Florida's ex-felon voting rules slow to impact registration

By some estimates, changes to the Florida state constitution could add as many as 1.4 million new voters to the rolls in Florida.

Feb. 24, 2019, 8:47 AM EST

By Dante Chinni and Sally Bronston

WASHINGTON - This past fall, citizens in Florida voted to give most former felons the right to vote and in doing so they may have fundamentally altered the electoral math in the nation’s swingiest perpetual swing state – or … maybe not.

In 2018, 65 percent of Florida’s voters approved an amendment to the state’s constitution that would automatically “restore the right to vote for people with prior felony convictions, except those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense, upon completion of their sentences, including prison, parole, and probation.”

The change brought Florida in line with most other states, where such restorations are commonplace, but it also dramatically changed the potential voter pool in the state. By some estimates, the change could add as many as 1.4 million new voters to the rolls in Florida.

And an analysis by two newspapers in the state showed those new voters could have a specific partisan lean. The Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald looked at the most recent year of data on citizens who lost their right to vote in the 20 largest counties in the state and found a lot of Democrats.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/florida-s-ex-felon-voting-rules-slow-impact-registration-n975041?cid=public-rss_20190224