Voter suppression was at high tide this week—working furiously to elect Republicans. The brazen methods were virtually breathtaking, but there was one bright spot on the voter suppression front. Florida voters abolished their felon disenfranchisement law, enabling a large segment of their population to vote (in future elections).
State legislatures established felon disenfranchisement laws after the Civil War with the purpose of limiting the black vote. States enhanced voter suppression laws in general and felon disenfranchisement laws in particular during the establishment of Jim Crow—the harsh segregation around 1900.
Florida was one of four states whose constitution permanently disenfranchised citizens with past felony convictions and granted the governor the authority to restore voting rights. The others are Kentucky and Iowa, where lifetime bars remain in place, and Virginia, where the governor restores voting rights on a case-by-case basis.
By 2016 around 6.1 million people, or about 2.5 percent of the U.S. voting age population, were disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. Florida was estimated to have 1,686,318 persons—over 10 percent of its voting age population—disenfranchised as a result of felonies.
In Florida, almost one in four African-American adults, nearly 500,000 in all, were barred from voting for life because of a previous felony conviction. Floridians passed Amendment 4, giving 1.6 million citizens with felony convictions in the state the right to vote after they complete their sentences, except those convicted of murder and felony sex crimes.
They will be able to vote in the next election—in 2020. Blacks were disproportionately disenfranchised, so if these ex-felons had been able to vote in this year’s elections and if they had voted similar to those blacks who did vote, Andrew Gillum would have easily become governor of Florida, and Bill Nelson would have handily retained his Senate seat.
This restoration of voting rights is a big deal–and long overdue.