How Republicans gutted the biggest voting rights victory in recent history
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Guardian UK) On the night it finally happened, Raquel Wright peeled off the road on her way home and went to her sisters house in Vero Beach, Florida. It didnt matter that no one was home Wright went inside, headed straight to the television, not bothering to turn on any lights. Watching the election results crawl across the screen, she finally saw the number she was waiting for. She broke into tears, sobbing in the pitch-black house.
About 100 miles north-west, in Orlando, Desmond Meade felt like a ton of bricks had been lifted off his shoulders. For nearly two decades, he and other activists had been pushing sometimes quixotically to end Floridas longstanding policy of preventing anyone with a felony conviction from voting. First implemented in the 19th century, the policy was used as a cudgel of white supremacy during the Jim Crow era to disenfranchise African Americans after they formally gained the right to vote. By 2016, it had become one of the most potent forms of voter suppression in the United States, blocking up to 1.4 million people in Florida including more than 21% of eligible Black voters from being able to vote. Among them were Wright and Meade.
On election night in 2018, Meade and Wright would find out that 64.5% of Floridians had voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to end the policy. More than 5.1 million people more than voted for Ron DeSantis, the Republican elected governor that evening were in favor of the measure. The referendum often referred to as amendment 4 was one of the most dramatic expansions of the right to vote in US history since the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
But more than a year and a half after amendment 4 went into effect, hundreds of thousands of people still remain blocked from voting.
The promise of amendment 4 remains largely unfulfilled because Republicans in Florida moved aggressively to gut it. They passed a law that put insurmountable hurdles in front of those with felony convictions and required them to navigate a byzantine bureaucracy to get their voting rights back (one county official testified in May that records from crimes decades ago had been kept on index cards in shoeboxes). As of late May, Floridas top election official had tens of thousands of pending registrations from people with felony convictions, but had yet to fully review a single one. ..............(more)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/06/republicans-florida-amendment-4-voting-rights