This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Justice is a myth.
Power, not law, determines legal status.
So some counties will charge you money to tell you how much money a person owes?
This is a disgusting abuse of the legal system.
That’s some catch; the best there is…
Florida is indeed a “swing” state.
Gangsters
I’m wondering why anyone would choose to live in FL. The mean-spirited GOP goes to great lengths to punish people for almost anything.
Nah. Worse. They charge you to access their data to figure out IF you owe. You may owe them nothing.
I remember what an uplifting story it was that the bill allowing felons who had completed their sentences to vote passed with such a wide majority. This is a perfect example of how the GOP minority can pervert the will of the people to a degree of cruelty that could not have been imagined by the people who first sponsored the bill.
This is true evil I used to never use that word, assuming that all people were actually doing their best at any given point. But I was wrong - things like this serve no one’s interest. There is just no point to this other than cruelty.
I guess the “county elections official” neglected to tell these folks which club they’re not part of.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
—Frank Wilhoit the Younger
You and me both. I used to think that word applied only to rare instances such as Hitler and Dahmer. Now I know it applies to many people in the GOP.
“That’s kind of the bottom line of the absurdity of this — it’s Kafkaesque,” said Dan Smith, chair of the political science department at the University of Florida. “It’s very troubling that we would have state attorneys prosecuting individuals who did not know their status, and there was no way for them to determine their status.”
In Ron DeSantis’ Florida Kafkaesque is a feature not a bug. The prosecuting attorney should be ashamed, but I bet he is going to get a pat on the back from the other local GOP politicians.
And Mark Meadows has still not been charged?
And skin color. I’m listening to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow about mass incarceration, and it’s heartbreaking. Now add in these byzantine rules and systems applied to felons’ voting rights, and I can’t see any hope at all.
Who are all these folks who think that requiring >all fines< to be paid is a good idea to withhold the franchise from effected citizens?
We don’t have a democracy because in our democracy slaves can’t vote, and there is a significant portion of our population which is enslaved.
Orlando Patterson defined slavery in a way that was not capitalistic, to try to capture the institution in cultures, the majority of cultures, that aren’t capitalist. In doing so he made an ingenious contribution to sociology and to our understandings of power structures.
He identified three traits that are required to identify an institution as slavery.
1. General dishonor
2. Natal Isolation
3. Social Death
Our prison system is clearly, by this definition, slavery.
People tried to help, but it was just a drop in the bucket - and with the lack of centralized information in Florida it still leaves people unable to vote. I don’t know if it’s still going on.
They’re doing under supervision of a government official, and they get it wrong, so they spend additional years in jail. There are no words.