100TH ANNIVERSARY

A century after women earned the constitutional right to vote, a Fla. lawsuit alleges obstacles.

In February 2019, Rosemary McCoy and Sheila Singleton got their voter registration cards. The two women were among more than 2,000 freed Floridians who registered to vote that winter, three months after Florida restored voting rights to approximately 1.5 million formerly incarcerated people. Of those newly registered voters, 44% of them were Black, like McCoy and Singleton.

Backed by nearly two-thirds of the state, the Voting Restoration Amendment, known as Amendment 4, granted the right to vote to those who’d been convicted of felony offenses – barring sexual offenses and murder – so long as they completed their sentence, parole and probation.

In March 2019, the two women from Duval County cast their votes in an election.

“I view voting as a part of my life, my livelihood,” McCoy said. “I get to voice my opinion about the people that’s in office … I get that chance to make a decision … that might be able to change a situation that’s not good for us.”

Amendment 4 granted arguably the largest mass enfranchisement effort since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But supporters’ celebration soon turned to confusion. In response to the amendment, the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 7066, which requires formerly incarcerated people to pay any restitution, fines, fees or court costs, also known as legal financial obligations, before regaining the right to vote.

“Amendment 4 restores – without regard to the wishes of the victims – voting rights to violent felons, including felons convicted of attempted murder, armed robbery and kidnapping, so long as those felons completed all terms of their sentences. I think this was a mistake and would not want to compound that mistake by bestowing blanket benefits on violent offenders,” Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote to the Florida secretary of state in June 2019 when he made SB 7066 law.

Advocates condemned the law as a modern-day poll tax, which had immediate implications for people such as McCoy and Singleton. While SB 7066 moved through the Legislature, the women initiated the process to find out how much money they owed the courts. McCoy owed about $7,500 in victim restitution, including interest. Singleton owed about $12,000, including interest. Duval County requires restitution to be paid all at once, and across Florida, payment plans are left to the discretion of the counties, some of which tack on a 40% collection fee to unpaid court debt.

For the two breadwinners struggling to find livable wages post-incarceration, this meant voting was no longer an option.

“That’s the strangest thing: to get your voting rights back and be able to vote, and then they come and try to take it away again,” Singleton told The 19th. “Isn’t that something?”

Suit cites 19th Amendment

McCoy and Singleton are plaintiffs in the only felony disenfranchisement suit alleging a violation of the 19th Amendment, the 100-year-old victory that gave women the right to vote.

Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), said it was important to bring the claim October 2019 on behalf of two Black women, a group historically “siloed” by the 15th Amendment, which accounted for men only, then again by white suffragists who didn’t want Black women to march with them.

“We really are trying to push for legal recognition of the triple impact – unfortunately, oftentimes, burden – of race, class and gender when it comes to accessing voting rights,” Abudu said.

Abudu claimed Florida’s law could permanently disenfranchise women such as McCoy and Singleton, who struggle to meet expenses in their households because of gender-based and race-based disparities and inequities in the labor force before and after incarceration.

“The passage of the 19th Amendment granted women the fundamental right to vote,” the lawsuit reads. “There is no compelling governmental interest for denying Plaintiffs and similarly situated women the right to vote solely based on their lower economic status.”

Women are the fastest-growing prison population, increasing at twice the rate of men in the past several decades, and Black and Latina women are more frequently incarcerated than white ones.

In the 2016 election, 10% of Florida’s voting-age population could not vote because of a felony conviction, and approximately one in four Black voters could not cast a ballot because of felony disenfranchisement laws. Taking into account that 21% of people living below the poverty line in Florida are Black, the SPLC’s lawsuit alleges that requiring all court costs paid before voting “will have a disparate and disproportionate effect on racial minorities and lower income people.”

Working-age women in Florida are more likely to earn incomes below the poverty line than men, and 25% of Black Floridian women live in poverty compared with 12% of their white counterparts.

Nationwide, 57% of men made less than $23,000 before incarceration; this is true for 72% of women. The gap persists once time’s been served. Data from Prison Policy, a nonpartisan criminal justice think tank, shows the unemployment rate among formerly incarcerated people ages 35 to 44 was 44% among Black women and 35% for Black men, and 23% among white women compared with 18% of white men.

“Whatever demographic breakdown you use, Black women are at the bottom,” Abudu said.

In addition to being a 19th Amendment case, the lawsuit makes a 14th Amendment equal protection claim on the grounds that McCoy and Singleton are barred from voting because of their financial status. The suit also cites the 24th Amendment, which protects against poll taxes.

The SPLC’s claim was consolidated with four other Florida felony disenfranchisement cases entangled in the courts for the past year.

“It’s not just about voting,” Abudu said. “It’s about what does having the vote mean when it comes to improving women’s lives, and for women of color, that goal hasn’t fully been realized.”

Arrested for voting

Crystal Mason, a Black woman in her 40s from Fort Worth, Texas, was sentenced to prison for casting an uncounted provisional ballot in 2016.

Mason, a mother of three and caretaker of her grandson, calls herself the head of her family. When she completed a prison sentence in 2016 for a tax fraud charge, she looked forward to regaining the right to vote – a civic duty her mother instilled in her at a young age.

In the November 2016 election, she was still on federal supervised release, which is similar to probation. Mason didn’t know that made voting illegal.

When Mason showed up to her polling location just before it closed, she realized she wasn’t on the voting roll. She filled out a provisional ballot.

A few months later, she was arrested. At her single-day bench trial (there was no jury) in March 2019, Mason said she had not read the left side of the provisional ballot that makes signees swear they completed any criminal punishments such as probation and parole. Her supervision officer told the court he didn’t tell Mason she couldn’t vote while on supervised release; it wasn’t something his office did normally.

Judge Ruben Gonzalez sentenced Mason to five years in prison for illegal voting. This conviction violated her terms of the federal supervised release, sending her back to federal prison for 10 months, time she has since served.

“I think that what we’ve seen throughout our history is that the right to vote on paper and the right to vote in reality can mean very different things,” said Thomas Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas who represents Mason. “The constant threat, especially for people of color to their voting rights, is part of America’s history. But it only underscores the importance of that right and the need to exercise that right to always take advantage of the ability to vote.”

Mason’s supporters point out that in 2017, Terri Lynn Rote, a white Iowan woman who was convicted for voter fraud after trying to vote for Donald Trump twice, received two years of probation and a $750 fine.

The ACLU highlighted that in April 2018, the same office that prosecuted Mason sentenced a white Republican justice of the peace to five years probation for submitting fake signatures to secure his slot on the primary ballot.

“As Crystal herself would tell you, she, after a lot of reflection, has decided to use this as an opportunity to tell people if they’re eligible, how important it is to vote and how critical it is for individuals to express their right to vote through the polls,” Buser-Clancy said.

In March, a three-judge panel in the Court of Appeals for the 2nd District of Texas denied Mason’s appeal, and her lawyers are pursuing a review by the full court. Mason is out on bail awaiting the resolution of this case.

State-by-state variations

Blair Bowie, who manages the Campaign Legal Center’s Restore Your Vote Campaign, warned Floridians at the end of 2018 that unless their secretary of state committed to an education and outreach campaign after Amendment 4, the state could follow Alabama’s failure to restore voting rights.

Before August 2017, Alabama permanently disenfranchised those convicted of crimes of “moral turpitude.” When Gov. Kay Ivey signed the Definition of Moral Turpitude Act to enumerate the crimes that permanently discard voting rights, approximately 76,000 Alabamians became eligible to vote again – in theory.

Nearly three in four residents who lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction had not heard about the law change that restored their right to vote, according to a survey by the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. Alabama kept in place the laws that required formerly incarcerated people to clear a poll tax by way of legal financial obligations, according to Al.com.

The Campaign Legal Center filed Thompson v. Alabama on behalf of Treva Thompson, 51, a Black woman from Huntsville who completed her parole and probation in 2015 and applied to register to vote. Although she meets the requirement to vote under the redefinition of moral turpitude crimes, she cannot because the court system said she owes $40,000 in debts she can’t afford.

The case is pending in Alabama federal courts.

Bowie said she’s helped a fair number of women who said their conviction was related to supporting their family: food stamp fraud, bad checks. “It’s usually, ‘I was trying to feed my kids.’ ‘I was trying to support my family.’ ‘I was trying to put food on the table.’ That burden often falls on women.”

Maine and Vermont are the only two states where voting from prison is allowed, and there is no impact on voting rights after prison. Only 16 states and Washington, D.C., restore voting rights immediately upon release from prison. The rest of the country hinges on a patchwork of often confusing laws to restore rights post-incarceration. At least 21 mandate that formerly incarcerated people complete parole, probation and often pay any outstanding debts before voting.

Kentucky and Virginia are the only two states that ban voting for life after a felony conviction unless the governor intervenes by executive order. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear restored voting rights to more than 140,000 people two days after taking office in December 2019, applying only to those convicted of nonviolent crimes, and leaving in place the permanent ban for many.

This month, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa restored voting rights to those who completed their sentences, parole and probation, regardless of any debts they owe courts or victims, shedding the superlative as the only state in the nation to permanently disenfranchise people with a felony record unless they appealed directly to the governor.

Bowie works on litigation in Tennessee over laws that disenfranchise people with out-of-state felony convictions, even if those other states restored their rights. The complicated nature of the laws will keep some away from the polls forever, Bowie said.

“It’s a form of passive voter suppression, drafting the laws in a complicated way or allowing them to become complicated over time,” Bowie said. “When there’s confusion, folks who have been through the criminal legal system will default to not voting because they don’t want to get pulled back into that system just for casting a ballot. They’re way more likely to err on the side of not voting.”

‘They’re just stalling’

If they could, Rosemary McCoy and Sheila Singleton would show up to the polls to vote the president out of office.

They said losing their voting rights before the presidential election is indisputably rooted in partisanship, especially since the Republican Party dominates the Florida Statehouse.

“Their whole main thing is for us not to vote,” McCoy said. “We won the people when we won Amendment 4 … we believe that we already won but they’re just stalling because of the election.”

McCoy is tired of what she calls hypocrisy and injustice: She paid taxes on canteen items in prison; prisoners are accounted for in the census, so why are they barred from participating in democracy after they served their time?

“You want me to pay taxes, but I don’t get any representation?” she said. “My little income helps pay your salary, but you don’t want to represent me? I don’t get any representation? None of us, 1.5 million, plus those coming out, zero presentation.”

Singleton said Florida’s leaders hinder voting access because of their loyalty to the president.

“We’re just going to be real about it: All of this ties around the election,” Singleton said. “OK, we know that our mayor and our governor are fond of Trump, right? So they’re going to do everything they can to stop us from voting due to Trump running in this election. … We see them; we know what’s going on. But trying to get other people to see what’s going on is a big issue.”

McCoy and Singleton work as advocates with the New Florida Majority, a grassroots group focused on voting access. They said they’ve grown closer fighting through this “living hell.”

“I wouldn’t be a part of the lawsuit if it wasn’t for Rosemary,” Singleton said. “She made us aware of what was going on.”

Singleton stressed that this issue affects not only Black communities but anyone with family who goes through the system and comes out with debts they can’t pay. “I think a lot of times, until people go through it, they’ll understand our point of view or what we’re trying to say,” she said.

McCoy said that for justice to happen, it’s important to get the word out.

“The truth should be told that everyone should have the right to vote, regardless of their situation,” she said. “Voting is not connected to whatever you did.”

This story was published in partnership with The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.

“I think that what we’ve seen throughout our history is that the right to vote on paper and the right to vote in reality can mean very different things. The constant threat, especially for people of color to their voting rights, is part of America’s history.”

Thomas Buser-Clancy

a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas