Here’s what you haven’t heard about restoring ex-felons’ voting rights
It’s been widely reported an estimated 1.5 million-plus Floridians are disenfranchised long after completing felony sentences resulting in the loss of their civil rights upon conviction, representing more than 25 percent of all felony disenfranchisement in the United States. Of those, disproportionately high numbers are racial and ethnic minorities given the nature of our criminal justice system, exacerbating divisions in civil society.
I feel privileged to introduce this analysis of matters of such great public importance developed by three uniquely qualified coauthors in cooperation with the Public Interest Law Section of The Florida Bar, PILS’ immediate past chair Whitney Untiedt most recently. They address aspects of these issues, which haven’t necessarily resonated in the public discourse — elusive facts and circumstances surrounding the startling number of people impacted by post-sentence felony disenfranchisement in Florida still barred from exercising one of the most basic tenets of our representative democracy; one many courageous Americans have sacrificed so much to defend. EDITOR’S NOTE:
Public awareness was heightened in January when a responsive citizens’ initiative was certified for the Nov. 6 ballot — it will appear as Amendment 4 — and again several days later on Feb. 1 when U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ruled that Florida’s civil rights restoration process for former offenders relating to voting eligibility violates the 1st and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution in Hand v. Scott, a high-profile case in the Northern District of Florida.
Not surprisingly, public discourse including advocacy, reporting and editorial writing focuses largely on the bottom line. Our distinguished coauthors — Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil, who previously served as secretary of the Departments of Juvenile Justice and Corrections, chief of the Tallahassee Police Department and later as president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police; Ion Sancho, a nationally renowned former Leon County supervisor of elections; and Mark Schlakman who for these purposes served as assistant general counsel and clemency aide to Gov. Lawton Chiles — unpack these issues and fill in some of the gaps.
Toward this end, Judge Walker signed an order nearly three weeks after he ruled granting Schlakman’s motion for leave to file a “friend of the court brief ” to provide additional background and context about Florida’s largely mysterious clemency process as the court deliberated over an appropriate remedy. His brief was general in nature and didn’t specifically address the parties involved or propose a remedy in the case, which was pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on the state of Florida’s appeal at the time of this writing.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln, we have a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” But, lest we be content, there is much to surmount in our continuing journey to form a more perfect union. The U.S. Constitution was framed based upon consent of society’s privileged, essentially white landowning males. Slaves, Native Americans, women and many others were excluded from the process. And, certain provisions of the Florida Constitution relate back to Reconstruction when as a matter of historical record felony disenfranchisement was leveraged in various instances in a number of states as a racially motivated tool to suppress voting eligibility, in effect permanently.
While progress has been made in many respects, remedies have been anything but rapid. Women secured the right to vote less than 100 years ago. African-Americans had to await freedom and only in the mid-20th century were they granted the effective right to vote. Young people who were conscripted and risked their lives for their country were granted a voice as voters only relatively recently.
And, still today, many of the governed in society are denied meaningful voice in their governance by a myriad of devices, post-sentence felony disenfranchisement prominent among them.