I get the impression that, if one wants to know what fascism would look like in the United States as a whole, they need look no farther than Florida or Texas
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The state and local governments there are purposefully making it hazardous for anyone with any criminal record to vote. If they wanted people to pay, they would make it easy to determine whether and how much they owe. But they don’t, so they won’t.
Florida pioneered the use of spurious felony convictions to disenfranchise Black voters. Not as an incidental side effect, either; this was a “clever” new trick to get around Constitutional protections that threatened what Southern whites asserted was the “natural order”. The unknowable and unpayable labyrinth of fines is part of this Jim Crow determination to keep the Black vote suppressed.
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This reeks of unconstitutionality, both for requiring the payment of fines that are not on the books and for the legislature’s overriding the will of the voters. If we had a functional U.S. supreme court, these miscarriages of justice would be overturned there, but alas the present crew would probably rule that the state of Florida was right on both counts.
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