A signature issue that bothers most Democrats (and very few, if any Republicans) in Florida is the ban on automatic restoration of the civil and voting rights of ex-felons who have paid their debt to society, an issue that became a big story during the 2000 presidential recount. Today, Tampa Bay area Congresswoman Kathy Castor said she's had enough, sending a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting a Justice Department inquiry relating to civil rights restoration in Florida.The state's policy regarding ex-felons was changed in 2007 when, under new governor Charlie Crist, a majority of the Florida Cabinet (including Democratic CFO Alex Sink and Republican Agricultural Commissioner Charles Bronson), voted to provide ex-offenders convicted of less serious offenses the right to regain their rights without a hearing, while those convicted of crimes such as murder required a more thorough investigation and a hearing.
But that was repealed in 2011, when Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the process was too easy for released felons. One month later, Bondi, Scott and the rest of the Cabinet scrapped the process and set a minimum of a five-year waiting period.
“I believe that in operation Florida is violating the U.S. Constitution’s tenets of due process and equal protection,” Castor wrote to Holder. “Therefore, I respectfully request that the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation into whether legal action is warranted against the State of Florida for its effective bar on civil rights restoration for non-violent offenders.”
In a statement, Castor says that as many as 600,000 people who otherwise could have voted will be absent from Florida's polls, due to this current policy.
“Nonviolent offenders who have completed their sentences and paid their debt to society should have full and equal access to exercise their voting rights,” Castor said. “We must use all the tools and legal authorities at our disposal to fight against racial discrimination, to stand against disenfranchisement and to safeguard the right of every eligible American to cast a ballot.”
As in so many other dubious statistics, Florida is something of an outlier on this policy. According to former USF Professor Susan Greenbaum, since the late 1990s, 23 states have changed their policies to be less restrictive when it comes to ex-felons' civil and voting rights.
In a December 2003 article in the American Sociological Review, Northwest University professor Jeff Manza and University of Minnesota professor Christopher Uggen wrote that "Had disenfranchised felons been permitted to vote, we estimate that Gore's [national] margin of victory in the popular vote would have surpassed one million votes."