Florida Voting Law Is Biased Against Black Felons, Civil Rights Groups Say

(Bloomberg) -- A Florida law requiring ex-felons to pay all their court fees and victim restitution before they can vote is an illegal poll tax that disproportionately impacts black residents and defies the will of voters, civil rights groups said at the start a trial to overrule the legislation.

While Florida voters in 2018 approved an amendment to the state constitution that lifted a ban on voting for more than a million ex-felons, Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, last year signed into law a bill that imposed limits on the measure. The case could impact the 2020 presidential election because President Donald Trump won Florida by a margin of 1.2%.

The amendment, which excludes people convicted of murder and sexual offenses, was seen as a potential boost for Democrats in Florida because African Americans are traditionally a reliable Democratic voting bloc while accounting for an outsize share of Florida’s felons.

Florida Republicans “knew just what they were doing to black Floridians and they did it anyway,” plaintiffs’ attorney Sean Morales-Doyle said Monday in his opening statement at the trial in Tallahassee. The proceedings are being conducted by video-conference as a result of the pandemic.

Morales-Doyle, with the Brennan Center for Justice, said black felons are far less likely than white ones to be able to pay their court costs right away -- if ever -- due to longstanding racial and economic disparities.

Mohammad Jazil, a lawyer for the state, argued that scrapping the financial requirement for felons would actually undermine the “clear and unambiguous” will of the voters because Amendment 4 explicitly stated that felons would only be allowed to vote if they completed all terms of their sentence. That was understood to include the financial obligations, he said.

“The voters in Florida voted for a generational change, there’s not doubt about that,” Jazil, a lawyer with Hopping Green & Sams in Tallahassee, said in his opening statement. But the plaintiffs “manufactured discriminatory intent for the very purposes of this lawsuit,” he said.

U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, will decide the case without a jury.

Nancy Abudu, another plaintiffs attorney in the case, said in her opening statement that the senate bill was part of the state’s “relentless effort” to chip away at the voting rights of people of color.

“If you are rich, if you are white, and if you are male, you have a much higher probability of being immune from Senate Bill 7066’s onerous financial requirements,” Abudu, with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the judge.

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