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 in the South established felon disenfranchisement laws after the Civil War with the purpose of limiting the black vote. In 1968 Florida fought off something almost as big as losing the Civil War—the federal government’s proclamation that the state allow every man the right to vote.
They needed to find some method of limiting the black vote that would pass federal muster. The answer they and other southern states found was legislating a lifetime voting ban on anyone with a felony conviction. They also passed laws criminalizing a lot of black behavior, enabling them to suppress black votes indefinitely.
After the creation of Florida’s new constitution in 1872, one legislator boasted that they had prevented the state from being “niggerized.”
By the 1870s it is estimated around 95% of convicts in the south were black, meaning taking the vote from felons, along with a raft of other discriminatory laws, effectively barred African Americans from voting.
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. The others are Kentucky and Iowa, where lifetime bars remain in place, and Virginia, where the governor currently restores voting rights on an aggressive 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. Florida has been a special case as it has over 27% of all disenfranchised persons in the country.
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. But that has changed as 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.
These ex-felons will be able to vote in the next election—in 2020. If black 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.
