Florida sued over law barring ex-cons from right to vote

MIAMI: Human rights groups on Friday sued Florida over a law that in effect denies more than a million ex-convicts the right to vote in the 2020 presidential election in the key swing state.

Governor Rick DeSantis, a Republican, had earlier Friday signed into law the bill, which was approved by the state legislature on May 3.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the largest human rights group in the US, along with the NAACP, the largest advocacy group for African-Americans, and New York University Law School filed suit against the new law.

“Over a million Floridians were supposed to reclaim their place in the democratic process, but some politicians clearly feel threatened by greater voter participation,” said Julie Ebenstein, a lawyer working with an ACLU voter rights project. In November last year, Florida voters taking part in a referendum known as Amendment 4 agreed to restore the voting rights of more than one million former convicts, except those who had served time for murder or sex crimes.

It was a vestige of racist laws dating back 150 years to the end of the US civil war.

But the Republican-dominated state legislature created another bill, the one signed Friday, that curbed the process. The new law states that people recovering their right to vote must first settle any outstanding debts they have with the courts. This can be in the thousands of dollars and beyond many people´s means.