Trying to thwart the voters’ will
Maxwell: AG Moody tries to block Floridians from voting on gun law.
In the latest legal battle surrounding a controversial bill that places restrictions on ex-felons’ voting rights, national advocacy groups on Saturday said they were seeking a preliminary injunction to block the new law from taking effect, arguing it’s unconstitutional and places a “price tag on a person’s right to vote.”
The bill, SB 7066, which was signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, requires former felons to pay off all fees, fines and restitution costs associated with their sentences before they are granted the right to vote.
Challenging the law are the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Florida, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School, who say the bill goes against Amendment 4, the law passed by voters in November aimed at restoring the right to vote to millions of former felons. Multiple lawsuits have been filed in response to the new law since it took effect last month.
In the motion, filed Friday in U.S. District Court Northern District of Florida, as part of a lawsuit against DeSantis and supervisors of elections throughout the state, the groups argued that SB 7066 violates federal law that prohibits poll taxes and unfairly punishes people who cannot afford to pay Legal Financial Obligations, or LFOs, associated with their sentence.
Supporters of the law have said the fees associated with a person’s felony conviction are part of their sentence, and therefore necessary to pay off in order to gain voting eligibility.
“Politicians cannot legally place a price tag on a person’s right to vote. It’s past time for over a million Floridians to reclaim their place in democracy,” Orion Danjuma, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, said in a news release.
The groups argued that SB 7066 would prevent thousands of people from voting, citing an analysis of 48 Florida counties that
determined more than 80 percent of former felons who would be eligible to vote under Amendment 4 still had outstanding financial obligations and “will be disenfranchised as a result.”
The motion also claims counties across the state will likely fail to implement the law uniformly because the processes by which courts track a former felon’s financial obligations are not streamlined.
“There are no publicly available sources that the Department of State, local election officials, and returning citizens can rely on to determine if the citizen has paid all LFOs for felony convictions, how much a citizen must pay to become eligible to vote under SB7066, or how a citizen can pay her disqualifying LFOs first,” the motion states.
A judge has not yet the motion. ruled on
A spokesperson for Gov. DeSantis could not immediately be reached for comment.