Florida can continue to stop people with felony convictions from voting until they have paid all the fines and fees they owe, the United States Supreme Court said Thursday, a major decision that makes nearly three-quarters of a million Floridians less likely. get to vote in November
The decision came at a preliminary stage in one of the most watched voting rights lawsuits in the U.S., On Amendment 4, a measure that Florida voters overwhelmingly approved in 2018 that allows people to vote once they They complete their felony convictions, a change estimated to affect 1.4 million people.
The amendment was a historic expansion of voting rights, but since it passed, Florida Republicans have made a concerted effort to slow it down. State officials offered no guidance on how to implement it, and then state lawmakers passed a law requiring those with felony convictions to pay off debts assessed as part of their sentence before they could vote again. There are more than 774,000 people in Florida who cannot vote because they owe money, and the state does not have a centralized way to inform people about how much they owe. Many people with serious crimes also simply cannot pay off the insurmountable debt they accumulate with their court decisions.
In late May, US District Judge Robert Hinkle struck down the Republican copyright law, which has been widely denounced as a kind of electoral tax and was seen as an effort to undermine the amendment and make it more difficult and confusing for the people regain their voting rights.
Lawyers representing Florida appealed against the ruling, and in late May, the US Court of Appeals blocked the lower court’s ruling while the appeal was pending. The plaintiffs in the case filed an emergency petition with the US Supreme Court to allow the Hinkle ruling to take effect so that the affected people can vote in a primary election in the state this summer. The supreme court declined to do so on Thursday, meaning Hinkle’s ruling will not go into effect while the eleventh circuit considers the appeal (he is currently scheduled to hear the case on August 18).
The supreme court did not offer an explanation for its ruling Thursday, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote a scathing dissent. “This court order prevents thousands of eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor,” Sotomayor wrote.
The supreme court will likely have the last word in the case, but Thursday’s decision makes it less likely that there will be a resolution for affected voters ahead of the November presidential election, where Florida is a key state on the battlefield.
At least 85,000 people with major crimes have registered since Amendment 4 went into effect, and Sotomayor noted that those people are now in legal danger, unlikely to know of the change in their eligibility to vote due to the Circuit 11 decision. But they face possible criminal prosecution if they voted.
“This is a deeply disappointing decision,” said Paul Smith, an attorney with the Campaign Law Center, who helped represent some of the plaintiffs. “The supreme court stood by while the Eleventh Circuit prevented hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they cannot pay fines and fees.”
Sotomayor also called the supreme court for its willingness to maintain voting restrictions in several cases in recent months. The court shortened the deadline for returning absentee ballots in Wisconsin and upheld restrictions on voting by mail in Texas and Alabama. In the Wisconsin case alone, the court has offered some reasoning for its thinking, based on a 2006 case, Purcell v González, which says that the courts should not interfere with electoral rules on the eve of an election.
“The inaction of this court continues a trend to tolerate deprivation of rights. Ironically, this court has exerted Purcell as a reason to prohibit courts from making voting safer during a pandemic, ”he wrote. “Now, faced with a suspension of the appeals court that disrupts a legal status quo and risks immense deprivation of rights, a situation that Purcell tried to avoid, the court resists.”
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