Florida felons must pay up before they can vote. How much? It’ll take years to learn Your Turn Frank Cerabino, Guest columnist Tallahassee Democrat, 9/20/2020 I know a lot of people are unsympathetic about convicted felons getting their voting rights restored. But if there’s a tiny ember of fairness in your soul, this should bother you. When 64% of Florida voters approved a referendum two years ago that appeared to re-establish voting rights to 1.6 million convicted felons who had served their terms, it was not the last word. Gov. Ron DeSantis insisted that the amendment had to be implemented through action by the state legislature. And that led to Senate Bill 7066, a high-hurdled piece of legislation that said Florida felons could vote again only after “all terms of sentence, including full payment of restitution, or any fines, fees, or costs resulting from the conviction” were satisfied. The law was challenged, and a ruling in May by U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle stymied it, calling the law a “pay-to-vote” system that operated as an unconstitutional poll tax. “A state may disenfranchise felons and impose conditions on their reenfranchiesment,” Hinkle wrote. “But the conditions must pass constitutional scrutiny. “Whatever might be said of a rationally constructed system, this one falls short in substantial respects.” Hinkle’s ruling wasn’t the last word, either, because the state appealed his decision to the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the decision last week. The 6-4 ruling authored by U.S. Judge William Pryor found that the requirement to pay wasn’t a poll tax, but part of the criminal penalty owed by the felon. And the court majority found that Florida’s restrictions on restoring the voting rights of felons was constitutional. “Monetary provisions of a sentence are no less part of the penalty that society imposes for a crime than the term of imprisonment,” Pryor wrote. “Indeed, some felons face substantial monetary penalties but little or no prison time.” For the sake of argument, let’s agree with Pryor’s reasoning, and reject the poll-tax finding from the district court. Let’s say that it’s fair for felons to regain their civil rights only after they pay “every dollar” that the court administrators and prosecutors claim they owe. We won’t call it a poll tax. OK. Fine. Moving on. So where can felons learn about their so-called LFOs – legal financial obligations – so they can figure out what it takes to get their civil rights restored? “The amount of financial obligations imposed in a sentence is usually clear from the judgment, which can be obtained by the county of conviction,” Pryor wrote. But it’s not in Florida. What Hinkle found after an eight-day trial was that it’s “often impossible” for Florida felons to learn how much they owe. He called Florida’s ability to inform felons how much they owe an “administrative train wreck.” The court looked at 153 randomly selected Florida felons and found that in only three cases was it clear how much money they owed. The state has a waiting list of 85,000 felons who have petitioned the state for an answer on how much they owe. And the state admits that it would take years for answers. Pryor made that reality irrelevant by ruling that Florida has no duty “for locating and providing felons with the facts necessary to determine whether they have completed their financial terms of sentence.” So to recap: You’ve got to pay “every dollar” before you can vote. But we have no idea how much you owe, and it will take years for us to get you an answer. Unless we decide not to give you an answer at all, since now there’s a legal ruling that says we have the right to demand “every dollar” from you with no obligation to tell you how many dollars that is. Oh, and another thing: You’d better not try to vote without paying up, because if you do, we’ll charge you with another felony. Judge Beverly Martin, writing in dissent on the appeals court, found it impossible to sanction this. “The majority breezes over the infirmities of the process,” Martin wrote. “But I cannot so easily condone a system that is projected to take upwards of six years simply to tell citizens whether they are eligible to vote; that demands of those citizens information based on a legal fiction (of its own making) known as the “every- dollar” method; and which ultimately throws up its hands and denies citizens their ability to vote because the state can’t figure out the outstanding balances it is requiring those citizens to pay.” How’s that ember of fairness in you? If it’s there, you ought to be able to feel it by now. It should be burning bright. - - - Frank Cerabino is a columnist for the Palm Beach Post.