LeBron James appears during an NBA basketball game in February against the Golden State Warriors in San Francisco. The | (AP Photo / Jeff Chiu, file)
TALLAHASSEE – A group founded by NBA superstar LeBron James and other black athletes and artists is joining the fight to register Florida voters with serious crime records, saying it will help pay the debts and fees of the court so they can vote in the November presidential election.
More Than A Vote, a group established by James and others in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, said Friday that it will donate $ 100,000 to help pay off outstanding debts of former criminals so they can register to vote. The money will go to the Coalition for the Restoration of Florida Rights, which in 2018 successfully pushed a constitutional amendment that lifted Florida’s lifelong vote ban on people with felony convictions. After the amendment passed, the Republican-led state Legislature earlier this year raised the bar for criminals to vote, passing a law that is being challenged in federal court.
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“Your right to vote should not depend on whether or not you can pay to exercise it,” Miami Heat forward and more than a Vote member, Udonis Haslem, said in a written statement.
The association will help ensure that “previously incarcerated US citizens, many of them black and brown, can pay their outstanding fines and fees and register to vote in the 2020 elections and beyond.”
The coalition has already raised more than $ 1.5 million for its fee and penalty fund, but the partnership with More Than A Vote is expected to attract attention and awareness about the effort.
Desmond Meade, executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, said the association will strengthen democracy and make more voices heard.
The association comes amid a bitter legal fight over the voting requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups have compared to an unconstitutional electoral tax. A study projected that up to 775,000 people in Florida with felony convictions have financial obligations that make them ineligible under the law. Of the more than 13.7 million registered voters in the battlefield state, nearly a third are black or Hispanic.
The fight has spread outside the courtroom as the presidential campaign intensifies. Polls show that President Donald Trump follows his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, in the decisive state, where candidates win or lose on the smallest margins.
More Than A Vote will also partner with Magnolia Pictures and Participant, a media company with a social mission, to organize an online screening of a new documentary chronicling the life of Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died. last week. .
Athletes and artists will promote the screening with profits that will also go to the coalition’s fines and fees fund.
More than one vote was cast in June by James and other athletes and artists dedicated to black political empowerment. Organizers say they are working to educate and protect black voters. James at the time said he would also use his social media platform to combat voter suppression and draw attention to efforts to restrict minority voting rights.
Friday’s announcement marks the group’s first statewide campaign.
A judge in the United States District Court in late May broke Florida law, calling it an illegal pay-by-vote system. Requiring people with felony convictions to pay fees, which are separate from the restitution paid to victims, to vote violates the United States Constitution’s ban on poll taxes, the judge wrote.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican and Trump ally, appealed the ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which suspended the ruling earlier this month while the appeal was being considered. The appeals court plans to hold a hearing on the case on August 18, the date of the Florida state primaries.
