that guy in AZ Wrote:As Dutch is well aware, voter suppression is alive and well in Florida.
Four months after a federal judge ruled that it was akin to an unconstitutional poll tax for Florida to require that people with serious criminal convictions pay court fines and fees before they can register to vote, an appeals court narrowly overturned that decision on Friday.
Although the fines vary a bit from case to case, they are typically in the range of $500-$700 .
Five of the six judges who supported the 60-page decision were appointed to the court by President Trump. Two of those judges were also former Florida Supreme Court justices named to that bench by Mr. DeSantis. (One of the former justices, Judge Barbara Lagoa, was named by Mr. Trump this week as among those he would consider nominating to a potential future seat on the Supreme Court.)
Restoring felons’ voting rights could vastly grow the electorate in the nation’s biggest presidential battleground state. An expert for the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups testified at trial that more than 774,000 felons in Florida owe legal financial obligations.
The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which organized the Amendment 4 campaign, has raised about $4 million to help more than 4,000 “returning citizens” pay their outstanding court fines and fees, according to Neil G. Volz, the coalition’s political director.
Florida’s division of elections had received 85,000 voter registrations as of May from former felons who believed they had been re-enfranchised by Amendment 4. The division must screen those registrations to see whether the would-be voters had paid their financial obligations. Only then could any of them be removed from the voter rolls, the appeals court said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/us/florida-felon-voting-rights.html
One guy who can make a difference in Florida is Mike Bloomberg. He has pledged $100 million to help Joe Biden in Florida.
Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida last week, after news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign, Bloomberg’s advisers said. Presented with several options on how to make good on an earlier promise to help elect Biden, Bloomberg decided that a narrow focus on Florida was the best use of his money.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bloomberg-money-florida-biden/2020/09/12/af51bb50-f511-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_bloomberg-630am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
Another problem, which is reported in Florida...is often there is NO RELIABLE WAY...to know how much is owed on these court costs and fines, before one can be eligible to vote again. Likely this is by design.