On Tuesday, an amendment to the Florida constitution restored the voting rights of more than a million people with felony convictions. Amendment 4 needed sixty per cent to pass and won sixty-four, reflecting bipartisan support in a famously divided state. That leaves only two states, Iowa and Kentucky, that place lifelong voting bans on all citizens with felony convictions.
Steve Phalen, who is thirty-six and works at an hvac distribution center in Florida, has not voted since he was a college student. In 2005, while under the influence of antidepressants and alcohol, he set fire to an empty bar in Wisconsin. After pleading guilty to first-degree arson and reckless public endangerment in the second degree, he served a year of house arrest and a dozen years of probation. On Tuesday night, when he learned that Amendment 4 had passed, he wrote, in a text message, “I’ve got one of those full, involuntary smiles and a feeling of agency I haven’t felt in nearly 13 years.”
Floridians have been fighting felony disenfranchisement since the early two-thousands, when civil-rights groups sued the state, unsuccessfully. Under the Republican Governor Charlie Crist, who made more people eligible for partial clemency, more than a hundred thousand Floridians regained their right to vote. (Crist switched parties in 2012, and won reëlection as a House Democrat on Tuesday.) But those numbers fell sharply under Governor Rick Scott, who adopted a case-by-case clemency system that, according to reporting by the Palm Beach Post, exacerbated racial inequality.
[For more on this story by Daniel A. Gross, go to https://www.newyorker.com/news...in-his-voting-rights]
For more stories on this topic, see Florida Restores Voting Rights to 1.5 Million Citizens, Which Might Also Decrease Crime and Florida’s Election
Shows the True Promise of Restoring Voting Rights.
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