It was his predecessor, Charlie Crist, who had restored them roughly four years prior.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker on Tuesday ordered the state clemency board — which consists of Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, State CFO Jimmy Patronis and Ag Commissioner Adam Putnam — to revise its current avenue by which former felons can earn back the right to vote, the News Service of Florida reported.
Currently, it takes about five to seven years for someone who has served his or her time to win back the ability to vote — if he or she can do it at all.
Voting rights groups like the Fair Elections Network want to change that, both via a November ballot initiative and the courts.
Last month, the Fair Elections Network scored a victory in their lawsuit against the state when Walker struck down the state's current voting rights restoration process.
He expressed concern over bias and partisanship, given how it's elected officials who are deciding who can and can't vote.
Scott subsequently threatened to do away with ex-felon voting rights restoration entirely.
Then on Tuesday, Walker ordered Scott to come up with a fair process that doesn't take took long or create unfair advantages for certain types of potential voters.
“This court is not the Vote-Restoration Czar. It does not pick and choose who may receive the right to vote and who may not,” Walker’s 22-page order begins.
Walker continues that Scott and his fellow clemency board members, in an apparently half-assed effort (our words, not Walker's) to comply with the February order, “essentially repackage the current scheme” to allow it “to do, as the governor described, ‘whatever we want’ in denying voting rights to hundreds of thousands of their constituents.”
“This will not do,” Walker wrote.
Whoa.
About 1.5 million people are not allowed to vote in Florida due to past felony convictions. Among this population is a disproportionately high number of people of color. Without their ability to vote, elections can get skewed in a purple state like Florida, given that minority populations tend to vote Democrat.
Advocates of restoring voting rights say they want to give nonviolent former offenders the ability to cast a ballot in Florida after they've served their sentences.
They, of course, lauded Walker's decision.
"Today the court has ordered Defendants to make meaningful changes to Florida's voting rights restoration scheme that will eliminate the risk of arbitrary and discriminatory decision-making and not merely serve as smoke screens," said Jon Sherman, senior counsel at the Fair Elections Legal Network, in a written statement. "This is a victory for the principle that the right to vote cannot be subjected to officials’ gut instincts and whims. We are also heartened that the court prevented Florida from following through on its threat to become the only state in the nation with an irrevocable lifetime ban on voting for all former felons — what the court called ‘the ultimate arbitrary act.'
Scott, who is expected to announce a run for U.S. Senate against Democrat Bill Nelson next month, was (of course) not amused.
"Officials elected by Floridians, not judges, have the authority to determine Florida's clemency process for convicted felons," spokesman John Tupps said in a statement the Tampa Bay Times. "This is outlined in Florida's Constitution and has been in place for more than a century and under multiple gubernatorial administrations."
This article appears in Mar 22-29, 2018.