she afford to pay that amount. She also had felony convictions spanning a 13-year period from 1975 to 1988, but county officials could not find those records and cannot tell her what she owes.
Another plaintiff, Curtis Bryant, owed $10,000 and pays $30 per month on a payment plan, according to district court documents. After Amendment 4 passed, he registered to vote. But once the federal ligation got under way, he doubted assurances that he could vote in the primary, so, fearing more criminal charges, he did not. Rosemary McCoy had to pay $6,400 in restitution and $666 in fees. After paying the fees, she asked about a repayment plan. The county clerk of the court informed her that the court did not have one.
Florida’s voter suppression tactics are straight out of the Old South playbook of relentless legal perversions and social indignities designed to suppress votes, especially the ones cast by African Americans.
So Americans mobilized to pay those debts. And when they did, Florida officials parried those efforts. Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James launched the More Than a Vote Campaign, recruiting athletes, musicians, and other entertainers to fight voter suppression and to back up those efforts with dollars. In mid-July, James donated $100,000 to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the statewide voting rights advocacy group behind the successful Amendment 4 campaign. Overall, FRRC has raised about $20 million from tens of thousands of average citizens, celebrities, and corporations, with the biggest chunk coming from billionaire former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg.
As unsettling as the FRRC/More Than A Vote campaign is for Florida’s Republican leaders, the prospect of a New York billionaire erasing returning citizens’ debts faster than it takes to do an electronic transfer is terrifying. Enter Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody to request that the FBI and state law enforcement investigate Bloomberg—for possible Florida election law violations. The attorney general has also threatened prosecutions of former felons whose fees are paid by the restoration campaign—for allegedly being paid to vote.
Last week in a talk streamed on social media, FRRC Executive Director Desmond Meade said that after Amendment 4 passed, politics took over. “It’s just like a politician walking past a homeless man for 150 years,” he said. “All of a sudden, the citizens in the community decide to come together and build that homeless man a house, and as soon as they build him a house, a politician wants to dictate how they arrange the furniture.”
On the same day that Florida launched the Bloomberg investigation, the state clemency board rejected Meade’s request for a pardon to restore his full civil rights. The Florida International University College of Law graduate had his right to vote restored, but cannot sit on a jury or, despite his many accomplishments, take the Florida bar exam. The board pointed instead to his criminal history. When Meade asked DeSantis if he planned to reconsider the decision, he said that he would think about it. When Meade wanted to know how long that might take, DeSantis said that he did not know. (The board did, however, grant clemency to FRRC’s deputy director, Neil Volz, at the same hearing.)
Florida’s overactive voter suppression scaffolding supported by a dubious legal framework is another instance of democratic rot rooted in the centuries-old desire to keep the descendants of enslaved people, like Meade and others, forever “in their place.”
