The ongoing fight for voting rights on 19th Amendment’s centennial anniversary

This year’s primary election falls on Aug. 18, the very same date 100 years ago that women got the right to vote when Tennessee’s legislature put the 19th Amendment over the top.

The coincidence is fitting not because it symbolizes the end of the suffrage movement, but because 2020 is a jarring reminder that the fight for voting rights never ends.

Up in Washington, the president of the United States is using his lofty platform — in the midst of a pandemic — to question the validity of mail-in ballots for the general election, even as he and his wife requested mail ballots of their own from Palm Beach County.

On Thursday, the president came right out and said he doesn’t want the U.S. Postal Service to get the money it needs to handle the expected flood of mail-in ballots.

For good measure, Trump has installed a political crony as postmaster general and chief mail saboteur. Louis DeJoy has cut overtime for postal workers ahead of what’s expected to be a deluge of ballots during the general election. The Postal Service has removed mail-sorting machines in some places and is talking about higher rates for mail ballots.

We have voting problems closer to home, too.

Here in Florida, hundreds of thousands of men and women who served their time after felony convictions are in voting limbo because the Florida Legislature decided to muck up Amendment 4 as much as possible. That’s the state constitutional amendment Floridians overwhelmingly approved in 2018 to restore voting rights for people who had completed their sentences.

Amendment 4 was supposed to undo a 150-year-old provision of the state Constitution that denied voting rights to anyone who had been convicted of certain crimes, a thinly veiled, post-Civil War attempt to repress the voting rights of freed slaves.

Florida’s historic vote on Amendment 4 stood alongside other historic, postReconstruction moments in U.S. voting rights, including the 19th Amendment.

The Legislature could have let Amendment 4 stand as approved by voters. But no, lawmakers decided to pass a law specifically requiring ex-felons to pay all of their fines and fees before they could vote. A judge decided that was unconstitutional and Gov. Ron DeSantis appealed. A higher court is expected to hear arguments next week — too late for this primary election.

Amendment 4 is the only real hope for ex-felons to participate in democracy, especially considering how the last two Florida governors have brought to a grinding halt the traditional means of restoring rights through the state’s clemency process.

During the first six months of this administration, just 26 ex-felons were granted their civil rights by DeSantis and the Cabinet in their role as the state Clemency Board. That’s even worse than under DeSantis’ predecessor, Rick Scott. As governor, Scott slashed the number of felons who got their rights back from more than 30,000 during Gov. Charlie Crist’s last full year in office to about 1,000 a year.

That policy of disenfranchising exfelons is the reason Florida voters amended the state Constitution in 2018 to give them the right to vote.

When it isn’t trying to keep ex-felons from voting, Florida sets its sights on other groups, like voter registration volunteers and young people.

In 2011, the state passed an electionreform package highlighted by a reduction in early voting and the threat of penalties against third-party groups, like the League of Women Voters, if they signed someone up to vote and didn’t turn in the registration card within 48 hours.

A couple of years later, Scott’s administration tried to ban early voting sites at college campuses. We all knew why: Young people are generally more inclined to vote for Democrats, and Scott’s a Republican. When a judge slapped that restriction down, the state Legislature tried an end-run ban on campus voting with new rules for non-permit parking at election sites, a bill that DeSantis signed. A legal challenge to that ruse was settled earlier this year.

It’s as if the government has a limitless capacity for concocting schemes to suppress voting but has less imagination when it comes to making registration and voting easier and more efficient.

We need to remember what women in the United States have known for centuries: The fight for voting rights is a marathon, not a sprint.

The 15th Amendment, for example, passed in 1870 and granted Black men the right to vote. But not women, to the disappointment of suffragists across the nation. It would take another half-century before the 19th Amendment knocked down the gender voting hurdle.

Not surprisingly, Florida refused to take up the 19th Amendment when it was in play 100 years ago. Late to the party, like most Southern states, Florida waited another half-century before symbolically and belatedly ratifying the 19th Amendment on May 13, 1969.

If the half-century since then has proved anything, it’s that the fight ain’t over.

Plantation