On Tuesday, Florida election officials certified that a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would restore the right to vote to those who have served out their sentences will appear on the ballot this November, giving Floridians a chance to reform a Jim Crow-era policy that disenfranchises 1.5 million fellow citizens. To pass and become law, the amendment must win 60 percent of the vote.
As many states did in the wake of the Civil War, Florida banned those with felony convictions from voting as an explicitly racist measure to prevent black citizens from voting, with one prominent supporter boasting in 1868 that the policy had “kept Florida from becoming ‘niggerized.’” According to the Sentencing Project, this lifetime ban has disenfranchised one in 10 Floridians, the highest proportion of any state in the country. And because of the measure’s discriminatory impact, Florida bars one in five black adults from voting, which is five times the rate of the rest of the population.
Republicans have vigorously fought efforts to loosen this restriction, and GOP Gov. Rick Scott even made felony disenfranchisement more draconian when he took office in 2011 by almost entirely ending the practice of granting clemency to restore voting rights to specific individuals. This ballot measure would sidestep the opposition of GOP elected officials, but Republicans will undoubtedly oppose it at the ballot box for a nakedly partisan reason: Florida’s disenfranchised population would lean disproportionately Democratic thanks to its racial and economic demographics.
But regardless of any partisan considerations, ending this voting restriction is long overdue, and no democracy should deny the right to vote to a tenth of its citizens. There are certain categories of citizens whose voting rights would not be restored by the amendment, including those in prison or on parole or probation, and those who have committed murder or sexual offenses. But it will strike a major blow against a Jim Crow policy that has prevented 1.5 million Americans from exercising one of their most sacred constitutional rights.
