October 19, 2019

A Big Legal Victory for Voting Rights in Florida, and a Rebuke Against its Republican Governor

A federal judge issued a ruling against a “modern day poll tax.”

James Borchuck/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA

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My colleague, and MoJo’s resident Big Brain on all things voting, pointed out this major legal win in Florida on Friday: A group of 20 people with felony convictions was suing the state over a new law requiring them to repay any fines or fees they owed before they could register to vote. The federal judge’s ruling was a temporary injunction, and represented, according to the New York Times:

… a rebuke to the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and its Republican-controlled Legislature. Legislators had enacted a law requiring the fine and fee payments this year after voters resoundingly approved an amendment to the State Constitution that restored voting rights to as many as 1.5 million former felons.

The law was widely seen as an attempt to suppress voting by the former felons, many of them African-Americans or Hispanics who appeared likely to support Democrats.

Here’s Ari with the crucial bit from the ruling:

This is a great opportunity to remind you of Ari’s work on this issue in Florida, where he documented the lead-up to the nation’s largest expansion of voting rights in decades, last November.

In his reporting for a big Mother Jones feature article on Florida’s Amendment 4, Ari met bikers in MAGA hats, African American preachers, convicts and their families, along with Floridians from all walks of life banding together to restore the right to vote to ex-felons. Ari’s reporting shows how even in a state that has a 150-year history of engineering laws to deprive African Americans of their civil rights, it is possible to change hearts and minds. Hear from Desmond Meade, one of the leaders of the Amendment 4 campaign, who was released from prison addicted, unable to find work, and homeless, but who ultimately led this successful campaign, on this episode of the Mother Jones Podcast, below:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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