Supreme Court of the United States • Florida • Felony • Suffrage
Channel: 11 World News & Stats
Date: 17/07/2020

The U.S. Supreme Court has left in place a lower court order that likely will prevent hundreds of thousands of ex-felons in Florida from voting in the November election. It is the fourth time that the court has refused to intervene to protect voting rights this year.  In 2018, nearly two-thirds of the Florida electorate voted to amend the state constitution and allow ex-felons to vote. The amendment applied to ex-felons once they had completed their parole or probation periods, and it did not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses. The referendum was something of an end-run around the Republican-controlled state legislature, and its passage meant that some 1.4 million ex-felons in the state would be eligible to vote. It had bipartisan support outside the legislature from both conservative and liberal groups.

The GOP-controlled legislature, however, sought to limit the effects of the amendment by passing a law that conditioned the right to vote on payment of all fees, fines, and restitution that were part of the sentence in each felon's case. The state, however, had no central listing of this information, and the legislature created no system to help ex-felons ascertain how much, if anything, they owed. Even the state ultimately agreed that it would take six years to create such a system.

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