Both Democratic and Republican conventions featured redemption stories: convicted criminals who had turned their lives around.
Donna Hylton, a Black woman sentenced to 25 years to life on kidnapping and second-degree murder charges spoke a few words from the Preamble to the Constitution in a prerecorded video during the DNC convention. Paroled after 27 years, Hylton is now a criminal justice advocate and ordained minister who earned a masters degree in prison.
The RNC convention featured Alice Johnson, sentenced to life for a first-time drug distribution offense. Donald Trump had granted her clemency in 2018 after she had served 21 years. He pardoned her a day after her speech praising him aired. Trump also granted a pardon to Jon Ponder, a convicted bank robber who founded Hope for Prisoners. Both are Black. “We live in a nation of second chances,” Ponder said.
Whether and how those second chances extend to voting depends on where one lives. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) summarizes:
Until recently, Florida never restored voting rights to felons. Those were permanently revoked by laws dating back to Reconstruction. As recently as 2016, Dexter Filkins writes at The New Yorker, “the ban disenfranchised one out of every five Black adults in the state.”
That changed in 2018 when almost 65 percent of Florida voters approved Amendment Four, removing the ban for all but the most violent offenders. “Amendment Four represented the largest act of enfranchisement since 1971, when the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen,” Filkins writes. But that was not the end of it:
Six months after Amendment Four passed, the Republican-dominated legislature approved a law dictating that ex-felons could vote only if they first paid all the fines, restitution, and fees imposed at their sentencing. The law may affect as many as seven hundred and seventy thousand Florida residents, about half of whom are Black. In many cases, the totals came to thousands of dollars. The burden was not just large but uncertain: state officials testified that they had no way of knowing how much money felons owe, or whether they have paid; those calculations would take six years or so to complete.
In May, a federal judge ruled the scheme a constitutionally prohibited “pay to vote” system. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals put the ruling on hold in July until it could hear the case. The Supreme Court refused to vacate the hold weeks later. “This Court’s order prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.
Filkins recounts the voter purges ordered in 2000 by Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris that may have decided the presidential contest:
They hired a company called Database Technologies, which was founded by Hank Asher, a former cocaine smuggler and a self-taught computer entrepreneur who sometimes consulted with Rudolph Giuliani on anti-terrorist ventures. Database Technologies presented Florida officials with a choice: they could run a precisely focussed search or a broader one. “The state dictated to us that they wanted to go broader,” George Bruder, a D.B.T. executive, later testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “And we did it in the fashion that they requested.”
Broader meant much, much sloppier. People with mismatched Social Security numbers and genders, dead people, infants even, plus felons from 10 other states. It meant a list of 60,000 names sent to local Boards of Elections:
In Leon County, Ion Sancho was skeptical. The list that he received enumerated nearly seven hundred suspected felons, and he doubted that his voter rolls contained so many. Looking more closely, he found that most of the names didn’t match. “We were being told to purge a voter named Johnston, even though the felon’s name was Johnson,” he told me. Fewer than forty turned out to be felons.
Computer-forensics expert David Klausner worked with the plaintiffs who sued Harris after the election. He estimated 40 percent were Black, saying, “The project was explicitly racial—as Jim Crow as you can get.”
Filkins offers much more. But now, with Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in Florida polling, the state could become make-or-break for the incumbent. Biden has more paths to victory without winning Florida. But Trump’s poor response to the COVID-19 pandemic is both dragging down his approval rating and DeSantis’s ability to deliver Florida for Trump. DeSantis has been distancing himself. People around DeSantis believe he wants to run for president in 2024, and having Trump in the White House is a disadvantage.
The virus and allegations of vote tampering along with hurdles to counting mailed ballots will plague Florida, as elsewhere. Those burdens will, as usual, fall heaviest on voters of color. The judgment of the Eleventh Circuit may come close to Florida’s October 5 registration deadline. Even if the court favors former felons, they will have to scramble to register in time. Full redemption there is still elusive.
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