Federal judge undoes racist remnant of old Jim Crow

Last week, a federal judge did something that 64.55 percent of Florida voters assumed they had already accomplished back in 2018, when they passed Amendment 4. The judge gutted a shameful vestige of old Jim Crow.

A sly bit of legislation passed last year and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis had subverted the constitutional amendment supposed to automatically restore voting rights to convicted felons (except those sentenced for murder or sex crimes). Instead, SB-7066 law barred them from voting until they had paid off an amorphous accumulation of fees, fines, surcharges and restitution that had been tacked onto their prison sentence.

Given that an overwhelming majority of convicted felons were poor before incarceration and poorer still after they served their sentences, the statute reduced Amendment 4 to a meaningless gesture.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, however, declared that the payment requirement amounted to a poll tax, which was outlawed by the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “Pay to vote,” the judge called it.

Judge Hinkle also noted that the state “has shown a staggering inability to administer the pay-to-vote system.” It became a Florida Catch 22. Felons, even if they wanted to pay their court debts, were afforded no discernible way to discover how much they owed, leaving their voting rights perpetually suspended in a bureaucratic netherworld.

Such artifice has enabled a Republican administration worried about Donald Trump’s waning poll numbers to keep more than 1 million felons — most of them of a Democratic-leaning racial minority — off the voter rolls.

Gov. DeSantis quickly announced that his administration will appeal the ruling. Of course, he will. Florida has a 150-year-old tradition of voter suppression to uphold.

Back in the post-Civil War days and throughout the Jim Crow era, Florida Democrats contrived to keep Republicans (especially black Republicans) out of office by denying a key constituency the right to vote. The felon disenfranchisement law was both enshrined in the 1868 version of the state constitution and included in the so-called Black Codes, a series of blatantly racist statutes concocted to replace lost slave labor with convicts and to keep former slaves off the voting rolls.

The intent of the felon voting law “was quite clear: to eliminate as many black voters as possible,” Darryl Paulson, emeritus professor of government at the University of South Florida, told the Washington Post.

In 1885, Florida also became the first state to adopt a poll tax — a $2-a-year fee that kept most blacks from voting. The state also added literacy requirements for voting, with tests contrived to disqualify blacks. Also, Florida invented whites-only primary elections.

Federal judges eventually tossed the discriminatory statutes, except for felon disenfranchisement. Florida voters figured they had killed that themselves in 2018 with Amendment 4, which received 1,072,740 more votes in the general election than Ron DeSantis.

But Florida Republicans passed SB-7066, because, like their Dixiecrat predecessors, they’ve embraced voter suppression as a political strategy.

Well, they’ve tried anyway. In 2000 and again in 2004, the Jeb Bush administration tried to purge supposed felons from the voter registration rolls, except most of the names belonged to legal voters, most of them minorities. Same in 2012 when Rick Scott’s Division of Elections claimed some 180,000 non-citizens were registered. Turned out, there were only 85. More than 13 million Floridians are currently registered to vote.

Republicans harbor the peculiar supposition that an illegal immigrant would be willing to risk a felony conviction, a five-year prison sentence, a $5,000 fine and deportation just to add a single, mathematically insignificant vote to the millions cast in state elections.

In that 2012 election, voters in some minority precincts had to wait in line for as long as seven hours to mark their ballots. That was also the election in which 28.8 percent of Florida’s eligible, legal voters stayed home. The Republican theory suggested that illegal voters, despite the risks, harbored a stronger sense of civic duty than the 28.8 percent of legal voters who couldn’t be bothered.

Crazy notion but not too crazy for President Donald Trump, who has been railing on Twitter this week that illegal immigrants and their allies intend to steal the upcoming presidential election by manipulating the mail-in ballots several states plan to use to keep voters safe from the coronavirus.

Never mind that Florida has allowed noexcuse mail-in ballots since 2002 with few problems. The president himself voted by mail in Florida’s March 17 primary.

Of course, in Florida it helps that Trump — unlike seven of his aides and advisors — has managed to avoid a felony conviction.

Fred Grimm