Note: This opinion/editorial appeared in the June 3, 2016 edition of the Palm Beach Post.
It is a vestige of discriminatory laws passed after the Civil War to deprive black people of their civil rights, and it still prevents 1.5 million Floridians from voting in elections.
Florida leads the nation in barring ex-felons from regaining their right to vote. We are one of only three states, along with Iowa and Kentucky, to impose a lifetime voting ban on anyone with a felony conviction.
This means that 10.4 percent of our state’s voting-age population cannot cast a ballot. Nearly 24 percent of eligible African-American voters in Florida are barred.
Now U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Orlando, who is running for the U.S. Senate to vacated by Sen. Marco Rubio, is putting forward federal legislation that would reinstate voting rights stripped because of criminal convictions, except for people convicted of murder, manslaughter or sex crimes. Grayson estimates that under his proposed law (H.R. 5352), 90 percent of Floridians so deprived would have their rights restored.
“It’s a bill about redemption, about giving second chances and about closure,” Grayson says. “We can’t have first-class citizens and second-class citizens in America. Under our Constitution, everyone, even convicted felons, are [sic] entitled to equal protection under the law.”
It’s a persuasive argument, and one that would easily win the day if our system were all about fairness, and nothing else. But this issue is heavily political. Republican leaders generally oppose making it easy to restore voting rights to felons, believing they’d be handing ballots to likely Democrats. (Some conservatives do support restoring voting rights to nonviolent felons, including billionaire funder Charles Koch.)
In 2007, Gov. Charlie Crist, then a Republican, revised the appeal process to make it easier for ex-felons to regain their voting rights. He argued, with the cabinet’s support, that felons who have their voting rights restored are less likely to return to prison, and that most felons haven’t committed violent acts. And from 2007 to 2011, some 154,000 Floridians got their voting rights back.
But Gov. Rick Scott put the clamps on that. Now a nonviolent felon must wait five years past the end of a sentence to apply for reinstatement, and then an average of nine years more for the case to be heard in the severely backlogged review process. Under Scott, restorations are down to a trickle: just 1,866 as of December.
Grayson is backing a just cause. Unfortunately, a Democrat has little chance of success in the GOP-dominated Congress, and this particular Democrat, recently criticized by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, holds questionable sway even within his own party. But while prospects are dim for this bill, Grayson’s efforts will help keep the issue alive for an attempted Florida constitutional amendment on the 2018 ballot. Preliminary polling shows widespread public support for restoring ex-felons’ voting rights — again, murderers and sex offenders excepted.
“If folks have served their time and they’ve reentered society, they should be able to vote,” President Obama said last July.
It’s that simple.
