Race is on to register former felons

Many don’t know they can vote after Florida OK’d measure

MIAMI — For Lucas Melton and his team of field organizers, their all-out campaign to register former felons to vote in Florida before today’s deadline began with informing them that they are eligible in the first place.

“They still don’t know,” Melton said Friday outside a church in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, where the organizers had fanned out to knock on doors. “It’s like a fact-finding mission.”

Two years after Floridians voted overwhelmingly for Amendment 4, a landmark ballot measure that restored the franchise for up to 1.4 million people with serious felony convictions, many former felons who could register as voters have not even tried, in part because of perceptions that the hurdles are still too great, according to many of the organizers. They were rushing over the weekend to help the new pool of potential voters make the registration cutoff for casting ballots in the November election.

Over the past month, Melton’s team from the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition has raced to canvass neighborhoods state with high populations across the of former felons, asking people at homes, flea markets and strip malls if they or someone they know has a criminal record and wants to learn more about their eligibility.

“Most of the people walking down the streets are like, ‘ No, man, I can’t vote — I don’t have my rights back,’” said David Lester, 26, one of the organizers, who stood in a huddle with Melton and a half-dozen others to talk about their work.

“It’s like they’re stuck in a mind frame of what they were told in prison,” added Camille Sharpe, 36, another organizer.

With the knotty complications that have followed the passage of Amendment 4, it has been hard to keep up with who is eligible and who is not.

The amendment got entangled in partisan politics almost immediately after it was approved. Republican state lawmakers, apparently fearing that former felons might register en masse to the benefit of Democrats in a presidential battleground state, undermined the measure's impact by a passing a law requiring that former felons repay any outstanding court fines and fees before getting back their rights. (Amendment 4 excluded those convicted of murder or sexual offenses.)

A conservative-leaning federal appeals court upheld the state's repayment requirement last month, all but ensuring that the vast majority of "returning citizens," as many prefer to be called, would be shut out of the ballot box this year. At least three-quar-ters of the roughly 1 million former felons in Florida owe court debts, by one estimate. Most former felons are too poor to pay them They are also disproportionately Black.

Since the appeals court decision, more than $20 million in donations has pored into the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition's fund to help former felons pay off their court debts.

Coalition leaders said they were focusing on encouraging people to register and cast a ballot, without talking about whom they should vote for. Still, some of those canvassing said the thousands of potential voters would provide an important new voice for the interests of lower-income families and people of color in Florida, on issues like access to jobs and housing for former felons, and bail changes.

Turning the floor of recent support into names on the rolls is not a quick process. Former felons must first find out whether they owe any court debts, and if so, how much — sometimes in more than one county. The state has no uniform system that records court debt. And even when someone knows exactly what they owe, in order to pay it off, they may have to figure out which private collection agency has been assigned their debt.

And raising money to help former felons is hardly a large-scale solution. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition estimates that each person helped by its fund receives about $1,000 in assistance, which means the $25 million the coalition hopes to raise could help about 25,000 former felons.

“It’s kind of incomprehensible to think that we have to rely on the generosity of billionaires to have voting rights,” said Daniel Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who has studied the issue of former felons’ outstanding court debts. “This is perpetuating the inequitable system of justice in Florida that rests on the backs of people who cannot afford to pay.”