TALLAHASSEE, Fla. _ Florida continues to lead the nation in the number of people unable to vote because of a felony conviction, despite the passage of a landmark 2018 constitutional amendment meant to restore their access to the ballot box, according to a study released Wednesday by a national nonprofit.
Nearly 900,000 Floridians with felony convictions are unable to vote because of a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year that required them to pay all court fees fines or restitution before voting, according to the study. The report was released by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform.
In all, more than 1.1 million Floridians are unable to vote because they have felony convictions or owe court debts, making Florida the "nation's disenfranchisement leader," the report states. About 15% of the state's Black voting-age population is disenfranchised because of a felony, the report estimates, compared to about 6% for the state's non-Black population.
Florida is home to about 20% of the estimated 5.2 million Americans who can't vote because of a felony conviction, the study states.
"No democracy can say it's legitimate, nor will it survive, when one group of people is disproportionately subjected to the coercive power of the police, prosecution, the courts and prisons _ and is consequently stripped of voting rights," said Sakira Cook, a program director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an advocacy group, after a news conference about the report.
The last time the Sentencing Project issued a report on felony disenfranchisement, in 2016, the group estimated 6.1 million Americans were prevented from voting. Floridians were by far the largest group, with more than 1.4 million disenfranchised.
Most of those felons, except those who committed violent or sex crimes, were believed to have had their right to vote restored when Floridians approved Amendment 4 in 2018. The amendment restored the right to vote to nearly all felons who completed "all terms" of their sentence, and it ended a 150-year-old law intended to keep Black Floridians from voting.
Florida was the last large state to keep felons off the rolls, and the passage of Amendment 4 was considered America's greatest expansion of civil rights in decades.
In the following months, however, Republican lawmakers drew a hard line on Amendment 4, defining "all terms" to include court fees, fines and restitution to victims. An estimated 80% of felons owe court fees or fines in Florida, making the Legislature's action perhaps the biggest single instance of voter disenfranchisement in the country.
A spokesman for DeSantis did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the report. DeSantis, who was against Amendment 4, has said the bill he signed carried out the intent of Amendment 4's creators, some of whom in earlier discussions about the ballot measure had said court costs were part of someone's sentence. Former state Rep. Jamie Grant, a Tampa Republican, used those statements to justify the strict interpretation of "all terms" of sentence.
"We know what the voters were told, and that's exactly what the bill is," he said during a committee hearing about the bill DeSantis eventually signed.
An analysis by the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee Bureau and ProPublica found that at least 31,400 people with felony convictions have registered to vote since Amendment 4 took effect, well below what supporters of the amendment had hoped. About half of them were Black.
To complicate matters, nearly 80% of felons who did register may be ineligible to vote because they owe fees, fines or restitution. Despite being ineligible to vote, the state has not removed any from the rolls, creating the possibility that thousands of ineligible voters could cast votes in the Nov. 3 election.
Voting while knowing you're ineligible is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. But because many felons are unaware they owe anything, it's unclear how they could be prosecuted.
Chris Uggen, a University of Minnesota sociology professor who co-wrote both the 2016 and 2020 Sentencing Project reports, said he estimated that 75% of Florida felons not in prison owe some sort of court debts. Other estimates have placed the number at about 80%. The state does not know how many people owe court fees or fines.
Uggen noted that 75% of the estimated 5.2 million Americans are disenfranchised despite no longer being in prison.
"This is really unusual _ I would say 'weird' _ by international standards," he said.
In most parts of the world, "The garden variety felony theft charge will not result in disenfranchisement," he said.
Juan Cartagena, president and general counsel at LatinoJustice, a New York-based civil rights organization, ended Wednesday's news conference with a question for people opposed to allowing felons to vote.
"What exactly are you afraid of?" he asked. "That people are actually going to vote? That people who vote have a different opinion than you? That's a pretty ridiculous position to take."
