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Mother Jones A federal judge in Florida has struck down Florida’s system for determining which ex-felons have the right to vote, handing an unexpected victory to advocates of broader voting rights.
Florida is one of a handful of states that permanently disenfranchise convicted felons, even after they have completed the terms of their sentence. The result is that more than 1.5 million Floridians are barred from voting, including 20 percent of voting-age African Americans. In November, Floridians will vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn the state’s disenfranchisement law.
Judge Mark Walker’s ruling Thursday does not address the legality of felon disenfranchisement, but rather the manner in which the state haphazardly restores voting rights to some former felons. In Florida, felons must individually apply for rights restoration, often imploring the governor and his Cabinet in person for their rights. That practice, detailed in 2015 by Mother Jones, makes restoring a person’s suffrage a personal decision by top state officials. Governors often determine whether to restore a citizen’s voting rights based on unrelated matters, such as his religiosity or number of traffic citations. Sometimes, the voting rights group challenging Florida’s regime has argued in this case, Republican governors may be swayed to restore voting rights to ex-felons who will vote for Republicans.
“In Florida, elected, partisan officials have extraordinary authority to grant or withhold the right to vote from hundreds of thousands of people without any constraints, guidelines, or standards,” Walker wrote in his opinion. “The question now is whether such a system passes constitutional muster. It does not.” Walker’s ruling, which came without holding a trial, found that Florida’s process violates the First Amendment as well as the 14th, which extends equal protection of the law to all residents.
Read more:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/judge-strikes-down-felon-disenfranchisement-system-in-florida/
Felon disenfranchisement is a holdover from the Jim Crow days. There is also a ballot issue on the 2018 ballot on re-enfranchisement of citizens who have served their sentences
