At first, it seemed that Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of felony falsification of business records would leave him ineligible to cast a ballot in his own race this fall. The candidate is a resident of Palm Beach County in Florida, a state that requires felons to pay a hefty set of fines, fees and court costs before they can vote and makes it next to impossible to know whether they’ve met their obligations. But he was tried and convicted in New York, where people convicted of felonies are only prevented from voting while they’re incarcerated. And it turns out Florida treats out-of-state convictions according to the relevant out-of-state rules, so what New York says goes.
These rules mean that, barring an unexpectedly harsh sentence and the absence of a stay pending the appeal he has vowed to lodge, Mr. Trump will be permitted to head to the polls come November. And perhaps he needn’t have worried anyway: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) promised late last week that the state’s clemency board, of which he is chair, would restore the former president’s right to vote if it were stripped from him.
This would have been the right outcome, occurring for the wrong reasons. Florida’s repugnant rules on felon disenfranchisement are in place because state lawmakers eviscerated a reform meant to restore felons’ voting rights, a reform that a supermajority of Florida voters approved. The rules prevent hundreds of thousands of people from reentering society after serving their time unless they pay what, for them, amounts to a poll tax. Some citizens have been confronted with bills of over $50,000. Worse still, the opacity of the system — there’s no database to help people figure out what they owe — renders it vulnerable to exactly the sort of favoritism Mr. DeSantis displayed. Who gets their rights back, apparently, depends on politics.
The trend toward restoring rights, as in New York along with other (mostly Democrat-run) states, is welcome. But the convoluted status quo in which Northeasterners with felony convictions may vote in federal elections while Southerners with felony convictions cannot is a problem in itself. A regulation so essential to nationwide contests should apply uniformly across the country. This is doubly true when the freedom in question is one of the most sacred the Constitution affords. Yet, instead, the country has a hodgepodge of conflicting regulations, under which felons never lose their right to vote in some states, even while incarcerated, and in others, felons need a governor’s pardon to regain their lost rights. The prospect of sorting through it all — even as Republicans seek, for political gain, to crack down on an alleged crisis of improper voting — is enough to deter many from even trying.
This patchwork brings to mind the 2020 presidential race, in which the intricacies of different states’ procedures for conducting their votes and certifying their slates of presidential electors assisted “big lie” proponents in seeding doubt and causing chaos. The Electoral Count Reform Act, passed as part of an omnibus appropriations bill in 2022, went some way toward addressing this problem.
The confusing multiplicity of rules also harks back to the 2000 presidential race, in which the absence of minimum standards for voting equipment and procedures brought the country to the brink of crisis. The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, improved matters there, too.
Congress ought to step in again, uniformly restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences — not only because doing so could preempt any similar imbroglio but also because those who have served their time deserve representation, too.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump ought to be able to cast his ballot, even though he previously opposed enfranchising felons, calling a 2016 Virginia rights restoration initiative an effort to enable “crooked politics” because the beneficiaries were “gonna vote Democrat.” Those who support voting rights and oppose Mr. Trump ought to avoid engaging in similar hypocrisy — even if they know Mr. Trump will vote for himself.
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