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The Supreme Court almost guaranteed that nearly 1 million Floridians will not be able to vote in the 2020 election due to unpaid debts by the court in a crushing order issued Thursday. Her decision will throw Florida’s voter registry into chaos, placing large numbers of potential voters in legal limbo and even opening them up for trial for casting a vote. Judges have effectively allowed Florida Republicans to impose a voting tax in November.
Former Florida criminals have the right to vote under state and federal constitutions. In 2018, a vast majority of residents passed a constitutional amendment that abolished a Jim Crow-era law that permanently deprives convicted criminals. Republican lawmakers immediately sabotaged this amendment by passing a law that required previously incarcerated people to pay all of the fines and fees associated with her sentence. Florida imposes a mind-boggling array of fees on defendants to fund its criminal justice system, and the new law would deprive nearly one million of the approximately 1.4 million voters who were willing to regain their voting rights. .
Federal District Judge Robert Hinkle dramatically limited the scope of the law in May. Hinkle discovered that the measure restricted the right to vote on the basis of wealth, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of 14.th Amendment, and that amounted to a tax on the ballot in violation of the 24th Amendment. Similarly critical, during an eight-day trial, Hinkle exposed a secret that Republicans desperately tried to hide: the state You have no idea how much ex-criminals really owe. He has kept few records of judicial debt, and the records that exist are often inscrutable. As the judge explained:
A group of well-trained and highly-educated individuals, a professor specializing in this field with a team of doctoral candidates from a major research university, made diligent efforts over a long period to obtain [court debt] information on 153 randomly selected criminals. They found that the information was often not available on the Internet or by phone and that, notably, there were inconsistencies in the information available to all but 3 of the 153 individuals.
Also, Florida has no intention of calculating how much ex-offenders owe. As I wrote in May:
Theoretically, the Elections Division reviews all voter records for felony convictions and, now, unpaid fines and fees. But an analysis of the state budget found that the division would require at least 21 additional employees to assess the avalanche of applicants in light of Amendment 4. And the Legislature provided zero. As a result, there is currently a backlog of around 85,000 pending voter records for newly eligible Floridians. [Director of the Division of Elections Maria Matthews] He calculated that his office would need 1,491 days to overcome the delay. If all of your staff worked on weekends and holidays, then it could be done in time for the 2024 elections.
To remedy this injustice, Hinkle issued a court order allowing former criminals to vote unless the state could prove they had a pending debt from the court. It also allowed them to vote on whether the state somehow made this demonstration, but the former criminals lacked the means to pay that debt.
On July 1, however, on 11th The US Circuit Court of Appeals removed Hinkle’s mandate in an extremely rare and suspicious move. (Because President Donald Trump turned 11th Circuit in 2019 now contains a conservative majority hostile to voting rights.) The court immediately took the case en banc, bypassing the usual three-judge panel; a progressive panel could have upheld the rights of formerly incarcerated Floridian voters. (A panel of three judges confirmed Hinkle’s earlier decision to block the law before trial.) In addition, three people named by Trump in 11th The circuits have serious conflicts of interest. Two, Robert Luck and Barbara Lagoa, sat on the Florida Supreme Court when they heard arguments in a case about this exact law. Another, Andrew Brasher, defended an Alabama law that is extremely similar to Florida’s and raises identical constitutional questions. Luck and Lagoa have already participated in the decision to lift Hinkle’s mandate. Brasher was too new to participate, he took office the day before, but has given no indication that he will withdraw from the case in the future.
The Supreme Court blessed this deception on Thursday by refusing to reinstate Hinkle’s mandate, without bothering to explain his reasoning. Her decision led Judge Sonia Sotomayor to write an incandescent dissent, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. (Judges are not required to take note of their dissenters from the orders, making it unclear whether Judge Stephen Breyer, a fellow Liberal, also dissented.) Sotomayor noted that the court had prevented “thousands of eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor.” In fact, “almost a million” people “will not be able to vote due to alleged Florida wealth discrimination, inscrutable processes and taxes.”
Sotomayor noted that, due to Hinkle’s decisions, Florida’s “voter payment wall” has been on hold for almost a year. During that period, “tens of thousands of Floridians with felony convictions have already registered to vote.” After all, the courts had said they could. Now, these people “will not have notice of their possible ineligibility or the resulting criminal prosecution that they may face for not following the abrupt change in the law.”
“Ironically,” Sotomayor concluded, the Supreme Court has recently banned courts from “voting safer during a pandemic,” apparently to avoid voter “confusion.” Now SCOTUS cheerfully “disrupts a legal status quo and risks an immense franchise” by greenlighting a scheme that will create confusion and chaos for 1 million voters.
There is very little chance that 11th Circuit will decide this case before voter registration for the Florida general election ends. The Supreme Court has ensured that a large portion of the state’s former criminals cannot vote in November without fear of prosecution. In his dissent, Sotomayor lamented the “tendency to tolerate deprivation of rights” of his colleagues. But at this point, judges are not just tolerating voter suppression. They are actively facilitating it.
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