Florida GOP pulls every trick in the book to keep ex-felons from voting | Opinion

Perhaps it’s news to Florida’s GOP, but some ex-felons are Republicans.

Or, have no party affiliation for that matter.

Yet, there’s only one reason why the state’s Republican leaders are using every trick in the book — against the will of voters — to keep nonviolent ex-felons who have served their sentences from voting in 2020: They suspect the majority of the 774,000 ex-felons granted the right to vote but with outstanding financial obligations — mostly, poor African Americans and Latinos — will register as Democrats.

And the GOP’s goal is to deliver crucial swing-state Florida to President Donald Trump. At all costs.

That party leaders such as Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker José Oliva resurrected the ugly ghost of Jim Crow laws — what amounts to a poll tax — to disenfranchise minorities didn’t matter.

That they packed the Florida Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals with conservatives who ruled in their favor didn’t matter. Not as long as they got what they needed: the legal right to force people to pay the state money to become eligible to vote.

And, that they used Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody to pursue more disenfranchisement by demanding the FBI investigate donations to pay those debts doesn’t matter, either.

They feel no shame in coming after the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the non-partisan grassroots organization helping ex-felons fully exercise their rights as Americans.

The group has successfully fund-raised to pay off debts with the help of singer John Legend and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who told The Washington Post he has raised $16 million and paid the obligations of 32,000 people.

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The unfounded accusation: Advocates are paying ex-felons to vote.

But it’s only another ruse to get away with obstructing a group of voters they find inconvenient.

“I have not seen any evidence that anyone is making the donation of this money contingent on someone registering to vote, or to vote in certain way,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The Rights Restoration Coalition has been aggressively non-partisan.”

Running roughshod over voters who approved Amendment 4 in 2018 may seem like a small price to pay for the GOP, but what about the assault on democracy?

Remember that when you vote, Floridians.

Floridians want ex-felons to vote

Two-thirds of Florida voters decided in a statewide referendum two years ago that nonviolent ex-felons deserved to have their voting rights restored. People saw it as another step in their rehabilitation, in becoming full citizens with all the rights and obligations.

But people couldn’t celebrate the passage of Amendment 4 for too long before Republicans went on the attack.

They have so little respect for African Americans and Latinos that they think they can only be one thing: suspects.

In this case, suspected of not being Republican enough, of not being Trumpian enough.

The battle has made national headlines for voter disenfranchisement.

The state’s voting ban on ex-felons was enacted three years after the Civil War and was one of many Reconstruction-era tactics designed to undermine the political rise of former slaves.

“Florida is at a whole different level,” Morales-Doyle told me. Not only for the sheer number of people affected by the policy of forbidding from voting people convicted of felonies who have fully served out their sentences — 4.6 percent of the state’s voting-age population — but also now for resuscitating the pay-to-vote rule.

“Because it so closely resembles a poll tax, also a very well-known Jim Crow policy written out of existence some 50 years ago, it’s in some ways the most blatant example [of voter suppression in the country],” Morales-Dolye said. “Other [state] policies are more creative or it’s hard to tell what they’re trying to get at.”

Thanks to advocates’ efforts, the GOP won’t get away with disenfranchising ex-felons completely.

But the deadline to register to vote in Florida is upon us, Oct. 5. That’s both for mail-in registrations, which must be postmarked by that date, and those done online.

The GOP’s challenges to Amendment 4 have bought Republicans enough time to keep the number of people of color able to vote lower. It’s especially useful when there’s a Black woman on the Democratic presidential ticket, Kamala Harris, in what’s expected to be a very tight election in must-win Florida.

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The state’s Republican Party could get away with voter suppression this year. All very legal in their eyes only.