Mitch Perry
The committee hoping to put a constitutional amendment on the 2018 ballot that would automatically restore voting rights to nonviolent Florida felons is inching closer to the signature quota required to place an amendment on the ballot.
Floridians for a Fair Democracy says it submitted more than 1.1 million signatures to various supervisors of elections during the week between Christmas and New Years. The minimum number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot is 766,200.
According to the Division of Elections website, 745,461 signatures have been verified. That means the state needs to verify just 21,000 more signatures over the next two weeks before the Feb. 1 deadline.
Organizers are confident they will reach that objective.
The group raised $547,855 last month and at the beginning of January had slightly more than $340,000 to spend this month to get the necessary signatures.
Florida’s current law permanently strips felons of the right to vote and other civil rights, including serving on a jury, running for public office and sitting for the state bar exam. Only three other states in the union – Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia – have similar laws.
There are approximately 1.68 million ex-felons in Florida who have not had their voting rights restored after serving their prison sentence, according to The Sentencing Project, a voting rights advocacy group.
“We never lose sight of the fact about what this movement is all about. It’s about people,” said Desmond Meade, the president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) and chair of Floridians for a Fair Democracy, on a conference call Tuesday night.
“At the end of the day, our campaign is not driven on how we think people will vote, but rather not if they have the opportunity to vote after they paid their debt to society,” Meade added.
If the measure does make it to the ballot, it will need support from 60 percent of voters in November to become law.
2 comments
Roger Clegg
January 17, 2018 at 5:18 am
The right to vote should not be restored automatically but only after the felon has shown he has turned over a new leaf since unfortunately most will commit new crimes. And if you’re not willing to follow the law yourself then you should not have a role in making the law for everyone else which is what you do when you vote.
Dude
January 17, 2018 at 3:24 pm
The right to vote would not be automatically restored if this measure passes. This would allow people to petition to get their rights restored in an easier fashion by simply just proving that they have served their sentence in its entirety (including probation terms). People can already petition to have their rights back now but it is a much harder process and one you must hire an attorney for which costs thousands. This only affects people who are already out and ready to reintegrate back into society. Even if somehow the people whose rights are being restored all had the worst of intentions, what can they possibly do with their singular vote? This will not dramatically change anything for anyone except the people whose political voice has been taken away by the government. The bar for the government coming in and saying that a person no longer has any rights to help decide who runs things in our town should be much higher than this. US citizens need to be on a constant lookout to ensure the government isn’t infringing on our rights or silencing portions of our community. Calling all felons boogeymen is a matter of opinion and it doesn’t really matter because with a singular vote they can’t harm our society in any way. So why has that political voice been taken away?
Comments are closed.