A voting rights group in Florida filed a lawsuit against the rightwing governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, saying his administration created a maze of bureaucratic and sometimes violent obstacles to discourage formerly incarcerated citizens from exercising their right to vote.
Florida voters in 2018 overwhelmingly passed a constitutional referendum, called amendment 4, that lifted the state’s lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions.
Yet what ensued in the years since 2018 was an aggressive campaign, led by DeSantis, to sow confusion and fear among formerly incarcerated people. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which championed amendment 4, said state officials have continued to disenfranchise 1.4 million Florida residents – roughly a quarter of the state’s eligible Black voters.
“Who is the public supposed to rely on to determine voter eligibility?” said the FRRC’s executive director, Desmond Meade. “We’re saying that it is the responsibility of the state. The law says it is the responsibility of the state.”
DeSantis appears to disagree. The lawsuit, resubmitted on Friday by the FRRC, comes a year after the Florida governor ordered the arrests of dozens of people who participated in the 2020 election, including people who had been issued voter registration cards from the Florida department of state.
“If the state dropped the ball by incorrectly verifying these people’s eligibility to vote, before you take someone’s liberty, they should fix their broken system,” Meade said.
In 2019, Florida lawmakers passed a controversial bill requiring people with felony convictions to repay all outstanding debts before having their voting rights restored under amendment 4. But the state has no centralized database that records how much each individual person owes in court fines. Each county clerk’s office has a different method of calculating the amount of money that a formerly incarcerated person owes the state, complicating the process of paying off fines.
“So you’re telling people that you have to pay your debt before you’re able to vote,” said Meade. “But there’s no guarantee that the state could even tell them exactly what they owe?”
The lawsuit said this system, in which local and state election officials cannot be trusted to dole out accurate information about voter eligibility, is part of an intentional, state-sponsored campaign to dismantle amendment 4.
“This is not simply the result of administrative failures or bureaucratic ineptitude,” the complaint reads.
According to documents shared with the Guardian, the FRRC repeatedly contacted the state election officials between 2018 and today, offering potential solutions to streamline the process of registering voters.
When the Florida department of state declined to hire additional staff to tackle a mounting backlog of voter registration applications from formerly incarcerated people, the FRRC offered to shoulder the costs. The advocacy group could identify and reach out to people whose court fines had been paid, easing the state officials’ workload.
The state’s response has been lukewarm. Efforts to establish a public-private partnership have been slow to advance over five years.
“We’ve had three different secretaries of state since the passage of amendment 4, each with different staff,“ said the FRRC deputy director, Neil Volz. “We still have not seen this become a priority.”
Natalie Meiner, a spokeswoman for the Florida department of state, said: “The department does not comment on pending litigation.”
The FRRC said it was still in talks with the state department.
“We just want the state to do its job,” said Volz.
The lawsuit is a last-ditch attempt to make accurate voter registration a priority for elected officials. But they worry that, without court intervention, state officials will keep amendment 4 in holding pattern, rejecting offers of assistance.
Volz wants people who had their voting rights restored under amendment 4 vote in the 2024 presidential election without fear of prosecution. But the memory of last year’s arrests, announced by DeSantis just days before the 2022 primary elections in Florida, is still fresh in the minds of millions of Florida residents.
Romona Oliver was driving home from work last August when she saw a group of Florida law enforcement officers in her driveway.
“She was upset, and asked what she was being arrested for, and they’re telling her voting fraud,” said her attorney, Mark Rankin.
Shortly after taking her case, Rankin learned that Oliver had submitted a voter registration application before the 2020 election. The state approved her application and sent her a voter registration card.
“She even went to the DMV at a later date to change her driver’s license because she got married, and the state issued her a second voter registration card in her new name,” said Rankin “So now she’s been basically told twice that she’s eligible to vote.”
The government had made a mistake. Oliver was ineligible to vote because she was convicted of second-degree murder in 2000 – amendment 4 does not restore the rights of people convicted of murder or felony sex offense.
Prosecutors offered Oliver a plea deal of “no contest” to the charge of voter fraud.
The other felony charge against Oliver was dismissed. She agreed to spend time in county jail on the day of her arrest. The court fines were waived.
“So basically, you just let her walk away to make it go away,” Rankin said. “But because she pleaded no contest, they were able to have what they wanted, which was a newspaper headline that says, ‘local defendant accepts plea deal,’ which I think is the point of all this.”
FRRC leaders said the highly publicized arrests were the final step in a complex scheme of voter intimidation designed by the DeSantis administration.
Millions of Florida residents, including the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, watched as people like Oliver were taken away in handcuffs just days before the 2022 midterm elections in Florida. The videos of arrests were a grim warning of what might happen to individuals who misunderstand the parameters of amendment 4.
“Those videos showed me that even if you honestly believe you are able to vote, they can arrest you anyway,” said Rhoshanda Bryant-Jones, one of the four individual plaintiffs in the case.
Bryant-Jones was convicted over a decade ago for narcotics-related crimes. Since her release from prison, she recovered from substance abuse issues and created a small business that helps other people battle addiction.
“I am not willing to risk my freedom, and all that I have accomplished,” she said. “Even though the day I thought I had my rights restored by amendment 4 was one of the great blessings of my life.”
By raising the specter of arrest, DeSantis sent a message to Bryant-Jones and all other Florida residents who might have had their rights restored under amendment 4: don’t bother trying to understand if you’re eligible to vote, the risks are not worth it.
Most of the August 2022 arrests follow a similar pattern: voters had assumed that they were eligible to vote because election officials had told them so.
If Oliver had rejected the plea deal, prosecutors would need to prove that she somehow knew the government had erred by approving her voter registration application.
“But it doesn’t really matter if you ultimately prove that you didn’t violate the law because you had no idea you were ineligible to vote,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who specializes in restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions.
Most of the people who DeSantis targeted, like Oliver, do not have the financial resources to fight a prolonged legal battle, so they opted for a plea deal.
“And you have to remember that these are people who have already been through the wringer of the criminal legal system and really, really don’t want to go back to prison,” Bowie said.
“This organized push to arrest people who seem to clearly have made good faith mistakes,” Bowie added. “It is something I don’t think we’ve seen at this scale since the end of the civil rights era.”
