U.S. Attorney General Erica Holder says felons should get right to vote back. (Photo via  US Embassy New Zealand/Creative Commons)

U.S. Attorney General Erica Holder says felons should get right to vote back. (Photo via US Embassy New Zealand/Creative Commons)

By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting

During a speech this week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said states should no longer bar felons from voting once they have completed their time in prison. He mentioned Florida specifically.

Holder’s speech is part of an effort to raise issues surrounding criminal justice and civil rights in the U.S.

In states like Florida, voting rights for people convicted of a felony at any point in time are prohibitively hard to restore, and Holder specifically mentioned the Sunshine State.

According to The New York Times, Holder’s speech was aimed at shining a light on these types of policies in states across the country.

The Times reports:

In a speech at Georgetown University, Mr. Holder described today’s prohibitions — which in some cases bar those convicted from voting for life — as a vestige of the racist policies of the South after the Civil War, when states used the criminal justice system to keep blacks from fully participating in society.

“Those swept up in this system too often had their rights rescinded, their dignity diminished, and the full measure of their citizenship revoked for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Holder said. “They could not vote.”

Mr. Holder has no authority to enact the changes he called for, given that states establish the rules under which people can vote. And state Republican leaders made clear that Mr. Holder’s remarks, made to a receptive audience at a civil rights conference, would not move them.

“Eric Holder’s speech from Washington, D.C., has no effect on Florida’s Constitution, which prescribes that individuals who commit felonies forfeit their right to vote,” said Frank Collins, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican.

…In Florida, the state that tipped that election, 10 percent of the population is ineligible to vote because of the ban on felons at the polls, Mr. Holder said.

In 2011, Governor Scott required felons to wait five years after completing their sentence before they can apply to vote again.

“For those who are truly remorseful for how they have wrecked families and want to earn back their right to vote, Florida’s Constitution also provides a process to have their rights restored,” said Mr. Collins, the governor’s spokesman.

Florida is among four states that currently bars felons from voting, unless they receive clemency from the governor—and the process for obtaining clemency is pretty cumbersome.

According to a 2004 article in Vanity Fair, the state’s history with this is also pretty interesting:

In 1868, Florida, as a way of keeping former slaves away from the polls, put in its constitution that prisoners would permanently be denied the right to vote unless they were granted clemency by the governor. In those days, and for nearly a hundred years after, a black man looking at a white woman was cause for arrest. The felony clause was just one of many measures taken to keep blacks off the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and “grandfather clauses,” by which a man could vote only if his grandfather had. All these other methods were effectively ended. But the constitutional provision about former felons remained.

In Florida, there are an estimated 700,000 ex-felons, and 1 in 4 is a black male. Six years ago, Florida state representative Chris Smith, of Fort Lauderdale, sat outside a local Winn-Dixie grocery store trying to get people to register. “A lot of black men that looked like me, around my age, would just walk past me and say, ‘Felony,’ ‘Felony,’ and not even attempt to register to vote,” Smith recalls. Why so many? In the past few years the majority-Republican legislature has upgraded certain misdemeanors to felonies and also created dozens of new felonies that disproportionately affect the urban poor. Intercepting police communications with a ham radio is a felony. So is the cashing of two unemployment checks after the recipient has gotten a new job. State senator Frederica Wilson, like other black lawmakers in Florida, believes these felonies are “aimed at African-American people.”

Meanwhile, black lawmakers have tried in vain to legislate rights restoration to some offenders who have served their sentences. Wilson recalls one such proposal that was smacked down by Republican state senator Anna Cowin, head of the Ethics and Elections Committee. “I literally begged her, ‘Please just agenda it,'” says Wilson. “She would not agenda it.”

During Gov. Charlie Crist’s time in office, felons were getting their rights restored in high numbers, but that changed with Gov. Rick Scott took office.

In 2012, News 21 reported that:

Florida leads the nation in disenfranchising felons, especially African American blacks. In 2010, about 520,500 African Americans — 23 percent of the state’s black voting age population — could not vote because of a felony conviction, according to The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based criminal justice reform group.

An estimated 5.85 million felons across the country could not vote in 2010, the last year for which The Sentencing Project has data.

Florida’s process for restoring a felon’s civil rights grew stricter [in 2011] when Scott and his Cabinet — Attorney General Pam Bondi, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater and Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam — established a five- or seven-year wait, depending on the offense, before felons could apply to have their rights restored.

In 2007, former Gov. Charlie Crist’s first year in office, 38,971 felons regained their civil rights. Last year, Scott and his Cabinet, acting as the Board of Executive Clemency, restored civil rights to 78 people.

Annually, it seems, a member of the Florida Legislature will introduce a bill aimed at making it easier to restore rights to felons once they do their time. This year is no exception. Although, few rarely get heard and even less make it to a final vote in either chamber.