Felon voting appeal loses
DeSantis effort fails, setback adds pressure for state to develop a screening system.
TALLAHASSEE — Striking another blow against Gov. Ron DeSantis, a federal appeals court has refused to reconsider a ruling that felons who have served their time but are unable to pay “legal financial obligations” must be allowed to vote.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday turned down the Republican governor’s request for a full court review of a decision by a three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based court. The case involves a challenge to a 2019 Florida law that made felons’ voting eligibility contingent upon payment of court-ordered fees, fines and restitution.
The panel on Feb. 19 upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle that the state cannot bar felons from voting if they are “genuinely unable” to pay the obligations.
Tuesday’s decision intensifies pressure for DeSantis’ administration to come up with a system to determine whether Floridians who register to vote are felons who have outstanding financial obligations and provide the information to local supervisors of elections, who have the authority to remove people from the voting rolls.
Florida lacks a single database where the information can be found, according to county clerks of court, elections supervisors and others. And court databases have incomplete or contradictory information, while some records may no longer exist, according to court documents and testimony.
Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction in October and ordered the state to come up with a process to determine whether felons are able to pay financial obligations.
But in a hearing last week to prepare for an April 27 trial in the case, Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee’s lawyer, Mohammad Jazil, told the judge that her department had not complied with Hinkle’s months-old mandate, in part because the DeSantis’ administration was awaiting the federal appeals court’s action.
“The state is working diligently every day. The state will have a process. The state has contingencies planned for if the courts go one way, the courts go another way. The state currently believes it would be irresponsible to lay out a process only to have it be changed
by a court order a week, a month, two months from now, with the November election coming up,” Jazil told Hinkle on March 24.
Hinkle, who for months has scolded the state for failing to come up with a plan, interrupted Jazil.
“If you don’t have a position in place by the time of trial, and I decide that it is a constitutional right — and if you read the 11th Circuit (panel) decision, you probably don’t want to bet against that — the answer’s not going to be, oh, start working on this. If the state is not going to fix it, I will,” the federal judge admonished.
The three-judge panel’s
February ruling unambiguously affirmed Hinkle’s decision about the unconstitutionality of Florida’s law. The Legislature passed the law to carry out a 2018 constitutional amendment designed to restore the voting rights of felons who have served their sentences.
“The long and short of it is that once a state provides an avenue to ending the punishment of disenfranchisement — as the voters of Florida plainly did — it must do so consonant with the principles of equal protection and it may not erect a wealth barrier absent a justification sufficient to overcome heightened scrutiny,” judges Lanier Anderson III, Stanley Marcus and Barbara Rothstein decided.