Felons get new boost on vote

A state appellate court ruled that the Florida Department of Corrections needs to do more to help felons get their voting rights restored.

BY MARC CAPUTO

TALLAHASSEE - In another blow to Florida's lawsuit-plagued voting system, an appeals court ruled Wednesday that state prison officials must follow a law requiring them to provide felons with the necessary forms and assistance to get their voting rights restored.

The First District Court of Appeal said the Department of Corrections, despite putting in place a computerized tracking system to streamline the clemency process, has failed to provide some of the needed paperwork to 85 percent of felons who served their time.

Estimated cost for the assistance: $22.3 million to $34.7 million a year, to help between 25,000 and 40,000 people who might now actively start seeking clemency. Florida is one of only six states that do not automatically restore voting rights to felons after they complete their terms.

The annual processing cost is on top of the estimated $2 million price tag for a list of possible felons the state wanted local election supervisors to purge from voter rolls. The list was so flawed that the state scrapped it amid controversy last week.

That move is leading the groups that brought the lawsuit to call on Gov. Jeb Bush to grant across-the-board clemency to about 700,000 felons.

Howard Simon, Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union, pointed out that President Bush made Texas an automatic restoration state when he was governor.

''Why isn't it good enough for the little brother in Florida?'' asked Simon, who brought the lawsuit with the Florida Justice Institute.

GOVERNOR'S VIEW

The governor has often said he believes that felons should not be allowed to vote without having to clear extra hurdles.

''I'm not going to, by edict, change the rules that are part of our Constitution,'' Bush said, complaining that the state has been sued so many times in recent weeks that ``I have to keep a card here because it's tough to keep up with them all.''

Leading the charge has been the ACLU. It threatened to sue the state two weeks ago over its database of 47,000 possible felons, which considered more than 2,000 people ineligible to vote even though they had their rights restored. Blacks and Democrats predominated, while Hispanics, who tend to vote Republican, were largely missing from the list.

Liberal activists, bitter over the 2000 elections, when many Democrats complained of wrongly being denied voting rights, cried election-year conspiracy. But the state said Hispanics, as an ethnic group, were not on the list because of complications in identifying their ethnicity.

Nevertheless, Bush scrapped the database. That came just weeks after media groups won a court judgment forcing Bush's election chief to release the felon list.

Bush said his department was just following a law shielding the list from the public. The governor said he thought his corrections department was doing the same thing with regard to providing felons with the necessary paperwork. He pointed out that he instituted a computerized application process that he had ''gotten little credit for'' even though it streamlines the clemency system.

Bush, who had not read Wednesday's ruling, said the state would comply with it but wasn't sure ''how that jibes with the statute.'' He suggested that the judges had ''leeway'' in interpreting the statute's wording requiring the corrections department to help convicts with their clemency applications.

DEFINITION AT ISSUE

The words in question? ''Shall assist'' and ``other forms.''

The judges pointed out that the statute's definition of ''assist'' was ''ambiguous,'' but that it clearly requires the department to help inmates. Bush's electronic system wasn't enough, they said, because his department's attorneys acknowledged in court that 85 percent of felons are unaffected by the ''streamlined'' process, that they need ''other forms'' and that they don't get them.

The arguments by the state were so confusing to the appeals court that, at one point, a judge said it sounded like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

EVOLUTION OF CASE

The case was originally brought on behalf of about 125,000 felons, released from prison or supervision between 1992 and 2001, who didn't receive the proper paperwork to apply to have their rights restored. The state processed the applications, and determined that about 22,000 should automatically have their rights restored.

More than 50,000 of them had died, moved out of the state or were imprisoned anew, and about 50,000 others will have to go through the yearslong process of filling out the needed paperwork and requesting a hearing before Bush and the rest of the Florida Cabinet, which must vote to grant voting and gun-rights clemency. According to the state Parole Commission, processing those requests costs about $815 per inmate.

''Gov. Bush must do something to end this abysmal system of civil rights restoration,'' said Florida Justice Institute Executive Director Randall Berg, who argued the case against the state. ``It only continues to decrease the public's faith in our system of justice and the electoral process.''