TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In a blow to voting rights that could have consequences for the presidential election, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Florida law restricting felon voting rights.
The result is that hundreds of thousands of people with past felony convictions in the battleground state likely will be ineligible to vote in the August state primaries and, possibly, the November presidential election in which Donald Trump and Joe Biden are on the ballot.
The high court on Thursday did not explain its decision. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all appointed by Democratic presidents, dissented. In a stinging rebuke, Justice Sotomayor said that “this court’s inaction continues a trend of condoning disenfranchisement.”
The ruling is another victory for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who opposed lifting Florida’s lifetime ban on felon voting. After voters in 2018 approved a ballot measure that restored voting rights to most felons, the GOP-led state Legislature passed a law that requires people with felony convictions to pay outstanding court debts and fees before they can register to vote.
“This is a deeply disappointing decision,” said Paul Smith, vice president at Campaign Legal Center, one of the groups representing former felons that challenged Florida’s law. “Florida’s voters spoke loud and clear when nearly two-thirds of them supported rights restoration at the ballot box in 2018."
A study by University of Florida political professor Daniel Smith found that nearly 775,000 people with felony convictions have some sort of outstanding legal financial obligation.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle in late May ripped Florida’s law, calling it an illegal pay-to-vote system.
Requiring people with felony convictions to pay fees — which are separate from restitution paid to victims — in order to vote violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on poll taxes, he wrote. Florida, he said, had no authority to bar former felons from registering to vote simply because they couldn't afford to pay fines and restitution.DeSantis appealed the Hinkle ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals which this month put the ruling on hold while the appeal was considered, prompting voting rights groups to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to step in.
Now the case will return to the appeals court, which is scheduled to hold a hearing Aug. 18, the same day as Florida's primary.
In their briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, lawyers for the state said Hinkle’s ruling had upended the election. They criticized the process the judge ordered put in place to determine if felons were eligible to vote. Hinkle got the idea for the process from the director of the state Division of Elections.
In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the Supreme Court’s order “prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor. And it allows the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to disrupt Florida’s election process just days before the July 20 voter-registration deadline for the August primary, even though a preliminary injunction had been in place for nearly a year and a federal district court had found the State’s pay-to-vote scheme un-constitutional after an 8-day trial.”
Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California Irvine, on his blog called the ruling one of the most “consequential” recent decisions when it comes to election law outcomes.