Blue counties are restoring former felons’ voting rights after Floridians approved Amendment 4 in the 2018 midterm elections, which re-enfranchised 1.4 million people in one of the biggest expansions since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Red counties are leaving former Florida felons disenfranchised — and it could backfire on them.
As soon as Floridians approved Amendment 4, Republican lawmakers sabotaged the will of the people. The GOP-controlled legislature passed a law that requires former felons to pay off all fines and fees related to their convictions before they can vote.
Before the amendment, more than 1.6 million voting-age citizens in Florida did not have the right to vote – including more than one out of every five black citizens statewide.
Civil rights groups described the GOP measure as unconstitutional — a Jim Crow-era poll tax historically used to keep African Americans away on election day.
This affects about 80 percent of former felons, said Daniel Smith, a University of Florida professor, in an interview with the Guardian.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in fines are owed in Florida, including $278 million in Miami-Dade County alone, NPR reported. In Palm Beach County, $195.8 million is owed in unpaid fines from felony convictions. That includes interest, according to the Palm Beach Clerk and Comptroller’s office.
More than $1 billion in felony fines were issued between 2013 and 2018 alone, according to annual reports from the Florida Clerks and Comptrollers, a statewide association. Over that five year period, an average of 19 percent was paid back.
Following backlash from Democrats and civil rights advocates, GOP legislators added a conciliatory section to their bill — a way out. It allows courts to modify the original criminal sentences so that money owed can be waived or lowered, and other requirements like community service hours can be reduced.
Implementation is playing out in partisan ways across the state, NPR reported. In counties under Democratic control, more people are getting their voting rights back. And in counties under Republican control, not so much.
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Democratic counties are taking advantage of the compromise, which means a majority of Floridians who do manage to register to vote are likely to be Democrats, Slate reported.
In 2001, Desmond Meade was convicted of possession of a firearm by a felon and sentenced to three years in prison. After his release, he checked himself into drug rehab, lived at a homeless shelter and enrolled in classes, graduating from law school a few years later. In 2009, Meade became head of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, an advocacy group for former felons that helped push Amendment 4 to the 2018 midterm election.
Meade registered to vote for the first time on Jan. 8, 2019. “When I went in and I registered and I came out and there was a celebration going on … I finally felt like I was fully an American citizen,” he told the Guardian.
Florida’s four most populous counties — Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough — together make up more than a third of the state’s population. All four counties created “rocket dockets” to waive fines and fees en masse, launched programs to identify people who owe fines and fees and fast-track their cases to the courts. Celebrity activist John Legend helped to publicize them by sitting in on a “rocket docket” session.
The lack of participation in Florida’s red counties could be a political liability later in 2020, said Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University.
“If they’re missing out on those votes, you know — we have very close elections in the state of Florida,” she said. “This could mean a huge difference going into 2020.”
