The nightmare of navigating Amendment 4 in Florida
TALLAHASSEE — Clifford Tyson gets by on a little money and a lot of uncertainty.
The 63-year-old former cook has an artificial hip, no job prospects and decades-old theft and robbery convictions. He lives on a disability pension of $7,600 a year and works as a volunteer pastor, offering hope to inmates and nurs- ing home patients.
“Nobody wants a 63-year-old chef,” Tyson told a federal judge this week, dressed in his clerical collar. “There’s not any work for me.”
If he had work, he might be able to pay the estimated $1,800 in court fees, fines and restitution he has owed in Hillsborough County since the late 1970s.
Tyson was one of several Floridians who came to the fifth-floor courtroom of U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle in Tallahassee, in a lawsuit by the ACLU and others. The suit seeks to stop Florida from enforcing a new law requiring felons to pay all their sentencing costs before they can vote under Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote to an estimated 1.4 million felons last year.
After voters passed the amendment, Tyson celebrated by registering to vote. But he worries that if he casts a ballot, he’ll violate the law (even though the Legislature enacted a provision giving amnesty to felons who registered between January and July 1).
A central question Hinkle will soon answer is whether the state’s decision to make voting subject to ability to pay is a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 24th Amendment, which prohibits a poll tax that was used to keep blacks from voting in federal elections.
At a two-day hearing, Hinkle seemed to answer his own question. He pointed to a federal case from 2005, in which a panel of appellate judges succinctly wrote in a footnote: “Access to the franchise cannot be made to depend on an individual’s financial resources.”
The eight judges who wrote that weren’t wild-eyed liberals, Hinkle said. They were “a solid bunch, dead center” politically.
The execution of Amendment 4 hovers over the 2020 election in Florida like a dark cloud, and it won’t go away any time soon.
Hinkle, 67, a senior judge who runs a tight judicial ship and favors bow ties and long, colorful soliloquies from the bench, was a Bill Clinton appointee, a native of Apalachicola and proud graduate of Florida State before he studied law at Harvard.
The judge could not hide his outrage at the state’s inept and possibly unconstitutional implementation of Amendment 4, calling it an “administrative nightmare.”
He noted that a working group of elections officials, led by Secretary of State Laurel Lee, is scrambling to make sense of the law being challenged, known as Senate Bill 7066.
He doubted the accuracy of decadesold, sometimes contradictory sentencing records in county clerks’ files.
He acknowledged the work being done by state prosecutor Kathy Fernandez Rundle in Miami-Dade to help felons navigate the payment requirements.
“Nobody should stop doing what they’re doing,” Hinkle said.
The judge mocked a new state voter registration form with check-off boxes that he said are so poorly worded that eligible voters couldn’t find a box that correctly reflected their status, and bluntly suggested it was part of a concerted state effort to discourage felons from voting.
“The form adds to the fear,” Hinkle said.
The attorney for the state didn’t try to defend the indefensible, calling the wording “inartful.” Bureaucrats lifted the words from SB 7066.
University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith, hired as an expert by the ACLU, studied felony sentencing files from 58 of the state’s 67 counties and called it his single most maddening experience in decades of working with Florida public records laws.
Smith found that about four out of five felons who’ve completed their sentences still owe between $500 and $5,000.
That’s nearly a half million people, he said, and it doesn’t include Miami-Dade, Broward and other large counties with the most cases.
Judge Hinkle will issue a ruling shortly, and he could strike down Amendment 4 as unconstitutional, which would throw the entire system into chaos in a presidential election.
Whatever he does, the losing side will immediately appeal to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. The judge plans a full trial on the case in April, after the March presidential preference primary.
As for Clifford Tyson, he just wants to vote.
“I’m kind of confused,” he testified. “I did enough wrong in my life. I won’t want to break the law.”
Speaking to reporters outside the federal courthouse, Tyson expressed gratitude for Hinkle’s references to the pastor’s predicament.
“He saw what I felt,” Tyson said. “That meant the world to me.” Send your 150-word letter to letters@SunSentinel.com. By mail: 333 SW 12th Ave., Deerfield Beach, FL 33442. Please include your name, addresss and phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and become property of the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
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