Let’s cut to the chase: Gov. DeSantis can’t pretend that the federal court’s voting rights decision came as any big surprise.
In a detailed 125-page order issued on May 24, a monumentally important decision in the civil rights and voting rights history of our state, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle declared Florida’s “pay to vote” system unconstitutional. “Voting can be conditioned on payment of fines and restitution that a person can pay,” he ruled, but “the state cannot condition voting on the payment of an amount a person is genuinely unable to pay.”
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If a person is indigent and genuinely unable to pay then, as the judge noted, you can’t get blood from a stone — not that the fine or restitution is no longer owed, but it is unconstitutional for the state to use the inability to pay to prevent that person from voting.
To insist on blood from a stone is, in effect, a crafty way to re-create by statute the lifetime voting ban, overriding precisely what voters ended by the 2018 citizen-initiated constitutional amendment, Amendment 4.
Last year, Judge Hinkle gave the state a warning and plenty of time to fix its unconstitutional problem. At last month’s trial, six months after a Preliminary Injunction — which was unanimously upheld by the Court of Appeals — state elections officials told the judge that they were still chatting about how to fix it.
And, please, hold the attack on activist judges who impose administrative responsibilities on state officials. The Judge imposed remedies for an unconstitutional statute that denied otherwise eligible citizens the right to vote. He did so because election officials failed to comply with what the judge had ordered and then slow-walked a remedy they could have devised by themselves.Gov. DeSantis is a Harvard-educated lawyer. He knows full well that a judicial remedy for unconstitutional government action is required.
So, thanks to a federal judge for doing what federal judges are supposed to do — prevent states from violating constitutional rights: those with a previous felony conviction who have completed their punishment, including probation or parole (except those who have been convicted of murder or a felony sex offense) and who have some outstanding legal financial obligation (fines or restitution) that they are genuinely unable to pay, cannot be denied the right to register and vote.
The federal court specifically restored the right to vote for people with felony convictions:
- who had been assigned a public defender; since the state has already determined that they are indigent;
- whose fines and restitution were converted to a civil lien (and as a result are no longer under the jurisdiction of the criminal court) because a court had determined that they are unable to pay; and
- for whom the state can’t determine the amount or the basis for what is owed.
In addition, voting rights were restored for those owing only fees and costs. These are taxes used to fund the court system and have nothing to do with punishment for an offense.
Maybe the Governor has been mesmerized by the narrative that has unfortunately captivated our Legislature for decades — that those who would be re-enfranchised would be “the wrong kind of voter.” But he should dig deeper.
When voters took control of their own constitution in 2018 and ended the lifetime voting ban, they wiped away a stain that has plagued our state for 150 years. They replaced the voting ban with the moral principle that one would hope the Governor would embrace — no one is a permanent second-class citizen; offenders can earn their way back into society with all the rights of citizenship, including voting.
But if the Governor chooses to look at this issue only as a political matter, he will see that the majority of Floridians with a felony conviction are white, not Black, and they are mostly white men. Perhaps he should try to win over these newly enfranchised voters on the strength of ideas, rather than trying to suppress their ability to participate in democracy.
Gov. DeSantis should reconsider digging in his heels and think about voting rights beyond the November 2020 election to his place in Florida history. Why would he want to be the champion of the nation’s largest voter suppression scheme?
(Howard L. Simon was Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida from 1997–2018 and was one of the authors of the 2018 constitutional amendment, Amendment 4.)
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June 06, 2020 at 07:03PM
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Guest opinion: The Governor, the Federal Courts and the Right to Vote - News-Press
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