Old Jim Crow still darkly looms over Florida state elections
Nothing new here. Notso-good ol’ boys up in Tallahassee have been concocting devious strategies to limit the black vote since Reconstruction days.
They enacted a $2 poll tax. They devised literacy tests (with special exemptions for unschooled whites). They instituted whites-only primary elections.
And in 1868, those good ol’ boys larded the state constitution with the permanent disenfranchisement of ex-felons — “unless restored to civil rights.” The intent, as an infamous Jackson County state senator put it so crudely, was to prevent Florida “from becoming “n - - - rized.”
(As a corollary, the post Civil War legislature also enacted so-called Black Codes, a nefarious category of statutes proscribing crimes that white legislators imagined were the particular purview of freed slaves, including “wandering or strolling about or leading an idle, profligate or immoral course of life.” Essentially, the Black Codes provided a legal pretense for rounding up former slaves, tossing them in jail, stripping them of voting rights, then leasing them out to local farmers as cheap labor.)
Florida was rid of Jim Crow voting laws a half-century ago. Except for that felon disenfranchisement clause and the racist sentiment that inspired it. It’s still enforced. Or it was until last month, when U.S. District Judge Mark Walker decided the state’s inscrutable system for restoring ex-felons’ voting rights was constitutionally wanting.
Under Gov. Rick Scott, the years long restoration process (for the relatively few ex-felons who are granted a hearing before the state clemency board) has become “purely arbitrary,” Judge Walker observed. He wrote that a board composed of “elected, partisan officials” (the governor and three Cabinet officers) “has extraordinary authority to grant or withhold the right to vote from hundreds of thousands of people without any constraints, guidelines, or standards.”
As Gov. Rick Scott declared during one board hearing, “We can do whatever we want.”
What they do is considerably less than under Scott’s predecessor. Former Gov. Charlie Crist’s devised a streamlined process that restored voting rights for about 154,000 people during his four years in office. In the seven years since Scott took office, fewer than 3,000 people have been granted restoration. In 2016, the board approved only 473 applications.
The restoration of the 473 voters hardly registers against Florida’s 1.68 million disenfranchised ex-felons. That’s 10.43 percent of the state’s voting-age population allowed no say in the democratic process. (No other state comes close.)
Here’s the damning stat: 21 percent of Florida’s voting age black citizens can’t vote, thanks to what Charlie Crist described as “a holdover of Jim Crow-era policies.” Of course, to Republican political strategists, large scale voting rights restoration equates to adding hordes of new Democrats to the voter rolls — something candidate Scott hardly wants to contemplate as he runs for a U.S. Senate seat.
Unless an appeals court intervenes, the clemency board has until April 24 to fix an utterly arbitrary process in which “similarly situated individuals obtain diametrically opposite results based on the passing whims of the Board members, since nothing regulates their decision-making.”
The judge did not rule that disenfranchisement itself was unconstitutional. Just the restoration process. “A state may disenfranchise convicted felons. A particularly punitive state might even disenfranchise convicted felons permanently. But once a state provides for restoration, its process cannot offend the Constitution.”
Florida, indeed, has a famously punitive attitude toward minority voters. In 2000 and again in 2004, the Jeb Bush administration tried to purge supposed felons from the voter registration rolls, except most of the names belonged to legal voters, most of them minorities.
In 2012, Scott’s Division of Elections claimed some 180,000 non-citizens were registered. The list — 60 percent Hispanic and 20 percent black (and you know how those minorities vote) — was, again, wildly inaccurate. The faulty list of illicit voters was then reduced to 2,631 but county election supervisors discovered that most of those names belonged to legal citizens.
The list was culled down to 198. Finally, just 85 names were removed. Along with the Scott administration’s credibility.
In November, Floridians (at least those with the right to vote) can circumvent the courts and fix this disgrace themselves. The fall ballot will include a proposed constitutional amendment which, with at least 60 percent approval, would automatically restore the right to vote to ex-felons, except for those with murder or sexual assault on their rap sheets.
It’s a chance for Florida to shed an ignominious distinction, even in the Old South. The Brennan Center for Justice reports, “Florida disenfranchises more of its citizens than Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee combined.”
When it comes to denying the vote to minorities, Florida has out-Confederated the Old Confederacy. But this fall, we can finally relegate Jim Crow to history.
Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter or columnist in South Florida since 1976.