No: Don’t let lawbreakers elect soft-on-crime lawmakers

Few Floridians have ever thought to themselves, “Our laws would be better if drug traffickers, child abusers, carjackers and terrorists played a bigger role in writing them.” That, in a nutshell, is the case against the so-called Voting Restoration Amendment to the Florida Constitution.

The amendment’s misleadingly innocuous title omits any reference to “felons” or “criminals.” Yet its sole effect would be to automatically restore voting rights to virtually all Florida felons immediately upon completion of their sentences.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the U.S. Constitution allows states to prohibit felons from voting. And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has overwhelmingly affirmed that Florida's felon voting restrictions are consistent with both the U.S. Constitution and federal Voting Rights Act, and were not adopted for racially discriminatory purposes.

The amendment’s supporters claim that felons deserve a “second chance” after they have “repaid their debt to society.” Current law, however, provides a more tailored approach for restoring felons’ rights.

In general, felons who refrain from committing another crime for five years after completing a sentence may have their civil rights restored simply by applying to the state Clemency Board. Felons convicted of more serious crimes must remain law-abiding for seven years and appear for in-person hearings.

While critics complain that the board operates slowly, that problem requires administrative reform, not a constitutional amendment. Our system ensures that felons have truly turned their lives around and become lawabiding members of the community before again entrusting them with the power to vote.

It should remain constitutional for the state to take a hard, individualized look at felons before allowing them to vote again.

“Second chance” rhetoric is misleading because the amendment would not apply solely to first-time offenders. Rather, it would automatically restore voting rights for virtually all felons, including career criminals, regardless of how often they have been imprisoned. This amendment does not give felons a “second chance,” but an unlimited number of chances.

The amendment also would ignore the high recidivism rate of Florida’s felons. The Department of Corrections reports that between one-quarter and one-third of felons commit another crime within three years of their release. This blunderbuss approach of automatically and immediately restoring voting rights for virtually all felons would allow numerous criminals to vote for soft-oncrime legislators and prosecutors as they commit new offenses.

Moreover, the amendment’s conception of which felons are too dangerous to receive a “second chance” is disturbingly underinclusive and arbitrary. Under the amendment, people convicted of murder or felony sex crimes would not have their voting rights automatically restored.

So a rapist may be barred from voting; an abuser who instead bludgeons his wife into a coma would have his rights automatically restored. A child molester may be barred from voting; a person convicted of getting kids addicted to drugs or providing material support to terrorism would automatically regain his voting rights.

The Voting Restoration Amendment is not about justice, but rather fundamentally and irrevocably about altering Florida’s electorate for partisan purposes. Today, Florida is almost evenly split between registered Democrats and Republicans.

The amendment would make approximately 1.6 million felons automatically eligible to vote, increasing the size of the electorate by nearly 10 percent. Allowing these felons to tip the balance in determining our state’s policies concerning policing, drugs, mandatory minimums, three-strike laws, crime-victims’ rights and other vital components of our justice system would be reckless and unfair to law-abiding voters.

Our current system ensures that felons have truly turned their lives around.