Florida missed that boat. The sunshine state had never voted on the 19th Amendment before it was ratified. Florida’s legislature didn’t actually ratify the 19th Amendment until it took a symbolic vote in 1969.
The current news about Florida’s voter purge has me wondering what happened in the 43 years between Florida’s symbolic thumbs up for suffrage and today’s current voter suppression?
The answer: The year 2000 happened.
Katherine Harris was elected Florida’s Secretary of State in 1998. Soon after, she initiated a voter purge in Florida that had been unseen since the days of Jim Crow. More than 57,700 eligible voters were wrongfully purged from Florida’s voter rolls. Harris claimed the purge was an attempt to block convicted felons from voting, but the purge was conducted in such a way that the state gave itself wide latitude to strike names that were not confirmed felons.
Recently Florida launched a new voter suppression campaign that claims to target non-citizens, but disproportionately affects Latinos and relies on an unreliable list of 2700 potential citizens.
In a democracy, the ability to vote is one of the most basic ways each citizen is given to exercise agency in her world. No matter how poor you are, no matter how rich you are, no matter marginalized you are, no matter how much power you wield, no matter obscure your life, and no matter how famous your name - all have the right to exercise a most basic form of agency in our world—the cast of a vote.
So, as we celebrate the anniversary of the congressional passage of the 19th Amendment, I celebrate the Justice Department’s decision to block implementation of Florida’s latest ode to Jim Crow. And I thank the 67 county elections supervisors, 30 of whom are Republican, who have defied Gov. Rick Scott and refused to implement the Florida purge.
The full article is available here
