From Pema Levy at Mother Jones, who’s been covering this story for some time:
Judge Mark Walker’s ruling Thursday does not address the legality of felon disenfranchisement, but rather the manner in which the state haphazardly restores voting rights to some former felons. In Florida, felons must individually apply for rights restoration, often imploring the governor and his Cabinet in person for their rights. That practice, detailed in 2015 by Mother Jones, makes restoring a person’s suffrage a personal decision by top state officials. Governors often determine whether to restore a citizen’s voting rights based on unrelated matters, such as his religiosity or number of traffic citations. Sometimes, the voting rights group challenging Florida’s regime has argued in this case, Republican governors may be swayed to restore voting rights to ex-felons who will vote for Republicans. [...]
Mother Jones assessed how Jeb Bush oversaw this process when he was a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president in the summer of 2015. Florida’s current governor, Rick Scott, has drastically reduced the number of voting rights restorations.
Mother Jones obtained more than 1,000 pages of transcripts of clemency hearings held during Bush’s tenure. Together, they provide a glimpse into his moral reasoning as he weighed the worthiness of the appeals by thousands of ex-felons hoping to regain their rights. The transcripts, covering two years of hearings, show that Bush seems to have relied on an entrenched set of personal values in his rulings. If a crime involved alcohol abuse—such as DUI manslaughter cases, which were relatively common—he liked to see several years of complete sobriety before he would restore the person’s rights. He was loath to approve the applications of petitioners he felt were not sufficiently remorseful or did not take full responsibility for their crimes. He sometimes asked wives in attendance to keep their husbands in check. Ex-felons needed to prove, over years of good behavior, that they had reformed. Bush often denied clemency simply because he believed not enough time had elapsed since the completion of the petitioner’s sentence. He did not appear to question the basic premise of his judgments: that the right to vote should be contingent on a citizen’s moral rectitude.
— www.motherjones.com/...
We already knew Jeb Bush was willing to trample on American citizen’s voting rights, he did it in 2000 to help his brother win the presidential election. But this is pretty damning stuff.
What makes it really interesting is the opinion, and the judge’s view that voting rights themselves cannot be held to a looser standard than campaign donations. He’s saying the right to vote (and associate with political parties) enjoys at least as much protection as the right of a corporation to fund political speech. If it holds, this will be an ironic legacy for Citizen’s United.
And if you think it couldn’t get any crazier, plaintiffs presented evidence where an ex-felon appears to have been denied restoration of voting rights purely because of their political views.
Judge Walker closes the decision with...
This court is not blind to the nationwide trends in which the spigot to access the United States most “precious” and “fundamental” right, the right to vote, depends on who controls the levers of power. [...] More than one-tenth of Florida’s voting age population — nearly 1.7 million people as of 2016 — cannot vote because they have been decimated from the body politic. More than one in five of Florida’s African-American population cannot vote.
If any of these citizens’ wishes to earn back their fundamental right to vote, they must plod through a gauntlet of constitutionally infirm hurdles. No More.
The state of Florida has until February 12, 2018 to present an alternate system of restoring ex-felon’s voting rights.
— @subirgrewal