The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law filed a motion for preliminary injunction to block Senate Bill (“SB”) 7066, a bill signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in June that undermines Amendment 4 and prevents hundreds of thousands of newly re-enfranchised voters from voting in Florida. The organizations filed the initial federal lawsuit immediately after the bill was signed by Gov. DeSantis. SB7066 unconstitutionally denies the right to vote to returning citizens with past felony convictions based solely on their inability to pay all fines, fees, and other monetary penalties associated with their convictions.
“Politicians cannot legally place a price tag on a person’s right to vote. It’s past time for over a million Floridians to reclaim their place in democracy,” said Orion Danjuma, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, which, along with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, is challenging the law.
A preliminary analysis of outstanding legal financial obligations in Florida by Daniel A. Smith, professor and chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Florida, shows that in the 48 counties for which data has so far been analyzed, fewer than one in five—or just 66,108 of the 375,256 individuals with a felony conviction other than murder or a felony sexual offense who have been released from county or Florida Department of Corrections supervision—are likely to be eligible to register to vote under SB7066. This means that, across Florida’s 67 counties, SB7066 effectively disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of voters who would have been eligible to vote in Florida under Amendment 4 had the legislature not stepped in to dismantle it. …