TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge ruled Sunday that it is unconstitutional to prevent felons in Florida from voting because they can’t afford to pay back court fees, fines and restitution to victims, striking down parts of a law passed by Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.
Calling the law a “pay-to-vote system,” U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle’s 125-page ruling declares that court fees are a tax, and it creates a new process for determining whether felons are eligible to vote.
"This order holds that the State can condition voting on payment of fines and restitution that a person is able to pay but cannot condition voting on payment of amounts a person is unable to pay,” Hinkle wrote.
The ruling is expected to be appealed, although a spokeswoman for DeSantis did not say Sunday night whether the governor would do so.
Hinkle’s decision could have immediate effects on the November presidential election in the nation’s largest swing state. Florida has more than 1 million felons, although the state has not seen a dramatic rise in registrations from felons since Florida voters allowed opened the franchise to felons through a constitutional amendment in 2018.
Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, called it “perhaps the most important ruling in the US now ahead of the November election."
The decision was praised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that sued DeSantis and state elections officials last year.
“This ruling means hundreds of thousands of Floridians will be able to rejoin the electorate and participate in upcoming elections,” said Julie Ebenstein, senior staff attorney with ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “This is a tremendous victory for voting rights.”
Neil Volz, a spokesman for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which created Amendment 4 but was not a party to the lawsuit, called it “a game-changer."
In his ruling, Hinkle also ordered state officials to adopt a new process for determining whether felons are too poor to vote: felons can request an advisory opinion from the Secretary of State.
If the secretary can’t issue the opinion within 21 days of receipt — and tell the felon how much fines and restitution to victims they owe, and how the state came up with that amount — they can’t stop the felon from registering to vote, Hinkle wrote.
Hinkle said that process would be simple and fast for most cases, since most convictions do not require felons pay back court fines — such as $50,000 for a drug trafficking charge — or restitution to victims.
“In most cases, the Division (of Elections) will need to do nothing more on LFOs than review the judgment to confirm there is no fine or restitution,” he wrote. “In the remaining cases — the cases with a fine or restitution—the overwhelming majority of felons will be unable to pay.”
But for some cases, it will be an impossible burden for the state to meet. A weeklong trial showed that for many older convictions, it’s impossible to determine how much in restitution or fines someone owes.
“That the Director of the Division of Elections cannot say who is eligible makes clear that some voters also will not know,” Hinkle wrote.
He ruled that court fees, which are used to subsidize the state’s criminal justice system, were “a tax by any other name,” noting that in one county, defendants have to pay a minimum of $548 in court fees.
In 2018, nearly two thirds of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, which was intended to reverse the state’s Jim Crow-era law barring felons from voting.
The amendment restored the right to vote to nearly all felons who completed “all terms of their sentence including parole or probation." But the definition of “all terms" was not defined in the amendment, and it was immediately contested by lawmakers and advocates.
With DeSantis’ encouragement, the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2019 drew a hard line. Lawmakers passed a bill defining “all terms” to include all court fees, fines and restitution associated with a case.
Those costs, at a minimum, are hundreds of dollars — amounts that many felons can’t, and don’t, pay.
Although the creators of Amendment 4 also said financial obligations were required, critics dubbed the bill a “poll tax.” More than a dozen felons, represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, sued DeSantis as soon as he signed the bill into law, arguing that it was unconstitutional.
During a teleconferenced trial that ended May 6, held last month, lawyers argued that lawmakers and DeSantis created a system that is almost hopelessly complicated for felons. Felons often can’t determine how much court fees and fines they owe, in part because state and county officials themselves sometimes don’t know.
The chief operating officer for the Hillsborough County Clerk of Court testified that he and four others in his office spent 12 to 15 hours just to figure out how much one person owed. And no entity in the state tracks restitution to victims.
At the end of the trial, Hinkle suggested he would rule against the state, and that he expected his decision to be quickly appealed.
Hinkle wrote Sunday that “after a full trial on the merits, the plaintiffs’ evidence has grown stronger.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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