Former felons are barred from voting in Florida, and in order to regain the right to vote an ex-felon must personally petition the governor. Even then, a petitioner does not qualify to have his voting rights restored until five years after the end of his sentence, parole, or probation—whichever comes latest. “Until you go through this, you don’t know what an arduous process this is,” the sheriff of Dixie County told reporters, in September, while supporting a friend’s rights-restoration petition. “A lot of people get discouraged. It takes a lot.” As a result, on Tuesday, when nationally significant races for the Senate, governor, and House of Representatives will be decided in Florida, a million and a half of the state’s residents won’t be able to participate.
Floridians who are able to vote will also, on Tuesday, decide the fate of a ballot amendment—known as Amendment 4—that would establish the automatic restoration of voting rights for most ex-felons once their parole and probation have been completed. It is arguably the most significant initiative on any ballot in the country. Supporters of the amendment, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the billionaire George Soros, have spent millions of dollars pushing for its passage. A notable aspect of their efforts has been how little resistance they’ve encountered, and how broadly popular the proposal has been. In Florida, ballot initiatives require sixty-per-cent support to pass, and polls so far have suggested that Amendment 4 will be successful thanks to its popularity among voters in both major parties. Last week, when Suffolk University surveyed Florida residents, they found that Democratic voters favored the measure eighty-six per cent to nine per cent, and that Republicans backed it fifty-two per cent to thirty-seven per cent. A national sample polled by HuffPost and YouGov earlier this year found that eighty per cent of people who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 supported the restoration of felons’ rights. But so did fifty-eighty per cent of those who backed President Trump. Former felons are not an obviously sympathetic population. For decades, their presence in political debates has mostly been as the subject of scare campaigns. And even though Democrats and Republicans agree right now on just about nothing, they agree that former felons should have the right to vote.
This year, though, the issue has been stripped of any partisan framework. The President, who has campaigned for his party in the midterms by warning darkly of the threat of immigration, and who has campaigned fiercely on behalf of his party’s candidates in Florida, hasn’t touched the issue. If the polls hold, and Amendment 4 succeeds, it’ll be among the few outcomes that both parties look ready to get behind.
