There is good news coming on this front from an unexpected corner. According to a really interesting article by The Daytona Beach News-Journal:
Voter registration records are public, as are felony criminal records.
But a last-minute insertion into a bill that passed with overwhelming support on the final day of Florida’s legislative session aims to keep the public from seeing felon voting restoration records.
Lawmakers say the amendment protects felons from being singled out and harassed. But the change also makes it difficult, if not impossible, to track the progress of a November constitutional amendment that restored voting rights to more than 1 million felons.
The bill would exempt from public scrutiny the names of felons granted voting rights by the governor and clemency board, which previously had the task of restoring voting rights to felons. The Palm Beach Post used those records in October to report that under Gov. Rick Scott, the clemency board had restored voting rights to the lowest percentage of black felons in 50 years.
See the full story here. In Florida, voters in 2018 restored voting rights to close to 1.5 million felons through a popular referendum. As such, a long racist history of the abuse of felon disenfranchisement in the state was finally ended. From now on, Floridians with prior felonies will be given the right to vote. The PBS Newshour’s Hari Sreenivasan together with Myrna Perez, who leads the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Election Project, held a very recommended review of the full meaning of this new voting law in a segment titled, “In Florida, Amendment 4 restores more than a right to vote” published on Nov 2018. The full transcript can be found here. The video lasts for about 4 minutes:
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