Florida Republicans always have a plan to keep preventing citizens from exercising their right to vote, and this week is no different.
The state’s attorney general, Ashley Moody, asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the FBI to investigate the $16 million raised by Michael Bloomberg to pay off court debts so that people who have served their felony sentences can have the right to vote that Florida voters approved in a constitutional amendment in 2018.
Despite that constitutional amendment vote, Florida Republican lawmakers passed a law requiring the returning citizens to pay off fines and other court debts before they could vote. A district judge struck down that obvious poll tax, but an appeals court restored it. So advocates have been raising money for them, an effort that got a big boost when Bloomberg brought in $16 million. That money is intended to reenfranchise Black and Latino people who owe less than $1,500 and already registered to vote—more than 31,000 of them.
Moody and other Republicans are hanging their complaints about the Bloomberg money on laws against paying people to vote. But the money is not going to the individuals. It’s going to pay their fines and fees so that they can vote if they so choose. Since they already registered to vote, it seems likely they will choose to do so, but the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition is not offering incentives. It’s offering help obtaining a legal right.
Florida Republicans are terrified that the people disenfranchised by a racist criminal justice system will get the legal right so long denied them. Again and again Republicans have thrown up barriers to voting. They added a poll tax to the constitutional amendment restoring the right to vote. They went to court to protect their poll tax. And now, faced with the prospect that the poll tax will be paid for even a small fraction of the 775,000 people they’re trying to prevent from voting, Republicans are calling in the FBI on an obvious pretext, pretending like paying someone’s court debts is the same as directly paying them to vote.
It’s ridiculous—but as we’ve seen, Republicans have rigged the system enough to get their way on a lot of ridiculous things.