Florida ex-felons file class action suit over voting laws News
Florida ex-felons file class action suit over voting laws

[JURIST] Seven convicted felons on Monday filed suit [complaint, PDF] alleging Florida’s process of restoring voting rights to felons is unconstitutionally arbitrary. The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida by the Fair Elections Legal Network [advocacy website] and the Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC [firmwebsite] on behalf of the seven plaintiffs, seeks to restore voting rights for ex-felons and eliminate the current process. Florida, Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia are the only states that require former felons to petition to public officials for the restoration of their voting rights. According the the complaint, there is no timetable required under the current law for a judgment on an ex-felon’s petition, and the 10,513 pending applications have created a significant backlog for the review board. “On September 1, 2016, this figure was 10,588. The backlog has only decreased by 75 pending applications in six months, demonstrating that the current system has both caused Florida’s disenfranchised population to grow to 1.68 million and is utterly unsuited to addressing the ever-worsening problem.”

Voting rights continue to be a pressing issue. Earlier in March a three-judge panel of the US District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled [JURIST report] that the boundaries of three voting districts violated the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. Also in March the US Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] that Virginia’s redistricting scheme must be examined for racial bias. In February the state of Georgia settled a lawsuit [JURIST report] against Secretary of State Brian Kemp over a voter registration law that would reject any application that did not exactly match personal identification information in state and federal databases.

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