While Florida generally makes it challenging for people in the state with felony convictions to regain their voting rights, former President Donald Trump had no issue casting a ballot for himself Tuesday in Palm Beach.
Trump was convicted in Manhattan earlier this year of 34 counts of falsifying business records tied to hush money payments before the 2016 election to adult film star Stormy Daniels. The first former US president convicted of a felony, Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on November 26.
Under Florida law, if a voter has an out-of-state conviction, Florida will defer to that state’s laws for how a felon can regain his or her voting rights.
For Trump, that means he will benefit from a 2021 New York law that allows people with felony convictions to vote as long as they’re not serving a term of incarceration at the time of the election.
For other Floridians with felony convictions, the rules are not so simple.
“Florida is really behind in terms of its laws,” said Blair Bowie, director of the Campaign Legal Center’s Restore Your Vote project, which is focused on ending felony disenfranchisement.
A successful 2018 ballot initiative restoring voting rights to those who had completed the terms of their sentence was gutted by state Republican lawmakers. They passed a law requiring that all the fines and fees associated with a conviction are paid – a process that can be cumbersome, as there is not a centralized system for tracking such outstanding fees.
The Republican measure adding the requirement that all fines and fees be paid was challenged in court, but a conservative appeals court ultimately upheld the law. Still, the litigation exposed how records of those outstanding debts are kept at the county level and are often incomplete.
But that bureaucratic morass is not something Trump must contend with, because he was convicted in New York.
“Bottom line is, it should be this easy for everyone, not just Trump,” Bowie said.
This story has been updated with additional developments.