Arrest Shows Confusion Over Florida’s Voting Law

The wannabe dic­ta­tor Governor in the state of Florida has cre­at­ed a force with­in law enforce­ment whose sole pur­pose is to arrest peo­ple with felonies who have paid their debt to soci­ety and have cast a vote in the state.
Desantis’ plan is to stop black vot­ers from vot­ing but more so to chill the vote of black Floridians who may not be sure whether or not they are eli­gi­ble to vote.

Florida Amendment 4, the Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative, was on the bal­lot in Florida as an ini­ti­at­ed con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment on November 6, 2018. It was approved.

A “yes” vote sup­port­ed this amend­ment to auto­mat­i­cal­ly restore the right to vote for peo­ple with pri­or felony con­vic­tions, except those con­vict­ed of mur­der or a felony sex­u­al offense, upon com­ple­tion of their sen­tences, includ­ing prison, parole, and probation.

A “no” vote opposed this amend­ment to auto­mat­i­cal­ly restore the right to vote for peo­ple with pri­or felony con­vic­tions, except those con­vict­ed of mur­der or a felony sex­u­al offense, upon com­ple­tion of their sen­tences, includ­ing prison, parole, and pro­ba­tion.Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ® said that Amendment 4 would require the Florida State Legislature to pass imple­ment­ing leg­is­la­tion for the amend­ment before it could take effect. The Florida Legislature con­vened on March 5, 2019. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner® said, “We need to get some direc­tion from [the Legislature] as far as imple­men­ta­tion and def­i­n­i­tions — all the kind of things that the [elec­tions] super­vi­sors were ask­ing. It would be inap­pro­pri­ate for us to charge off with­out direc­tion from them.”[3]Florida Senate President Bill Galvano ® said “By a lot of accounts, there’s no action even required for its imple­men­ta­tion.”[4]Proponents of the mea­sure said that the ini­tia­tive’s lan­guage is self-exe­cut­ing and did not require imple­ment­ing leg­is­la­tion.[5]Former-Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum (D), DeSantis’ 2018 gen­er­al elec­tion oppo­nent, tweet­ed: “The role of the gov­er­nor is to faith­ful­ly exe­cute the laws, includ­ing #Amendment4 on January 8 — and not one day lat­er. Justice delayed is jus­tice denied.”[6]

What Desantis and Republicans in the Florida state leg­is­la­ture cooked up was a scheme to defy the will of the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the state’s vot­ers by say­ing that there must be leg­is­la­tion to define who gets to vote and who doesn’t.
The sad irony is that those are the exact ques­tions that bal­lot mea­sure amend­ment 4 addressed.
Ron Desantis and Republicans in the state are afraid of the vot­ers, as is evi­dent in states like Georgia, where Brian Kemp ille­gal­ly removed over two hun­dred thou­sand vot­ers from vot­ing rolls because they did not vote in every election.
Kemp purged those rolls as sec­re­tary of state and won the elec­tions by a slim 2% mar­gin over Stacy Abrams.
Desantis elec­tion police are now out in force arrest­ing Black peo­ple who dared to vote, even though they have a legal right to do so.