Click to Translate to English Click to Translate to French  Click to Translate to Spanish  Click to Translate to German  Click to Translate to Italian  Click to Translate to Japanese  Click to Translate to Chinese Simplified  Click to Translate to Korean  Click to Translate to Arabic  Click to Translate to Russian  Click to Translate to Portuguese  Click to Translate to Myanmar (Burmese)

PANDEMIC ALERT LEVEL
123456
Forum Home Forum Home > Off Topic Forum > Political Discussion > Politics - Political Talk
  New Posts New Posts RSS Feed - Republicans,try to stop,1.4 million from voting...
  FAQ FAQ  Forum Search   Events   Register Register  Login Login

Now tracking the new emerging South Africa Omicron Variant

Republicans,try to stop,1.4 million from voting...

 Post Reply Post Reply
Author
Message
carbon20 View Drop Down
Moderator
Moderator
Avatar

Joined: April 08 2006
Location: West Australia
Status: Offline
Points: 65816
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Republicans,try to stop,1.4 million from voting...
    Posted: December 07 2019 at 2:32pm


US election
A modern day poll tax: How Florida Republicans are trying to stop 1.4 million people from voting
When voters in Florida voted to remove Jim Crow-era law keeping reformed felons from voting, Republicans quickly began working to subvert the results


@ClarkMindock
6 hours ago
11 comments
A special court hearing in Miami, Florida, to restore the right to vote under Amendment 4. Eighteen former felons saw their voting rights restored during the session in November 2019. The singer John Legend, an advocate of criminal justice reform, was in the gallery to show his support
A special court hearing in Miami, Florida, to restore the right to vote under Amendment 4. Eighteen former felons saw their voting rights restored during the session in November 2019. The singer John Legend, an advocate of criminal justice reform, was in the gallery to show his support ( AFP via Getty Images )
When Raquel Wright received her voter information card earlier this year in the mail, she was overjoyed. The 45-year-old African American mother immediately laminated the small piece of card stock for preservation, and placed it in her wallet. It fit in snug right there between her Visa and the loyalty punch card for her favourite coffee shop in town.

Strictly speaking, a voter information card doesn’t do much. It’s just a card with blue and white lettering, a name, address, and party affiliation. You don’t actually need to present it to vote. But, for Wright, the moment was a relief after seven years of disenfranchisement that she had been told was permanent because she had done hard time in prison — a heartbreaking circumstance for a woman whose family treats voting as a deeply important ritual and group activity.


Things had changed for Wright just months earlier, though, when an overwhelming majority of voters in Florida cast their ballots supporting an amendment aimed at putting an end to the Draconian state law barring former felons — a group that includes some 1.4 million people, just like Wright — from ever voting again.

Download the new Indpendent Premium app
Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Download now
“Seeing that card come in the mail was just, like, everything was a breath of fresh air,” she tells The Independent. “I tell my daughter to be grateful and humble and appreciate everything in her life, because it is an act of freedom. And I have the freedom now to go to the polls. I have the credentials. I have the pass. I’m just so excited. I can’t wait.”


But, just as Wright was getting that voter information card in the mail, Republicans in Tallahassee were working hard to implement restrictions to the landmark amendment approved by voters last November that would have marked the largest expansion of voting rights America has seen in decades. And if they get their way, she’ll have to pay more than $50,000 to the state before she can ever vote again.

Trump 2020 launch: Fascist Proud Boys, baby blimps and Uncle Sam




The fight for Amendment 4
On 6 November 2018, the nation was watching Florida. Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, the press had been reporting for months that all signs were pointing towards a massive blue wave. With a competitive governor’s race on the ballot alongside an equally competitive Senate race, the perennial swing state that had helped usher Mr Trump into office in 2016 was seen as a key indicator of just how much trouble the president was in.


Months before that, though, as national coverage understood the midterms in Florida as a Washington and Tallahassee story, ex-cons around the state were mobilising to pass Amendment 4. Seeing an opportunity to once again find a political voice, activists like Wright and others in similar situations spent their spare time collecting signatures and ginning up support to restore voting rights to 1.4 million former convicts across the state.

As it would turn out, those efforts were wildly successful, even if the blue wave that swept through the national political scene wasn’t quite realised that year in Florida. On the night of the election, Wright remembers crying as she sat alone in the dark at her sister’s home, with the voting results scrolling along the bottom of her local news channel. She had stopped on her way home because she couldn’t wait to see the outcome.

The ticker told her the voters of Florida had approved Amendment 4 with 64 per cent approving. In total, the measure received more than a million more votes than any candidate on that year’s ballot, including the eventual winner of the governor’s race, Republican Ron DeSantis. And, considering the sheer number of people impacted, Amendment 4 represented the largest expansion of American voter rights since the passage of the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1971, when the voting age was lowered across the country from 21 to 18.

“It is a monumental, generational event in the advancement of voting rights. I think it was huge,” says Sean Morales-Doyle, a senior counsel in the Democracy Programme at New York University’s Brennan Centre for Justice.

“It’s hard to overstate,” he continued. “If you forget about criminal disenfranchisement as the context, if you just think about voting rights as the context, restoring voting rights to 1.4 million people — that is the largest single act of enfranchisement since the ratification of the 26th Amendment. In the context of criminal disenfranchisement laws, specifically, it’s only bigger.”


Growing storm across the country
At the time of the 2018 midterms, Florida was one of three states in the United States with permanent disenfranchisement for former felons — a Jim Crow-era policy on the state’s constitution since 1868.

While the effort was ultimately the most significant expansion of felony voter rights in American history, it was far from the first time states had taken efforts to make it easier for former criminals to become voters again. Earlier that year, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, for instance, had announced he would reinstate voting rights to returning citizens through executive order. In Louisiana that same year, around 36,000 former felons were also re-enfranchised.

The measure was also passed after the relatively successful first two terms of America’s first black president, a time that brought renewed focus on America’s criminal justice system and its disproportionate impact on African and and other racial minority groups. In Florida alone, a whopping 48 per cent of all inmates are black, for instance, even though they make up just 15.5 per cent of the population. Wright herself finds herself as a portion of this statistic, as do other former felons in Florida interviewed for this story.


Criminal disenfranchisement across the United States
The current state of disenfranchisement across the United States, by state. Florida is listed alongside others as permanently disenfranchising former felons because of provisions in Amendment 4 that exempts murders and sex offenders from regaining the right to vote. (Brennan Centre for Justice)
While not the first in the nation, the vote in Florida focused attention on the issue in a way none of those earlier efforts had. With a bipartisan consensus in Florida — a state that voted both for Donald Trump and for Barack Obama — the humanity of allowing citizens to vote after serving their punishment was more obvious than ever.

Earlier this year, following the success of Amendment 4, Republican governor of Iowa Kim Reynolds also championed an effort to reform her state’s approach to former felons, in a failed attempt in one of just two states in the US with permanent disenfranchisement on the books. In Kentucky, incoming Democratic governor Andy Beshear promised on the campaign trail in 2019 to re-enfranchise former felons in his state, too.

America had become aware of the harsh way that African American and minority communities are targeted by police across the country, not to mention how poor people are targeted. Florida voters chose a course correction, and other states saw a model to follow. And, taken together, voting rights supporters say the efforts in Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky prove beyond reasonable suspicion that the issue is one that bridges the partisan divide across the country.


In Florida, Republicans respond to a threat on their power
Soon after the measure was approved in Florida, however, Republicans in the state had already begun thinking up ways to subvert the new law. With healthy majorities in the state Senate and House, and continued control of the governor’s mansion, power was theirs to lose.

Within the first few months of 2019, when Amendment 4 legally took effect, the state legislature and Senate — both of which are controlled by Republicans — had introduced a bill now commonly referred to as SB7066. That bill, which has now been signed by DeSantis and stayed by a court when confronted by a lawsuit that includes Wright and around a dozen others, would require former felons to pay off outstanding court fees and fines before being allowed to vote.

As Wright and hundreds of thousands of others realised they were no longer permanently relegated to a second tier of citizenship, Republicans were working to undermine a measure that was more popular at the ballot box than any elected official in the state.


DeSantis and Trump at a rally in Sunrise, Florida in November (Getty Images)
“It became pretty clear that as soon as Amendment 4 passed there would be efforts by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to delay this as much as they could,” says Anna Eskamani, a Democrat in the Florida House of Representatives.

Ms Eskamani is the daughter of Iranian immigrants, and was elected to her Orlando area seat in 2018. She says the swift efforts by Republicans this year reflect a fear in the party that major demographic changes, and the president’s divisive policies, are threatening their continued power. Amendment 4 could bring in a wave of new voters, many of them minorities, who often favour Democratic politicians over Republican ones.

“It’s this reflection of trying to control power and maintain the status quo. I think my Republican colleagues know all too well that demographics are changing dramatically, that Trump is resulting in people like me running for office, and winning,” Ms Eskamani says.


A request for comment sent to the Florida governor’s office was not returned. In late October, a court issued a preliminary injunction in favour of the civil rights groups suing SB 7066. A federal hearing on the matter is set for April

Modern day poll tax
On the surface, the fee requirement is a good governance effort, with the fiscal health of the courts being held in the balance. As a result of a 1998 constitutional amendment in the state, the courts must be funded by those very fines and fees. It’s a system that brought in $1.1 billion to the state in 2018 alone.

For former felons, though, the system can often be confusing, and tying the right to vote to fines means that some like Wright, with over $50,000 in outstanding fees, may never vote again if that balance must be paid.


Michael Monfluery, a 38-year-old who has never been eligible to vote, shows off a certificate restoring his right after the special court hearing in Miami, Florida last month (Zak Bennett/AFP via Getty Images)
Betty Riddle, 62, who received her first criminal conviction at the age of 17 in 1975, and spent some 22 years struggling with drug abuse, says that even figuring out the total may be unattainable. Riddle, who has four children, 24 grandchildren, and 8 great grand kids, has cleaned up and found solace in God. But, she has no idea how much she owes the state of Florida.

“My record goes all the way back to ‘75. So, when I went to the clerk to get all my outstanding court costs and fines, they only went back to 1990,” she says. “I tried. But really I don’t know how much I owe.”

But large sums and lost records aside, voting rights advocates say that there’s a more sinister history at work with SB 7066 — one that dates back to the very first efforts by African Americans and poor whites to participate in democracy in America.


According to Carol Anderson, a historian with Emory University and author of several books on the history of voter suppression in the United States, the fight in Florida has roots all the way back to 1890 Mississippi, when some of the first measures to suppress the black vote were conceived in post-Emancipation America.

At that time, predominantly white politicians came forward to the public with what seemed like a reasonable argument: Democracy costs money. Ballots don’t print themselves, nor do they count themselves. So, it only makes sense that states would require investment from voters in the form of a small fee — one that ultimately served to deny African American voters, suffering from the myriad resounding impacts of slavery, the right to vote.

Read more
Nearly 90,000 US felons may have voting rights restored
The United States made poll taxes illegal in 1963 with the 26th Amendment, but Anderson says it's hard not to see a return of the tactic.


“If you’ve been incarcerated for years, what is your likelihood of having the deep pockets to be able to pay all of those fines and fees — and those fines and fees are, frankly, very arbitrary,” she says. “So, it is now making the ability to vote dependent upon, ‘have you paid the fee? How deep are your pockets’.”

Anderson noted that, just like the poll taxes outlawed more than half a century ago, the biggest group impacted by Florida’s law are African Americans. An analysis by the Brennan Centre also finds that SB7066 would disproportionately impact African Americans.

“If you can stop that cohort, that group from voting, you can shape an electorate in a way that allows, well that is really in violation of the Constitution,” she says. “It is a poll tax, because your ability to pay means whether you can gain access to your voting rights or not. That’s why it is a poll tax.”


An ancestral tradition
Wright is no stranger to that history of disenfranchisement. As a black woman in America, she stresses that the struggle and fight to vote “goes back years, and years through my ancestry.”

Before her incarceration — a three-year sentence she received for helping facilitate the sale of 70 oxycodone pills to an undercover police officer — Wright was a teacher for 15 years, teaching students in elementary school and also adult education. Throughout that time, she and her family dutifully voted every chance they could. They would pile into cars and drive together to the county administration building where they cast their ballots.

Following her conviction, Wright still managed to help some 80 fellow inmates to earn their GED, the US high school certificate. Upon release, she was no longer able to teach, a lost passion. Since she has a college degree and the $47,000 in student loans it cost her, she was told she is overqualified for jobs at Walmart, at McDonalds, and 7-Eleven.


And, she was forced for the first time to sit in the car as her family went to vote, in 2016. She recalls vividly sitting in the back seat of her mother’s SUV as they went in to vote. Her sister returned with her dachshund under her arm, and an “I voted” sticker on its snout.

Wright says one of the hardest parts of the experience was explaining to her 11-year-old daughter why she couldn’t vote, too, and why she had left her in school on that historic day.

Now 14, her daughter is well aware of the current state of American politics. She asks about it constantly. Hoping to prepare her daughter to take seriously the immense responsibility of voting, she does her best to answer. Wright thinks 2020 is the most important election in a generation.

“I never want to sit in the car again,” she says. “That, I promise, will not happen.”

MORE ABOUT
AMENDMENT 4 | FLORIDA | RON DESANTIS | DONALD TRUMP | BARACK OBAMA

GET IN TOUCH
Contact us
Jobs
OUR PRODUCTS
Subscriptions
Install our apps
Archive
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Evening Standard
Novaya Gazeta
EXTRAS
All topics
Voucher codes
Advertising guide
Syndication
LEGAL
Code of conduct and complaints
Contributors
Cookie policy
Privacy notice
User policies
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

Marcus Aurelius
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply
  Share Topic   

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down