When two-thirds of Florida’s voters chose to restore voting rights to nearly 1.5 million ex-felons in the state last November, Karen Leicht thought she might get to vote again.
In 2010, Leicht pled guilty to charges related to international insurance fraud. That led to 30 months in federal prison, three months of probation, and when she got out, $59m dollars in restitution she has to pay back. She also lost the right to vote. But, she says, “I was free.”
However, after Amendment 4 was passed last year, reinstating voter rights for convicted felons, except those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense, Leicht got her right to vote back.
But now Florida’s Republican lawmakers are trying to impose more specific requirements before former felons can vote, which could impact many thousands of Florida voters, with one news report suggesting the figure could be more than half a million voters.
This week, the Republican-controlled state senate voted along party lines, passing election reform bill SB 7066, which adds a provision that felons with restitution, fees and fines to pay still will not be able to vote.
On Friday, it was passed by Florida’s House and if signed into law by the Republican governor, will go into effect later this year.
This could mean Leicht won’t be able to register to vote. “I’m like a citizen again, except for I still can’t vote,” Leicht told lawmakers at a Florida senate hearing in March, in opposition to this measure.
Opponents say Florida’s restrictive felony disenfranchisement laws can be traced back to the end of the civil war and are linked to racial discrimination. The state, then an ex-confederate one, rejected the 14th amendment to the US constitution in 1868, adding a provision that banned male citizens with felony convictions from voting, targeting African Americans through the “black code”, a list of crimes that designated even “disrespect to an employer” as a felony.
By the 1870s, an estimated 95% of convicts in ex-confederate states in the south were black.
Florida, according to a 2016 report from the Sentencing Project, accounts for nearly half of the disenfranchised post-sentence population across the United States. More than 20% of African Americans in Florida, the report adds, couldn’t vote before the 2018 amendment passed.
Being able to limit even a few thousand people in Florida from voting, could impact elections in the battleground state. With 29 electoral votes up for grabs, Florida is the largest swing state in presidential elections.
In 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by just 1.2% of the votes, a little over 100,000 votes. In 2012, former president Barack Obama beat Republican candidate Mitt Romney by 0.9%, with just more than 73,000 votes.
Even though the vote to add provisions to the bill are happening along party lines, Michael Morse, a PhD candidate at Harvard University, who is working on a dissertation focused on Amendment 4, said Republican lawmakers don’t seem to be paying attention to voters in their own party. While African Americans are disproportionately disenfranchised in general, Morse said, the majority of ex-felons in Florida are white.
“A lot of the people impacted are white and they’re certainly not all Democrats,” Morse said.
He points to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the grassroots group that led the effort in rallying the state’s voters to vote in favor of Amendment 4. The political director is a white Republican and the president, Desmond Meade, is a black Democrat.
In a written statement after the bill was approved by the House, Meade called the election reform bill’s passage disappointing but said the group would “continue to move forward in the spirit of creating a more inclusive and vibrant democracy for all by seeking to register qualified returning citizens in Florida”.