Dear Florida Legislators:

Across Florida, returning citizens continue fighting for our right to vote. After Florida voters passed the Voter Restoration Amendment (Amendment 4) in 2018 with 65 percent of the vote, it automatically restored voting rights to returning citizens who completed their sentences, except those who committed murder or felony sexual offenses. But those with power quickly instituted a poll tax, requiring all returning citizens to pay all outstanding legal financial obligations before regaining the right to vote. Many brave Floridians challenged this poll tax, Senate Bill 7066 (SB7066), in the federal courts, and recently, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Florida voters and returning citizens. A majority of the appeals court blessed Florida’s pay-to-vote scheme.

Despite the appeals court’s ruling, those with power must understand SB7066 is part of a larger effort to deny those who have served their sentences their dignity and fundamental rights. After completing our sentences, many returning citizens struggle to find sustainable employment and housing. Although we have served our time, we are often on the receiving end of stigmatization and ostracization by our neighbors and the larger community, which makes it more challenging for us to become contributing members of our communities. Further, many others in government, who claim to champion democracy, continue to propose laws to eliminate returning citizens’ abilities to participate in civic engagement by criminalizing our votes and prohibiting us from becoming full-fledged, productive members of our community. This government action eliminates returning citizens’ abilities to become reintegrated.

Having a real second chance to make positive change and become a contributing member of our communities is met with numerous hurdles and obstacles the day we re-enter society. It harms us, and it harms our families and our loved ones.

Our elected leaders must understand having the ability to vote supports rehabilitation. Acknowledging returning citizens’ humanity and dignity makes our redemption and full rehabilitation possible. An unconstitutional poll tax most of us cannot afford to pay should not destroy our chance at redemption.

Returning citizens’ voices should be heard, and our votes should be counted for our children’s welfare. Please do not silence us and deprive us of the right to preserve our rights and our loved ones’ rights.

The state provides scant resources for returning citizens’ rehabilitation. The lack of meaningful resources for returning citizens who primarily come from low-income communities renders rehabilitation illusory when the government releases us into the same broken communities those in power already see as worthless. This perpetuates a cycle of poverty and disproportionately impacts and discriminates against low-income communities of color. Depriving us our ability to vote makes creating positive change within our communities impossible.

SB7066 makes it nearly impossible for returning citizens to have the second chance in life that the Voter Restoration Amendment promised us and our families. When SB7066 is combined with other suppression policies, our voices are silenced at the ballot box, we are held back from employment opportunities, and resources are withheld from the communities to which we return. Returning citizens are not asking for a handout, but a hand up from the social injustices stifling our futures.

We must also hear and remember the people still in overcrowded jails and prisons who are threatened by or suffering from COVID-19 with little-to-no protections or medical treatments.  Their lives and voices also matter.

Please, hear us. We have paid our debts to society and deserve a second chance. Give us a reason to believe our government also cares about us. Twelve-year-old Keedron Bryant recently wrote a song protesting police brutality containing a message we embrace that we also want you to hear: “We just want to live. God, please protect us”.

Tranassa White is a prison reform advocate and resident of Escambia County.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized that dismantling patriarchy was necessary not only for women’s liberation, but for all of us to have the freedom to thrive regardless of gender. That certainty drove her strategy during the eight years she spent as director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, which she co-founded with Brenda Feigen in 1972.

No case better encapsulated Ginsburg’s strategy in the 1970s than that of Charles Moritz. Moritz was solely responsible for the care of his elderly mother, but he had been denied a caregiving tax deduction because he was an unmarried man. By representing him, Ginsburg was able to show male judges that sex discrimination hurt men as well as women. And, because the case originated in tax court, it allowed Ginsburg and her beloved husband Marty, a tax specialist, to collaborate on work as well as life.

The government’s defense in the case backfired spectacularly. It pointed to a hefty list of federal statutes that, like the one that disadvantaged Moritz, expressly distinguished between women and men. Ginsburg couldn’t possibly be right about the tax law, argued the government, because if she was, then hundreds if not thousands of other laws would be unconstitutional, too. Ginsburg prevailed, and the list – known as “Appendix E” – became WRP’s playbook as Ginsburg and her colleagues systematically took aim at laws that discriminated on the basis of sex.

While Ginsburg succeeded in establishing that the government could not condition benefits on sex, the private sector has been slow to catch up. In recent years, WRP has challenged employer policies premised on the generalization that women are the primary caregivers at home and has fought for men and women to be entitled equally to benefits like parental leave to care for newborn children. Men’s full participation in early days of parenting can lead to more equitable family roles over the long haul.

Ginsburg knew that, in order for women to step out of caregiving roles, men would have to step into them. That’s not to say that Ginsburg prioritized work outside the home over work within it. To the contrary, it was her fervent hope that everyone could share equally in the joys and labor of family life.

I had the opportunity to interview Justice Ginsburg in what turned out to be one of her final public appearances. Knowing that she had often been asked how she balanced her own career with parenting, I wondered whether anyone had ever asked her husband about how he achieved work-life balance. Unfortunately, Marty wasn’t there to speak for himself, having died a decade earlier. Instead, I asked Ginsburg what advice she would give to men who are working and parenting. “One of the saddest things about men’s lives is that they’re out there working,” she answered, “and one day their children are grown and they didn’t have any real part in raising them.”

I remembered Ginsburg’s remarks in that moment on Friday evening when we learned, as the sky went dark and a new year began according to the Jewish calendar, that she had died. Just as childhood is fleeting, so too she had left us too soon. We at the ACLU will use each day to carry forward her legacy.

Note: This piece was originally published in SCOTUSblog on Sept. 21, 2020

Ria Tabacco Mar, Director, ACLU Women's Rights Project

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) is often referred to as the “motor voter” law because it requires states to offer voter registration at the DMV. The statute also requires certain state and local agencies, including public assistance and disability agencies providing Medicaid, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), and other similar programs, to provide clients with the opportunity to register to vote and assistance with registering whenever they apply for or recertify their benefits or submit a change of address.

Unfortunately, it is all too common for states to neglect or ignore the NVRA requirements. Many states recently upgraded to online systems to streamline the process for clients to apply for and recertify their benefits, but failed to provide NVRA required voter registration opportunities through these new platforms. Other states incorrectly place the burden on clients by making receiving a voter registration form an opt-in rather than opt-out process. And many states completely fail to provide clients with the opportunity to register or update their voter registration when they report a change of address.

As a result, millions of Americans — particularly low-income, minority, and disabled citizens, all of whom are already underrepresented in the electorate — are illegally denied their federally-mandated opportunity to register to vote. Low income voters traditionally face numerous obstacles to voter registration and, consequently, have among the lowest registration rates. More than 85 percent of citizens with a family income at or above $150,000 were registered to vote in November 2016, compared to only 57.7 percent of those with incomes below $10,000.[1] Low income voters are also more likely to move frequently and thus need to update their voter registration address.

In order to help rectify these NVRA violations, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, along with our partner organizations, have engaged in extensive litigation and advocacy to ensure that citizens with low incomes are provided the voter registration services they are legally entitled to. As a result, this year multiple states agreed to extensive mail campaigns to provide voter registration packets, including registration applications, to public assistance clients.
 
As of today, almost 3 million Medicaid, SNAP, and Low Income Energy Assistance (LIEAP) clients in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia have received voter registration applications in the mail. And due to the ongoing mailings, that number will grow before the fall voter registration deadlines. For example, in Arizona each month approximately 100,000 Medicaid clients will receive these mailings until the state’s NVRA violations are permanently resolved.

The timing of these mailings is particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Voter registration rates traditionally peak in the lead up to a presidential election, as new voters prepare to cast their ballot for the first time and seasoned voters update their registration. But the pandemic prevented most in-person voter registration opportunities, leading to drastic declines in registrations in many states.

Many voters register or update their address during a transaction at the DMV, and voter registration groups also play a large role in registering new voters, often through community events or door knocking. Stay at home orders, social distancing recommendations, and office closures limited these opportunities this year, and the impacts are drastic. For example, organizations in Florida registered 14,144 voters in January but only 133 in April. Although 39 states and DC now offer some voters the opportunity to register online, it has not made up for these lost in-person opportunities. In January and February 2020, voter registration rates far outpaced those of 2016. After the pandemic began in earnest in the U.S., one study found that new voter registrations dropped 70 percent in April compared to January in 11 states and D.C.

Further, in response to the pandemic, many states implemented emergency changes to the process for obtaining or renewing SNAP benefits. These changes are crucial to ensuring food assistance, but because SNAP clients must be provided voter registration during renewals, postponed deadlines have the unintended consequence of limiting registration opportunities. To help address the problem, we worked with states to provide additional mailings, texts, and calls to public assistance clients regarding voter registration opportunities. 

While these efforts can never undo the impacts of ongoing systemic NVRA violations and systemic voter suppression, they will at least provide millions of citizens the opportunity to register and vote in November.

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, November 2016, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/p20-580.html.

Ceridwen Cherry, Staff Attorney, ACLU Voting Rights Project,
& Sarah Brannon, Managing Attorney, ACLU Voting Rights Project