Amendment 4’s Passage Means Florida Still Won Big

Jay Willis
Updated
Despite disappointing nights for Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson, this landmark civil rights achievement could change state politics—and presidential elections, too—forever.

Florida, as Florida is wont to do, is doing its level best to screw up the 2018 midterm elections: Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis is projected to defeat his Democratic counterpart, Andrew Gillum; outgoing governor Rick Scott, who is challenging Democrat Bill Nelson for a seat in the U.S. Senate, has taken a razor-thin lead over the incumbent. On Wednesday morning, the Senate race officially headed for a mandatory recount, which, if memory serves, is a process that has never been a problem in this state, ever.

These results, worrisome though they may be to voters who are not vile shitheads, may not be the state’s most important choice of the night, though, because voters on Tuesday also passed a constitutional amendment that will automatically restore the franchise to some 1.4 million Floridians who have been convicted of a felony and completed their sentence, including any attendant periods of probation or parole. (Those who commit murder or sex crimes are excluded from its scope.) To put it differently: Without a single person moving into the state, the potential size of its electorate just grew by seven figures.

The felony-disenfranchisement scheme abolished by Amendment 4 is probably the most onerous one in the nation—a Jim Crow–era fossil baked into the state constitution in 1868 to prevent black people from voting. It is as labyrinthine as it is draconian: Under the current system, which includes rules implemented by Scott in 2011, ex-felons must wait five years after completing their sentences to even apply for restoration of their voting rights. Then they must travel to Tallahassee to appear in person before the governor and explain, in painstaking detail, why they deserve to get them back.

Most of the time, Scott has said no. (A recent NPR podcast follows several ex-felons through the hearing process; listening to it is gutting.) According to a Palm Beach Post investigation, then–Republican governor Charlie Crist approved the clemency requests of about 39,000 people each year, on average, between 2007 and 2011. Rick Scott’s average annual figure since then? 412.

The effect is exactly as the framers of Florida’s constitution intended: An analysis conducted by the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald found that black Floridians, by operation of this law, are five times as likely to lose their right to vote as white Floridians. Last year, more black people lost their right to vote than did white people, even though the population is only 13 percent black. Because minority voters tend to vote Democrat, felony disenfranchisement is also foundational to the GOP's power and influence in the state. Of those people removed from the rolls last year, 52 percent were Democrats; only 14 percent were Republicans.

The clemency system has amounted to state-sanctioned discrimination, too, especially under Scott. The Palm Beach Post’s investigation found that he granted clemency to twice as many whites as blacks, and three times as many white men as black men. Among the state's governors, he boasts the lowest restoration rate for African-Americans in half a century. After punishing voters beyond the term of their sentences, Florida law also rigs the petition system so that it favors the petitioners who are white. It is a constitutionally enshrined form of racist voter suppression—which goes a long way toward explaining why Scott has been so stingy about it.

In news that might surprise you, however, among voters, Amendment 4 is neither partisan nor controversial. Scott and DeSantis opposed it, but it earned the backing of both the ACLU and the Koch brothers. And despite the photo-finish nature of the Senate and gubernatorial races, Amendment 4 comfortably cleared the 60 percent threshold required to pass constitutional amendments by ballot measure. It turns out that "Americans who pay their debts to society should be treated with dignity and fairness” is an argument that supporters of both parties intuitively understand.

Florida, with its weird mix of young minority voters and old white retirees, plays a consistently outsize role in national politics, often to the chagrin of the rest of us. Six years ago, Barack Obama won there by less than one percentage point, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost it by less than two. (You may also recall its results, or lack thereof for months and months and months, being somewhat important to the 2000 presidential race.) In a state with elections as close as this one's, Amendment 4 could fundamentally change the national political landscape, in 2020 and beyond. It is a landmark civil rights achievement that deserves to be celebrated, and no matter what happens to Gillum and Nelson this time around, Democrats who hoped for more encouraging results in Florida might have to wait just one election longer than they thought.