Martin Dyckman: Feds should force Florida to restore right to vote to felons

 North Carolina, the vacation or retirement home for throngs of Floridians, seems to be competing with the Sunshine State for dishonors.

The Tarheel state is winning. North Carolina’s legislature has managed to repeal a century of progress in a single session.

Its new voter suppression law is among the nation’s most diabolical.

In just one respect, however, North Carolina wears a better face.

In North Carolina, anyone with a felony record can register and vote after being released from prison or supervision.

It’s automatic. Under a law dating to the 1970s, the prison, parole office or court with jurisdiction is required “immediately” to certify “the restoration of his rights of citizenship.”

In Florida, on the other hand, an estimated million people who thought they had paid their debts to society remain mired in second-class citizenship, forbidden to vote, hold office, serve on juries or engage in specified professions.

Their only right that the state respects is to pay taxes.

It’s said that more than a third of them are black. In Florida, Kentucky and Virginia, more than one in every five African Americans is denied the vote as an ex-felon–a much higher rate than among whites.

These policies date from slavery and Reconstruction.

Florida’s constitution imposes lifetime disqualification for a felony committed anywhere, unless and until the clemency board votes to restore someone’s civil rights.

The governor and at least two of the three elected Cabinet officers must agree to restore them.

Unlike North Carolina’s constitution–this is a critical distinction–Florida’s does not authorize the Legislature to do anything about it. The power is reserved to the governor and Cabinet.

The constitutional revision commissions of 1968, 1978 and 1998 failed, inexplicably, to address this.

When the 1974 Legislature attempted to make restoration automatic, as North Carolina had done, Gov. Reubin Askew signed the bill. But he worried that the state Supreme Court might find it unconstitutional, as indeed it did.

Askew got around it by persuading the Cabinet to make the paperwork process automatic. The cases were rubber-stamped unless some member of the Cabinet objected.

But to make a long story short, the state regressed and Charlie Crist confronted a huge backlog when he became governor in 2007. He dealt with it somewhat as Askew had, making processing automatic for non-violent offenders though not for others.

There were more than 150,000 restorations during Crist’s term, but a caseload of 100,000 remained when Rick Scott became governor and Pam Bondi became attorney general in 2011.

They are not kind-hearted people. It took them only two months to change the rules, imposing–among other things–at least a five-year waiting period. According to PolitiFact.com, only 850 people (through September) have had their rights restored under Scott.

Scott’s press release paid unctuous hypocrisy to the virtues of civil-rights restoration but went on to prattle about withholding it as an incentive for good behavior.

In the real world, where politicians like Scott and Bondi never venture, no one says to himself, “If I break into that car I’ll never get back my right to vote.”  He might, on the other hand, be thinking, “If I do that, I’ll go back to jail.”

Bondi and Scott did what they did for the sake of demagoguery. They also knew that they would be keeping a lot of Democrats off the voting rolls.

The usefulness of such strategy is illuminated by a recent “push poll,” reported by the Miami Herald, which asked voters whether they would be more or less likely to vote for Crist for governor again “if you knew he worked to get murderers and rapists the right to vote.”

In fact, his reform did nothing for them.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the best champion of voting rights since Lyndon Johnson, is urging states such as Florida to repeal felon disenfranchisement.

He is wasting his breath. He should spend his energy suing them over the underlying racial discrimination.

Regrettably, the Supreme Court in 1974 ruled 6 to 3 that the 14th Amendment allowed states to disenfranchise felons, but racial discrimination wasn’t the core issue.

In 2005, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited that case and found that if racial discrimination ever accounted for Florida’s rule, the slate was wiped clean when a new constitution incorporated it in 1968.

But the recent actions of Scott and Bondi, it seems to me, have dirtied that slate again. Holder should drag them into court.

Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives at Waynesville, North Carolina.