After Ronald Miller registered to vote in 2020, the State of Florida sent him a voter information card in the mail. Mr. Miller did not find out that a prior felony conviction made him ineligible to register or vote until, in 2022, Florida state officers arrested him. Now, Mr. Miller is one of several returning citizens that Florida’s Office of Statewide Prosecution (OSP) is prosecuting for making what appear to be good-faith mistakes about their voter eligibility. Rather than helping their citizens understand Florida’s complicated voter eligibility rules, the State has instead resorted to these intimidating, anti-democratic prosecutions.

Today, we — along with our partners at the ACLU of Florida, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justice — filed an amicus brief in Mr. Miller’s case highlighting OSP’s unlawful prosecution against Mr. Miller and other returning citizens in Florida, which disproportionately implicate Black citizens.

In 2018, Florida voters passed Amendment 4, which aimed to permanently end felony disenfranchisement in the state and restored voting rights for returning citizens who had completed the terms of their sentences. That amendment would’ve restored the right to vote for an estimated 1.4 million people. But, the following year, Florida’s legislature passed a new law requiring returning citizens pay off certain fines and fees before they can regain their right to vote. The ACLU and our partners challenged Florida’s pay-to-vote system for returning citizens, but were ultimately unsuccessful.

For Betty Riddle, Amendment 4 Win Makes Her A Part of Society, Not Apart

Betty was one of 1.4 million Floridians re-enfranchised by Amendment 4. This is her story on the fight to restore her rights.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Now, in the words of one federal court, Florida’s system of rights restoration for returning citizens is an “administrative train wreck.” Florida has essentially abdicated its responsibility to returning citizens in the state, refusing to provide meaningful guidance to individuals looking to navigate this byzantine system and figure out if they are eligible or not. When a registrant is ineligible, that should be flagged by the state before the person mistakenly casts a ballot, but Florida hasn’t consistently provided registrants with that clarity. In many cases, Florida has misled its citizens about their voter eligibility, including by sending them voter information cards in the mail.

And after telling multiple federal courts that returning citizens who made good-faith mistakes about their voter eligibility need not fear prosecution, the State has instead decided to prosecute nearly two dozen individuals for what appear to be honest mistakes. Fifteen out of the 19 returning citizens being prosecuted by OSP are Black.

Because Florida’s system for knowing whether you’re eligible to vote is so confusing, some of Florida’s local state attorneys have declined to prosecute people who try to register or vote while mistakenly thinking they’re eligible to do so. And for good reason: Voting while ineligible is a crime in Florida, but only when someone knows they’re ineligible and purposefully decides to vote anyway. People like Mr. Miller who don’t know and are never told they’re ineligible, and try to vote, aren’t guilty of a crime. That’s why, for example, one local prosecutor last year decided not to prosecute some people in a similar situation.

But just before a major election in 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced OSP’s arrests of 19 returning citizens — including Mr. Miller — for allegedly voting while ineligible in 2020. He called those arrests the “opening salvo” of his state government’s efforts to prosecute voting where local prosecutors hadn’t. OSP, however, only has authority to prosecute crimes that happen in multiple judicial circuits. Registering to vote or voting while ineligible, of course, happens only in one location. So, several state courts have dismissed the charges against Mr. Miller and some other returning citizens, finding that OSP didn’t have authority to bring the prosecutions. The State has appealed the dismissal.

Our amicus brief, filed before Florida’s intermediate appellate court, argues that the OSP doesn’t have the power to prosecute Mr. Miller. That’s because it was created to go after organized, complex, criminal conspiracies that are hard for one local prosecutor’s office to handle alone. The legislators who authorized OSP didn’t intend for it to wield its power to prosecute people like Mr. Miller, who vote or register because of a good-faith mistake. Instead, they were careful to give it a limited authority over only some kinds of crimes and not to usurp the discretion of local prosecutors. The State’s argument — that registering and voting occurs throughout the state as a whole, so any voting offense is a statewide crime — blows up that balance entirely. Under that theory, the OSP would have prosecutorial power over almost any offense. The State, in other words, wants OSP to have boundless authority.

Florida’s attempt to assert free reign to carry out unjust voter prosecutions, instead of fixing its registration system, is just one of many ways it has tried to chill and suppress the votes of Black people in the state. In Florida, one in eight Black people are disenfranchised, twice the rate of non-Black people. Nationwide, Black people are more likely to face jail time for voting violations. Knowing that any simple mistake on a voting form could lead to a prosecution has already made many eligible voters afraid to vote.

The Fight for Voting Rights: How the Past Informs the Current Discriminatory Landscape

For decades, Black voters fought for equal access to the ballot. Today, that access is still under attack.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

These arrests and prosecutions, in other words, are another dramatic attempt at suppressing votes in Florida, particularly for Black citizens. The ACLU and our partners are committed to combatting these shameful prosecutions that work to endanger our democracy.

The 2020 police killing of George Floyd launched the largest protests in U.S. history and a nationwide reckoning with systemic racism and police brutality. Now, Georgia’s Attorney General Chris Carr has shamefully invoked Floyd’s killing and the subsequent uprising in a sweeping criminal indictment of activists protesting a $90 million Atlanta police training center known as “Cop City.” Carr’s actions must be understood as extreme intimidation tactics that we need to resist. They must not set a precedent.

On September 5, Carr obtained indictments against 61 people, alleging violations of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, over ongoing efforts to halt construction of Cop City. Indicted activists, including a protest observer, face steep penalties of up to 20 years in prison. Three bail fund organizers face additional money laundering charges, and five people also face state domestic terrorism charges.

The indictment’s theory is shocking, and its combination of charges is unprecedented.

Georgia’s legislature intended RICO to combat organized crime, not to punish protest, civil disobedience, or isolated crimes. Yet according to Carr, opposing construction of Cop City amounts to a criminal conspiracy under the state RICO statute. To make its case, the indictment relies on people’s beliefs and community organizing as the connective tissue for sweeping criminal liability. It devotes 25 pages to vilifying Defend the Atlanta Forest (DTAF), the grassroots movement opposing Cop City’s construction, identifying its “beginnings” in the nationwide protests against George Floyd’s murder and protests in Georgia against the police killing of Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks, and calling out the movement’s “anarchist ideals.” It paints the provision of mutual aid, the advocacy of collectivism, and even the publishing of zines as hallmarks of a criminal enterprise. In doing so, it flies in the face of First Amendment protections for speech, assembly, and association.

Nathan Posner/Shutterstock

While Carr wants to prosecute a protest movement as if it were a full-fledged organized crime ring, much of the alleged conduct is far less severe. For example, the indictment’s list of alleged criminal conduct repeatedly includes: people trying to occupy the forest in which Cop City would be built, reimbursements for protest supplies, and characterization of individuals attempting to join a “mob” to overwhelm the police. Even innocuous acts like buying food, writing “ACAB,” or distributing flyers are made out to be the cornerstones of a nefarious criminal scheme.

To the extent that unlawful conduct such as property crimes could be alleged, Georgia prosecutors could have chosen to press those specific lesser charges. Instead, the indictment haphazardly sweeps many forms of opposition to Cop City, including speech, peaceful protest activities, and minor acts of civil disobedience, into felony violations of Georgia’s anti-racketeering law.

Indeed, Georgia officials have repeatedly chosen to escalate charges beyond any legitimate need. In March of this year, Georgia police stigmatized 42 Cop City activists with arrests for “domestic terrorism.” This is exactly the kind of overreach rights groups warned about and objected to when Georgia’s legislature amended the domestic terrorism law in 2017 to add a harsher punishment — up to 35 years — to property crimes that were already illegal, simply because of accompanying political expression critical of government policy. It’s chilling to see “domestic terrorism” charges formally levied against five people in the recent indictment.

Taken together, these disproportionate charges send a clear message: Think twice before voicing your dissent. Unfortunately, punitive intimidation tactics against civil rights, social justice, and environmental activists is not new. We do not forget that civil rights movement leaders like Rep. John Lewis and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were labeled security threats and investigated, monitored, and often arrested — including in Georgia — based on their organizing and civil disobedience in the pursuit of equality. If Georgia’s RICO and “domestic terrorism” laws had been available to prosecutors in the civil rights era, they could easily have been misused to persecute activists.

Today, there is legitimate concern that Georgia’s sweeping indictment could form a playbook for other prosecutors and state officials seeking to stifle political dissent. Several states now have RICO and domestic terrorism laws on the books. But Attorney General Carr’s actions must not set a precedent.

Instead, Georgia should honor a better precedent. Atlanta a critical hub of the modern civil rights movement — and the protection of protest is integral to both our rights and our democracy. Attorney General Carr’s trumped-up and excessive charges against Cop City activists should be dropped immediately.