Florida; Still denying black voters rights
Judith A. Browne - MinuteManMedia.org
Have we learned nothing from the 2000 Presidential Election? Is it possible that the state of Florida is more interested in disenfranchising voters than safeguarding the right to vote? Are Florida officials determined to commit, in plain sight, five months before the election, another alleged felon game?
Recently, the state created a list of more than 47,000 voters, who may or may not be former felons, and instructed county election officials to take steps to purge these would- be voters from the rolls. If your name is on this list you will be notified via certified mail and given 30 days to prove to the State of Florida that you are not a former felon. What happens if you do not respond within 30 days? You lose your right to vote. So Floridians may want to rethink the length of their summer vacations, just in case they have a similar name or birth date to someone who is a felon.
We have gone from poll taxes and literacy tests to the latest craze of the disenfranchisement of voters of color— “suspected felons”. It is now the burden of the voter to jump through the many hoops dictated by the state if they want the most basic of civil liberty afforded to all Americans—the right to vote.
In fact, documents obtained from the State of Florida reveal that the state’s “felon match” list for purging voters may include many of 25,585 people whose voting rights have been restored through clemency grants or pardons, as well as individuals who have had their charges reduced. That’s not counting those who may have never been convicted of a felony but for whom bad data caused them to be suspected. Unless corrective action is taken, those wrongly placed on the purge list will be unable to vote in this year’s presidential election.
According to research by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, the Florida Division of Elections database identifies 145,823 individuals who have been granted clemency since 1964. Documents recently obtained from the Florida Office of Executive Clemency show a different – and larger – number of records of processed clemency cases and pardons over the same period, tallying 171,408 individuals. What explains the apparent undercount of people whose voting rights have been restored? I guess “fuzzy math.”
To settle a federal lawsuit brought by civil rights organizations, Florida agreed to clean up the civil rights violations we saw in 2000 when thousands of eligible voters were wrongly identified as having a felony conviction barring them from the polls. Now we’re discovering new errors in the administration of Florida’s undemocratic practices aimed at once again denying the right to vote.
In light of the 2000 presidential election in which allegations swirled that thousands of voters of color were thus disenfranchised, the current list should be openly available for scrutiny by any interested party. Yet the state refuses to disclose it, choosing instead to fight in court.
What we have seen in Florida, is the most aggressive effort in the country to take voters off the rolls. And while all of us want the voting rolls to be accurate, and people who no longer live in the state, or have died, to be removed — you have to balance that with the notion that you can’t take people off the rolls who belong there.
With the election just five months away, and criticism of Florida’s current ineligible voter list being documented by the civil rights community, there is a strong public interest in making the list available for verification. The courts then should act quickly in finding any barrier to access unconstitutional.
The 2000 Florida debacle wasn’t about who won or lost, so much as who didn’t even have a chance to cast a ballot. Don’t let it happen again!