- Good morning, and I am
officially welcoming you
to our discussion on Free Our Vote,
voting rights and technical solutions.
My name is Hillary Brill,
and I lead Georgetown's
Institute for Technology
Law and Policy, which is a
think tank at Georgetown Law,
where we focus on providing deep expertise
in tech and policy and
public interest issues
for our students.
We engage in independent
research on issues
at the intersection of law and policy
and convene thought leaders,
civil society, policy makers,
and experts on a variety of
issues that involve technology,
including privacy, AI
bias, digital inequities,
and of course today's important
issue about voting rights.
Today's event showcases the
philosophy of the Tech Institute
that technologists working together
with civil society can solve solutions,
can create and provide solutions
to pressing access to justice problems.
The Institute, for example,
hosts the Iron Tech Invitational,
where students from
around the world compete
to create apps dedicated to
helping access to justice.
As we approach the upcoming elections
in an unprecedented, uncertain environment
during a global pandemic,
issues of disenfranchisement,
whether intended or not are
at the forefront of concerns
of our civic society.
At the core of our fundamental
rights is the ability
of our enfranchisement,
our ability to elect
and choose our leaders.
Today's discussion focuses
and presents officially Free Our Vote,
a technological solution created
by our very own professor Neel Sukhatme
to provide access to justice
for voters in Florida
that are dealing with
a voting rights issue
in our upcoming election.
I will leave it up to
our esteemed panelists
with deep expertise to present
the voting rights issues
that are going on in Florida
and voting rights issues in general.
And I leave it to Professor
Sukhatme to discuss
and present how Free Our Vote
can help with this problem,
how it works and how he is motivated
to action to create this solution.
But briefly, let me just
tell you a little bit
about our panelists.
Professor Sukhatme, a
professor at Georgetown Law
and is also the Thomas Alva
Edison Visiting Scholar
at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
He received his PhD in
Economics from Princeton,
and he received his JD
from Harvard Law School.
After law school,
Professor Sukhatme clerked
for the Honorable Walker
on the U.S. District Court
and the Honorable Williams
in the U.S. Court of Appeals.
He received his Bachelor's
Degree in Computer Engineering
and a minor in mathematics.
He is also the co-founder of Spindrop,
which I recommend to all of you,
a music technology startup
with a novel approach
for automatically mixing songs.
I'd also like to present Ashley Thomas,
the Florida State Director
for the Fines and Fees Justice Center.
Ashley Thomas, as the
director works closely
with the Florida community
and community-based organizations,
state legislators, local officials,
and a diverse group of stakeholders
to advance policies that
are better for Florida
and for individuals
whose lives are impacted
by criminal justice debts.
Prior to joining the center,
Ashley was the Director
of Strategic Initiatives
at South Carolina Appleseed
Legal Justice Center,
working on reentry forms
and removing barriers
to opportunity for individuals
with criminal justice involvement.
She successfully lobbied for legislation,
including a bill to remove a fee
for South Carolina's convicted
violent offender law,
a passage of the Mug Shot Extortion Bill,
as well as legislation
expanding South Carolina's
expungement law.
Before this, she was a public defender,
and she spent over three
years as a public defender,
ensuring her clients'
legal rights were upheld.
We have with us another professor,
welcome to our own from
Georgetown, Professor Paul Smith,
who is an expert in constitutional law
and election law issues.
He is also the Vice President
for Litigation and Strategy
at the Campaign Legal Center,
which fights to preserve
and promote American democracy.
Prior to 2017, he was in private practice
for more than three decades
where he had a Supreme Court practice
and an election law practice.
He has argued 21 cases in the
United States Supreme Court,
including a number of
voting related cases.
And we pleased to have you here.
We have Jesse Kelly, who works
for the R Street Institute's
criminal justice implementation efforts
across the United States
as a government relations director
at both the federal and state level.
She advocates, researches and writes
for criminal justice and
civil liberties policy team.
She works with lawmakers
to implement effective public policies
related to policing
reform, juvenile justice,
post-conviction life and other topics.
She previously worked as a
criminal defense attorney
in Alabama and worked on the
Mississippi Innocence Project
on post-conviction issues.
We are pleased to have Marq Mitchell,
the founder of Chainless Change, Inc.
A child of formerly incarcerated parents,
he has also been directly
involved with the criminal justice
and child welfare systems.
Before the age of 22,
Marq had served nearly
seven years in juvenile
and adult detention facilities.
As a result of this experience,
Marq understands the system firsthand,
and he's proved that with
access to proper resources,
formerly incarcerated women
and men can not only thrive,
but they can contribute
immensely to society.
And he founded Chainless Change.
He also has studied
business administration.
He is a trained forensic
peer support specialist,
and he has served in his community
by focusing on reentry, at-risk youth
and advocacy for disadvantaged groups.
And our final panelist is Neil Volz,
Deputy Director of the Florida
Rights Restoration Coalition,
the organization that
spearheaded the passage
of Florida's Amendment 4 in 2018.
Volts has more than 25 years of experience
working as a public servant.
He is a former chief of staff
and staff director for Congress.
He ran a homeless shelter,
worked as a program director
and served as a chair
of the Homeless Coalition in Lee County.
He has worked on a variety
of different services
in Southwest Florida,
and he is the author of
the book "Into the Sun"
and speaks to local, state
and federal organizations
about his work on Amendment 4 in Florida.
With this, I want to let all
of these tremendous panelists
talk about these issues.
And I wanted to first start, Ashley,
with your feet on the
ground and your experience
and your participation directly
with what's going on in Florida,
can you please set the stage,
explain from the state
perspective what's going on
with this Florida law,
including motivations behind
the passage of the bill?
- Yes, thank you so much, Hillary,
for having me, and I am
thrilled to be a part
of this amazing panel
and discussion today.
And obviously the issue of fines and fees
are a big issue for the
work that I do in Florida.
So I wanna talk a little bit
about the Fines and Fees Justice Center.
We're a relatively new organization
designed around advocacy,
information and collaboration.
And our mission is really
to create a justice system
that treats people fairly
and ensures public safety
and community prosperity.
And we are the only
organization in the country
focused exclusively on fines
and fees in the justice system.
So in addition to serving as
a national hub of information
on fines and fees reform,
FFJC also has four state campaigns.
We have a state, New Mexico, Nevada,
New York, and of course
Florida, which is where I work.
So I wanna start just by
sort of setting the stage
of why fines and fees
issues are such a, you know,
impacting so many people here in Florida
and why it's such a huge issue
that needs to be addressed.
And I'm gonna start with just sort
of very basic information about the types
of monetary obligations that stem
from criminal court involvement.
And there are basically three buckets
that I'm gonna talk about.
And the first one is sort
of costs that are assessed
to serve as restitution.
Restitution is designed
to make victims whole.
And so for instance,
if a window is broken,
it's money to replace the window,
or if a car is stole,
money to replace a car,
so on and so forth.
And fines are another
type of financial debt
that can come out of involvement
in the criminal justice system.
Fines are by nature, you know,
sort of designed to be a punishment
to serve as part of the punitive part
of a criminal sentence.
Sometimes they're used as an
alternative to incarceration.
Sometimes they are in
addition to incarceration,
and in Florida,
not every criminal conviction
comes with a fine attached,
but many do, and especially when it comes
to drug convictions, these
fines can be pretty significant.
You know, certain drug charges carry fines
of $50,000, mandatory charges,
mandatory fines of $50,000
up to a couple hundred
thousand dollars in fines.
And I wanna focus mostly
on the third bucket,
which are fees.
So fees are in many ways
the most egregious way
that money enters the justice system.
And in Florida, every
single criminal conviction,
whether a misdemeanor or a felony
will automatically carry
hundreds of dollars worth
of fees that attach as soon
as a conviction attaches.
And these fees are basically designed
to raise revenue for the state of Florida.
And over the years,
these fees have increased
as revenue needs have increased.
These fees fund clerks of court,
they are earmarked to be deposited
into Florida's General Revenue Fund.
There are over 30 additional trust funds
that receive dollars from these fees
that are charged to folks
with criminal and felony convictions.
And these trust funds serve
important government purposes,
but they may or may
not be actually related
to the underlying offense
for which they're imposed.
So some of these funds are like the Brain
and Spinal Cord Injury Trust Fund,
Marine Resources Conservation Trust Fund,
the Crime Compensation Trust Fund,
Department of Financial
Services Operating Trust Fund,
Crime Stoppers Trust Fund,
Department of Children and Family Grants
and Donations Trust Fund,
the State Attorney Trust Fund,
Indigent Defense Trust
Fund, so on and so forth.
I mean, the list kind of goes on.
That's just a sample
of where the dollars go
that are assessed.
And over the last three years,
there's been over $1.1
billion in fines and fees
that have been remitted
to the state of Florida
to be divvied up amongst
these various trust funds.
So the state of Florida really depends
on these fines and fees to raise revenue,
to support core government services,
to support these trust funds that exist.
So I talked a little bit
about where the dollars go.
I also wanna talk about
where they are coming from.
So, and this is not an exhaustive
list at all, but you know,
in Florida, if you need to
apply for a public defender,
you have to pay $50 for the court
to determine whether or
not you were indigent
and qualify for a public defender.
If you then receive the
assistance of a public defender,
it's an additional fee of at least $50,
despite the fact that we're all told
that the state will provide
a lawyer at no cost to us.
That's not the case in Florida.
There is a a $100 fee, minimum $100 fee
to pay a prosecutor for prosecuting you.
Mandatory $225 fee that attaches
to every felony conviction.
And there are just additional, you know,
fees and surcharges and costs
that attach automatically as
soon as a person is convicted.
So, you know, when you think about it,
the upshot is a person
is convicted for a crime.
And in addition to facing
probation or a prison sentence,
every individual has hundreds of dollars
of fines and fees that are imposed.
And Florida knows that these
costs are unaffordable.
They only expect to collect
about 9% of the felony fines
and fees that are imposed.
And the consequences for
nonpayment are pretty severe.
If a debt goes 30 days unpaid,
you lose your driver's license.
If it goes 90 days unpaid,
it goes to collections
and then additional surcharges are added.
And so with Amendment 4
and sort of the underlying
context of fines and fees,
you can see that this is
impacting everybody basically
who goes through the justice system
and can't afford to pay
these fines and fees.
And so what Amendment 4
ultimately did is in addition
to extracting wealth from communities,
they've also, you know,
the Florida lawmakers that passed SB 7066
managed to extract also
political accountability
to individuals who are most
impacted by fines and fees
by basically keeping them from being able
to register to vote.
So with that, I will wrap up,
but I'm looking forward
to this discussion today.
- Thank you, Ashley,
for explaining to us what is
happening right now in Florida.
And I'd like to turn this
over to Professor Paul Smith
to set the stage and lay
the groundwork, please,
for what the general
voting rights issues are
and the current case, what
happened recently in August,
the procedural history,
sort of set the stage
for our audience, where we are
and how we got there legally.
- Thanks, Hillary.
As Hillary indicated,
I have a second role,
which is vice president
of thing called the Campaign Legal Center.
And I'm happy to be here
to talk to all of you
about the case in Florida
that grew out of Amendment 4,
which we and a lot of other fine lawyers
from other nonprofits are involved in.
It's really a great cast of legal brains
trying to figure out how to deal
with the problem that arose,
I think, kind of unexpectedly.
The people of Florida in
2018, as I'm sure you know,
rose up and said we're not
gonna be the leading state
for disenfranchisement of
people with felony convictions,
as we have been for many decades.
There was well over a
million people in Florida
who could not vote and it was
essentially a lifetime ban
from voting.
60 some percent of the voters said
we're gonna amend the
Constitution to eliminate that
and say, once you finish
all terms of your sentence,
including probation,
we need to be able to
vote under Florida law.
And nobody really focused
at the time on the question
of fines and fees, which
arise out of your conviction,
as Ashley said, essentially
every conviction
entails some form of
exaction of fees or costs,
because the court system
itself has to be paid for
by the fees it can exact.
There's no general revenue
that goes to the court system.
Plus they fund a lot of
other stuff that way.
Plus there are the fines and restitution.
And the way the system works,
by the time you get out of probation
and would otherwise be eligible to vote
under Amendment 4,
most of the people who
haven't at that point paid
what they owe really can't.
The people who can would
have done it during probation
in most cases, 'cause
there's a lot of incentive
to keep your payments up.
So we have this population
of 700, 800,000 people
who would otherwise be able to vote
under Amendment 4, but can't
because they owe fines and fees.
And the constitutional issue in the case,
there's several of them,
but one of them is,
can people be denied the right to vote
because of their inability to pay
because of their poverty?
Is it okay to have two classes of voters?
Two classes of people with the
exact same felony conviction,
the exact same sentence,
the one that was able
to pay the fines and fees gets to vote.
The one who isn't able to
essentially maintains a
lifetime ban on voting.
And is that a form of discrimination
that we should tolerate
under the 14th Amendment
when something as important
as voting is at stake?
A second argument in the
case is that this requirement
that you pay these fines
and fees in order to vote
is a form of a poll tax.
The poll tax was a device intended
to prevent people from
voting in Jim Crow era,
primarily targeting blacks.
And it was banned for federal elections
in the 24th Amendment back in the 1960s.
And so we raise that argument as well.
And there's a third big issue in the case,
which is the system is
so messed up in Florida
they can't even tell you what
you owe or what you have paid.
The court records are a mess.
There's no centralized database.
Many times the judgment is ambiguous
that you might have several convictions,
some felony convictions,
some misdemeanor convictions
with a generalized fine.
Nobody knows which one
it is attributable to.
And there are very few records
that accurately reflect
what you have paid.
Restitution is often paid
to private individuals
and not recorded at all.
Anyway, we had in this case,
17 individual plaintiffs,
and the state was unable
to, by the time of trial,
even tell what any of those
17 owed at this point,
the records were such a mess.
So there's kind of a
procedural due process
void for vagueness claim.
And we were able to succeed
on all three of those issues,
wealth discrimination, poll
tax, and procedural due process
after a trial that happened last spring,
over Zoom, much like
this proceeding today,
an excellent, remarkable
opinion by Judge Hinkle saying,
first of all, under a long
line of Supreme Court cases,
discrimination against
people in access to voting
is unconstitutional when it's based
on their inability to pay.
The cases involved,
private cases involving
voting plus also cases
that say you can't be put in jail,
because you can't pay a fine.
You can't be denied the right
to appeal your conviction
if you can't pay the fees
that are associated with it,
those kinds of important interests
can't be tied to payment of a fee
at least as to those people
who can't afford the fee.
And so that was a very
important holding by the court.
And then the court
differentiated between the fines
and restitutions on one side,
and these fees and costs,
which are primarily
revenue raising measures
on the other and said, as to the latter,
tying that to the ability
to vote is a straight up tax
within the meaning of
the poll tax amendment.
The poll tax amendment says
you can't have poll taxes
or any other taxes as
a condition of voting.
And he said, this is clearly taxes.
Their primary purpose is
to fund the court system.
And if you tie that to voting,
you're directly violating
the 24th Amendment.
And then he said as well,
there's a clear violation
of procedural due process
when the state is putting something
as important as voting
conditioned on payments,
but it can't tell you what you owe.
The long discussion and the opinion
about how the state itself has
changed its accounting method
in the middle of the proceedings,
fundamentally changing what
payments count toward what
and how to calculate it.
But the system is so incredibly botched up
that we have this large group of people
who we may never know
whether they have paid enough
or haven't paid enough
in order to get access to voting.
And there's this kind of catch-22,
before you really get your
record examined by the state
to see whether you're
eligible, you have to register,
but in order to register,
you have to swear that you're eligible,
that you have a good faith
belief you're eligible to vote.
And so you're risking criminal prosecution
in order to get into the system
where they will then examine
your eligibility to vote.
And so we have this
wonderful opinion last spring
saying for three reasons
there's unconstitutionality here,
and the large hundreds
of thousands of people
who had their voting rights restored
by the federal district court,
the state appealed to the
11th Circuit Court of Appeals
and asked that court to
take the very unusual step
of hearing the case on bond
without going through a three-judge panel
in the first place.
The court granted that.
That means there's essentially 10 judges
who will be hearing this appeal,
and in fact are considering this appeal.
And the other thing they
did when they decided
to hear it that way was
immediately stayed the entire
decision of the district court
saying it can't take
effect for the primary,
which happened in the meantime.
We had a very, very quick
briefing of the appeal,
and it was argued a couple of weeks back.
I was able to argue along
with a lawyer from the ACLU
and a lawyer from the
Southern Poverty Law Center
that the district court's
opinion should be upheld
in its entirety.
It is a pretty conservative court.
Of the 10 people we were arguing to,
five of them were appointed
by President Trump.
And so it's a tough, it's a tough forum,
but we're still hopeful.
Hopefully we'll get a ruling soon
so that whatever they do,
we can maybe bring it
up to the Supreme Court
and see what possible
remedy we could get there
if we don't get it out
of the 11th Circuit.
Clearly a remarkable
thing what Florida did
enfranchising this huge
large group of people,
but then to see it taken back
by this fines and fee issue
is really hurtful.
It's really unfortunate to see that happen
and basically leave most of the people
the voters thought they were helping
in a state of potential
permanent disenfranchisement
because of their inability
to raise the money
to pay these fines and fees.
I think I'll leave it at that.
- Thanks, Paul.
That was an excellent foundation for us
to understand where we
are in terms of the case,
and Ashley, thank you as well.
And with that, we will
turn to the center stage,
which is a tech solution, right?
We understand more about the problem,
why it's a concern in Florida,
why it's a concern in general
for constitutional rights.
And we have heard from civil
society and legal experts.
Now Professor Sukhatme,
can you please explain
to us the motivations
behind your Free Our Vote,
what it is and how it works?
- Thank you, Hillary.
And I wanna thank the Institute
for supporting this meeting
today, and of course,
my wonderful panelists,
you guys are all amazing.
And thank you for spending
some time with us here today.
Yeah, so I'm more of a latecomer to this.
You know, it's funny, Paul,
when we used to work in our office,
Paul was right down the hall from me,
but we never talked
about this whole Amendment 4 litigation
while we were there.
And now during COVID, we're separated.
And now we're connected on
the sort of same fight here.
When in July when the Supreme Court said,
we're not going to sort
of reinstate the stay
that the district court had put in,
I thought about it and I said,
"Well, this seems really messed up
"that folks are not gonna be able to vote
"because of these fines and fees."
And as I was reading
more, as Paul alluded to,
even more messed up is the fact
that the state of Florida
can't tell these folks
how much they owe.
So, you know, it's one
thing to say, "Okay,
"you have to pay back
your fines and fees,"
and you go to the state and you say,
"Okay, how much do I owe?"
They say, "Oh, we really can't tell you."
And it might take, you
know, up to six years
to sort this whole thing out.
So in the meantime,
you just have to live
with this uncertainty.
And that struck me as just plain wrong.
And so, you know, my
background is as an economist
and as an attorney, as
a computer engineer.
And I put that together in my research,
a lot of my research happens
to be in the state of Florida.
I'm very familiar with
using data in Florida
as is one of my coauthors Alex Bailey,
who's also a co-founder of this project.
And I thought about it and I said,
"I think there's a way in
which we can help folks
"by creating a website
that has accurate estimates
"of fines and fees data,
"that takes publicly available information
"and puts it together
in a way that's useful
"to folks who want to
regain their right to vote
"in time for the election."
So you know, we started
this in July, right?
Now it's barely September.
So we've been working very hard
over the last month and a
half to put this together.
But you know, we launched
the Free Our Vote website,
it's up now.
And so folks can query it.
So what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna sort of lay out
a little bit of the problem.
I'll just show screenshots
right now of the website,
but you can go and check
it out on your own.
And then also talk about
some of the aggregate data.
There are other possibilities
beyond the individual level
that our data research allows us to do.
And so hopefully you'll
get a flavor for that.
So I'm gonna try
and hopefully successfully
share my screen here.
Let's see if I can do this properly.
All right, wait a minute.
I don't know if I can...
There's always a problem.
All right, can you guys see the screen?
You can, okay.
I cannot see it now.
Okay, now I can't see you guys.
Well, I'll just have to
alternate between you folks
and see if I can see both
of you. Okay, anyway,
so this is the Free Our
Vote website right here.
So you go to FreeOurVote.com.
You can see what it looks like.
And as I suggested,
so, as I suggested right,
has it gone to the next slide?
Can you see it? How much do?
- [Man] It has not.
- Okay, can you see it now?
- Yes.
- Okay, great.
So this is the website. You
can see, how much do people
with prior felony convictions owe?
And no one seems to
know, but it, you know,
it's gonna take at least
six years to figure it out.
If you look at the district court opinion,
this is a long quote, but
if you sort of look at it,
it says, "The projected completion date,
"even if the Division of election
"starts turning out work today,
"and even if screening for
LFOs doesn't take longer
"than screening for
murders, sexual offenses,
"custody and supervision,
is early in 2026."
So this is why we started Free Our Vote,
and again, our goal is to
provide accurate information
to Florida's returning
citizens on the court costs,
fines, and fees, and also
whether they owe restitution.
And so the goal is to create
a sort of a clearing house
or a website with accurate
up-to-date information on this.
And this turns out to be a
pretty complicated endeavor,
because we have to link data across a host
of different data sets.
So there's data from the Florida
Department of Corrections,
there's court data,
there's also, you know,
to the extent we wanna connect it
with actual people who have voted,
there's voter registration data,
and Florida has 67 counties.
And each of them store those
data in different ways.
So there's a complicated
task in obtaining the data.
And then once you obtain the
data to be able to parse it,
to make sense of it,
and then there's information obviously
that you have to calculate, right?
So it's not all fines and fees that matter
for purposes of folks
regaining their right to vote.
It's only those associated
with sentencing.
So for example, if you
have a fine or a fee,
and you don't pay it back,
you might have to pay interest on it,
but that interest does
not count for purposes
of regaining your right to vote.
So being able to parse through that
to the extent possible
and get accurate estimates
also requires knowledge of
the relevant legal rules
and figuring out based on
the data that's available
what fines and fees count and what don't.
Also restitution is a complicated thing,
because as Ashley suggested,
restitution is imposed
on a number of cases.
And as Paul suggested,
many times the court doesn't keep track
of whether the restitution
was actually paid.
So determining whether
there might be restitution
in a case is a separate issue.
And then finally, a complication is
that there are some crimes that you commit
you're not eligible for regaining
your right to vote anyway.
So, you know, figuring all that out
is sort of a significant complication.
Okay.
So right now the coverage
that we have sort of posted
right now are these 14 counties.
And they're most of the big counties
in the state of Florida,
including, Miami-Dade, Hillsborough,
Pinellas, Duval, Broward,
Palm beach is gonna be done.
It's gonna be posted very soon.
So within a week, we
should have 23 counties,
including the 10 most
populous counties covered,
which is approximately 17 million people,
about 80% or so of Florida's population.
And, you know, it's gonna be,
it's hard to get to all the way to 67,
because some counties the data is not
in a sort of a usable format
or it's not posted online,
but it turns out that population
of Florida is pretty skewed
toward a smaller number
of counties, right?
By the time you get to the top 35,
I think you're at like
95% of the population,
something like that, or 90%.
And so we can get a lot of coverage
and help a lot of people,
even if we're unable to
get to all 67 counties.
And our data are also limited
to felony conviction since 2000.
So some older folks might not
be able to benefit from this,
because that's just where the data
from the Florida Department
of Corrections goes back to.
So we try to make clear
all of this on the website,
all of the sort of
caveats and limitations,
but I still think there's a,
I know there's a huge number of people
who will benefit from the information
that we can provide them.
And so again, if go to the website,
this is what it looks
like. So how does it work?
So you see, there's this thing that says,
"Do you have fines or fees?
or "Check fines or fees."
If you click on that,
it asks you to enter your information
to check your fines and fees.
So you have to provide your
first name, your last name,
your birth date, and a
county of conviction.
And if you do that,
what will pop up is your
estimated fines, fees and costs.
So you'll see for John Smith here,
he has $0 associated.
A conviction in Orange
County, but $0 associated.
Now, currently the way the
website has been put up,
we're limiting it to folks
who are essentially have no fines or fees
and have no restitution,
no prohibited offenses.
So right now it's serving
kind of as a clearinghouse.
It's like, am I clear to go?
If I go to this website and I put my name
and my date of birth, I should be clear.
They're the caveats that we put down here,
but by and large, you should be clear.
We do have all the data
and estimated fines and fees
for hundreds of thousands of folks.
It turns out that this
number of people right now
who are free and clear,
we can free and clear about 80 to 100,000,
just with the data that we have right now.
As I add those counties up,
it's gonna continue to go up.
I estimated by the time we're done,
we'll be over about 150,000 people.
If they go to our website
and enter their information,
they can determine that we've estimated
based on going through
these public records,
they have no fines and fees,
no court costs, no restitution,
no prohibited offenses.
But we do have the data to
provide detailed information
of estimates of folks who don't have,
who don't have non-zero amounts.
And so we've been talking right now,
we were just talking
to the Florida Rights
Restoration Coalition yesterday
about ways of sort of responsibly
making that data available
or otherwise using it in a
way to help those individuals.
So that's sort of an ongoing conversation,
but just wanted to let you know
the state of the website right now.
Okay, so one thing we can do
once we have all this data
is also look at it in the aggregate,
which I think is really
interesting in telling us
about how fines and fees work in Florida
and how people pay them off.
When do they pay them off?
We can actually answer questions
that folks haven't been able to do
sort of in a detailed way before.
Just as a profile, I picked
Lee County in Florida,
which actually happens to be the county
where my folks live.
So they, you know,
it's a personally a place for me.
And so if you look at Lee County, right,
it's in the Southwest corner of the state,
Fort Myers, Naples, Fort Myers is there.
It's about 800,000 people in the county,
and our data set right from 2018,
we have about 40,000 cases,
41,000 cases,
corresponding to about
29,000 convicted felons.
So if you aggregate up all the LFOs,
LFO stands for legal financial obligation,
you're getting about 42 million.
And if you calculate what's
sort of remaining to be paid,
it's about 20 million.
And so if you look about
29% of folks have paid,
of cases involve all the fines and fees
and court costs have been paid.
So what would be
interesting for us is to see
how much is remaining for the folks
who have not paid off
their fines and fees.
And remember, not all fines and fees count
for purposes of getting
back your right to vote.
So if we do that, we can do a histogram.
So if you cut it off at 2000, right,
this is 95% of the fines
and fees that are out there.
It turns out that the way
fines and fees are distributed,
there's a few people
who owe a ton of money,
but most people owe somewhere between zero
and a thousand dollars.
And so you can see right
here in this histogram,
if you look on the X-axis,
it shows you your balance,
and the Y-axis sort of
is like a frequency.
And you can see,
there are a lot of people at zero, right?
And it's about 28%.
And most of the folks are
between zero and 1000.
So the point to be sort
of shared here is that
it's not a necessarily
a huge amount of money
on an individual basis. It
might be a huge amount of money
for returning citizens to pay,
but it's not a huge
amount of money in sort of
in what you might usually think
for folks to pay in
order to be clear there,
to be able to vote.
And by the way, if you look overall
at sort of the total amount that's due,
obviously the numbers go up,
because that includes
information collection,
interest, collection fees,
sort of collection fees that are assessed,
but it's not sort of
significantly much more.
Now this is interesting.
You can look at the payment timing.
So this is asking the question,
after an individual is sentenced,
when did they make payments to the county?
We can sort of look at
when they've made payments.
And what you can see from this graph
is that the vast majority
of payments occur
within the first couple of years.
Within like two to three years,
the vast majority of payments are made.
By the five-year mark, if a
payment is going to be made,
it'll have been made
by the five-year mark.
And so this tells us that from
the perspective of the state,
if you have folks who have fines and fees
that are over five years old,
it's unlikely that you're
gonna collect on them, right?
So really what's happening
is here is to the extent
you're denying folks the right to vote,
and it's sort of a very old debt.
You're not gonna collect on them.
And you're essentially just
disenfranchising these folks
and not letting them vote for, you know,
and you're not going to get the money.
So, you know, I think it's useful to know
what this timing is
to sort of figure out the reality
of whether or not this
money is going to get paid
sort of on its own.
And this also raises the possibly,
having this aggregate
data raise the possibility
of potentially looking at case settlement
in a larger kind of broader sense.
So right now you can
go to the county clerk
and give the money that you owe
and then sort of receive
a receipt and say,
"Okay, I'm clear. My debt is clear."
Now, it turns out it might
be possible to do that
in the aggregate for
a whole slew of cases.
So there's a number of
cases that, you know,
if a donor, for example,
goes to the clerk of court
and says, "Hey, I'd like to pay off all
"of these different cases,"
it seems possible under Florida law
to be able to do that sort of a thing.
And not only that,
because of the fact that the amount
that the state is going to collect
is really pennies on the dollar,
the amount that the state
should be willing to accept
to be able to wipe out that debt
should also be significantly less
than the face value of the debt.
And so there's a Florida
statutory provision
that suggests that all of
this might be possible.
And so I'm hopeful that our
data will not only be useful
for folks who are individually
going to go out there
and are interested in paying
off their fines and fees,
but in the aggregate,
we can work out a way
that the state wins by
receiving fines and fees,
money that it otherwise
would not likely receive.
The individuals win in an aggregate sense
by having their fines and fees cleared,
which is an obligation, by the way,
that sort of tails them well
after they have left prison.
These individuals have to deal
with these fines and fees.
It affects their credit rating.
It's something that's,
it's not good for them
for a long period of time,
independent of voting.
So, you know, hopefully
it's a win for them,
and it's a win for the state
if these things can be paid off.
And so hopefully our work
will help to do that.
And so I just wanna also
thank the rest of our team.
A lot of these folks are law students
or are affiliated with Georgetown,
and without their help,
we would not have been able
to make this progress move so quickly
and get to the point where we are.
So I thank all of them.
Thank you for joining me here today.
- Thank you, Neel.
Thank you for presenting Free Our Vote,
which is definitely an opportunity
to see your legal background mixed
with your technology background
to come up with a practical solution
to this pressing problem.
And I wanted to move quickly to Marq
to tell a bit about your personal story,
how you're affected by this law
and others that you help
with your organization
are affected by this law.
- Thank you.
Neel, it's great to see
that you've put so much time
and energy into creating the solution
for so many folk who are impacted
by these fines and fees.
And I think that you made a point
that's extremely important.
It impacts people in other
ways, other than voting, right?
It's something in Florida
that limits your ability
to have a driver's license.
If you are wanting to get a credential
or an occupational
license, that's impacted,
if you have these
outstanding fines and fees.
If you want to explore
jobs with the government,
that's something that's also impacted.
So being able to resolve it,
yes for the purposes of voting,
it's great. It's empowering.
But it also is one of the first steps
to people being able to access
a better quality of life.
For me, I was 16 years old
when I was direct filed
and sentenced as an adult.
And so for my entire adult life,
I've had these barriers.
I've been disenfranchised.
I never knew what it was like to vote.
I also didn't know what it was like
to have an opportunity
to easily access housing
or easily access employment
without having my background
being a factor there.
And so being able to change that
by being re-enfranchised
through Amendment 4
and ultimately being able
to elect representatives
who would fight for our best interests
was extremely important.
And so when Desmond and Neil
and so many people across
Florida were doing the work
to ensure that Amendment 4
made it to the actual ballot,
we all were excited,
because we figured that this
was our first opportunity
to really reconnect and
reconcile with society
after a history of being
ostracized, stigmatized,
and also limited,
because of our backgrounds and
this just was the first step.
It was the first step to
being able to do more,
reimagine what life could be
for such a large group of people
across the state.
I think the estimate is that there's
like 1.5 million people or so in the state
who have these felony backgrounds.
And so for me, you know, with
this happening to me at 16,
I don't know life another way.
I don't know life without
having the barriers.
I don't know life without being impacted,
but I found out about the fines and fees
in a really unique way.
I have an organization
that I founded in 2018,
Chainless Change.
And we assist people who are
seeking to rebuild their lives
after contact with the
criminal legal system.
And a part of that means
that we're helping people
understand how to advocate
for their best interests
and resolve things like
driver's license suspensions
or address court costs and fines
so that they can then become
eligible for employment
or occupational licenses.
And so once Amendment 4 passed,
I went to register to vote,
but I also started to explore
what solutions would be available for folk
who had these fines and fees,
never knowing that I had them myself.
The way that I found out was
once I registered to vote,
I received a letter in the mail
that told me that I owed about $5,000,
and that it had been handed over
to a collections agency
that I needed to contact to
resolve my payment issues.
I couldn't pay the courts directly.
And when I reached out to
the collections agency,
after about three days being on hold,
them trying to scramble around
and figure out exactly what I owe,
I realized that there was a 40% surcharge
or interest that had accumulated,
because these were things
that happened years ago,
more than 10 years ago when
I was an indigent juvenile
in foster care.
And it really became a bit overwhelming
and disappointing, because I thought
that we finally reached this point
where those things would
no longer impact me,
but here it was with
something from my childhood
in which I was treated as an adult,
which I shouldn't have
been, came to hunt me.
But not only that, there's
a huge interest rate
that's tacked on top of
the court costs and fines
that were assessed.
And I had absolutely no
idea how I'd ever be able
to afford to pay that,
considering that people with
criminal backgrounds tend
to have limited opportunities
for stable employment
and make livable wages.
So I noticed I started to kind of engage
and figure out what solutions there were
and somehow was connected to the ACLU.
And this has been such a interesting,
intriguing and quite eventful experience,
because for a moment
we had our rights back.
For a moment, we thought that we'd won
that this was resolved.
The temporary injunction,
we believed set a precedent
and we were going to be eligible to vote.
I voted in the primary in March
and thought that I'd be able
to vote again in August,
and that didn't happen.
And it's a feeling that
kind of has happened
throughout my life where, you know,
something is given and
then it's taken away
because of my background.
And so I'm really, again,
just appreciative to be here.
And I'm hopeful that we'll
reach a resolution really soon,
because there are about
seven or 800,000 people
I work with who are
impacted by this thing.
I work with people day in and out
who are still trying to figure out
how to resolve these issues,
how to resolve their fines and fees.
But more importantly,
they just wanna understand
how much they owe.
It's so hard to figure it out.
If you contact the clerk of courts,
they'll direct you to another entity.
And that entity kind of has a hard time
really processing that information
and tracking down records,
especially when stuff is as old as mine.
Mine is, you know, like 2007.
But when you look back to other folk
whose records were, you
know, earlier than that,
it becomes much, much more difficult.
I am really just thankful
to have had an opportunity
to be a part of this panel
and also have an opportunity
to be a part of this fight
that'll impact the lives of so many folk.
And I really am appreciative
for your efforts
with unlock the vote,
because I understand that
this can really change
the political landscape of Florida.
It can change someone's ability to act,
to improve their quality of life,
but it also starts to dismantle some
of the last remnants of the Jim Crow era
that are disproportionately
impacting black
and brown communities.
- Marq, thank you so much
for that perspective.
And thank you for explaining
how this is affecting both yourself
and those around you
and recognizing that
there are lots of people
that are working with you,
and we are very fortunate to have you
on this panel today, as well,
and as part of the team of people
who are trying to
provide you what you need
and Free Our Vote is one
of those opportunities
and bringing technology to
try to help you with that.
It raises so many different questions,
and I know that we are short on time,
and I wanted Jesse and Neil
to provide an opportunity
to speak to some general
question and some general issues.
So Jesse, as someone who
works on these issues,
and you've now heard personal perspective,
a technology solution, a legal foundation,
what's going on in Florida,
you work federally and on a
state level on policy issues,
what are lessons learned here?
What can we do?
How do we get Free Our Vote out?
How do we help Marq and other
people in similar situations?
- Yeah, thank you so much.
And thanks for having me on the team today
to talk about this.
So R Street's criminal justice
and civil liberties policy team works
across the ideological spectrum
to provide policymakers with reforms
that prioritize human
dignity, public safety,
due process, individual liberty,
and fiscal responsibility.
And it's for these
reasons that we signed on
to the Amicus Brief in support
of Jones versus DeSantis.
So permitting those with felony records
to vote is an important
step in reintegrating people
who have paid their
debt back into society.
And so I wanna first sort of hit
on this public safety issue,
which is one of our core principles
and very important to lawmakers,
both at the federal and state level.
So practically speaking, research suggests
that restoring voting rights
might decrease re-offending rates
by encouraging formerly
incarcerated people
to become more invested
in their communities.
And one study in particular found
that people who had felony convictions
who then voted were half as likely
to commit a crime in the
subsequent three years
than those who did not have
the opportunity to vote.
So by reducing crime rates,
restoring voting rights
actually saves taxpayers money
that is currently spent on
those repeated steads in prison
due to recidivism.
So giving those with
felony records a stake
in shaping their society and
reintegrating as full citizens
helps combat that stigma of alienation
that many people in
this population endure.
And then I would go on to add
that restoring voting
eligibility does not wipe away
an individual's duty to
pay off that restitution
or other court debts.
Those obligations, they'll
still have to be met.
And, you know, as the saying goes,
you can't get blood from a stone.
Many people simply can't afford
to pay their different legal obligations.
So particularly those who are caught up
in the criminal justice system
are often the least able to pay.
Another study using
nationally representative data
found that about 36% of people
arrested in the year 2017
had individual incomes of
less than $10,000 per year,
which is well below the poverty level.
So simply put, conditioning
eligibility to vote
on repayment of restitution
or other debts will not
make it any more likely
that those debts will get paid.
And, you know, really eligibility
to vote is no more related
to a person's ability
to pay off a court debt
than it is their ability to
pay off a student loan debt
or a credit card debt.
And then the third bucket I
would like to address quickly,
and I don't want to take up too much time,
is this racial injustice issue
that we're seeing be so prevalent
in our country right now.
And you know, many of these
felony disenfranchisement laws
in the United States were expanded
at the end of the Civil War
when black men first
received the right to vote.
And this was only highlighted
in the 2016 presidential election.
So an estimated six million
Americans could not vote
because of a felony conviction,
but what's more is that
one in 13 black Americans
could not vote in that election
while one in every 56 non-black
Americans could not vote.
So we're still seeing this
trickle down racial disparity
seep through every part
of our criminal justice
and civil society.
And then, you know, the bottom line
is that no matter what political
party you're a part of,
no matter where you fall
in the policy debate
about restoration of rights
or whether someone is
legally allowed to vote,
they should know that.
And it shouldn't be hard,
because that's the democracy
we claim to be part of.
So the launch of this tech
initiative is gonna be critical
in ensuring that everybody
gets a fair shot,
and that's what we all are aiming for.
- Thank you Jesse very much.
And Neil, I was gonna promise you
that we were gonna get to you
in these last few minutes.
As someone who works for FFRC,
and hopefully you can wrap up
what we've been seeing today
and give us some hope
for things that we can do
or what this is going
to look like in Florida,
how we can get out Free Our Vote
and your thoughts on the matter.
- Yeah, well thank you so much
for allowing me to be here today
and for the conversations
and this partnership that's developing
around the lives of returning
citizens in Florida.
I'm a person with a
past felony conviction.
Marq and I have been walking this together
along with so many other folks.
I was blessed to be able to
vote in the August primary
for the first time in 16 years,
along with many other returning citizens.
And so I would just say
that I see hope in this
in the tools that so
many people work so hard
to put together.
Thank you Neel for
spearheading this effort.
Our organization is a statewide
returning citizen organization.
We've got 20-plus
chapters across the state.
We're led by returning citizens,
those of us with past felony convictions.
We advocate for returning
citizens and our loved ones.
And this is what we do every single day.
This is a real issue
in real people's lives,
whether it's what's
going on in the courts,
whether it's what's going
on in the legislature.
But what I feel is most important
to try and help kind of
like you said, Hillary,
like tie this a little bit
is that for the last year,
our organization has been
digging into these issues.
We've registered tens of
thousands of returning citizens.
We've paid fines and fees
for thousands of returning citizens.
We have relationships with
all 67 clerk of courts
and understand the dynamic
and the tension involved
with trying to get reliable data,
data that somebody like myself or Marq
or any returning citizen
in Florida can go in
and say, "Hey, I know that
I can go register to vote."
And I think that's all of our goals.
And this is an incredibly important step
towards making, you know, those of us
who are fighting to expand democracy
and create a more vibrant
democracy in Florida
by allowing these hundreds
of thousands of people
who literally went to bed at night
after the Hinkle decision
thinking they were gonna vote in November,
and now, because our own
government is blocking that
are unable to vote.
And we're looking at the
creativity of technology,
the love and passion of
people who are willing
to literally pay fines
and fees for somebody else
they don't even know.
That's the place that we're at,
but it gives us real hope
that when we work together
and we're creative and we
focus simply on the real lives
of real people who are impacted.
I get texts every day from people
who have registered to vote,
both sides of the coin.
"Hey, I'm gonna register
for the first time."
And by the way, I know
we're not all there yet.
We registered a lady a couple
of days ago who has cancer,
and she's been given six months,
and she asked us all to
pray with her and to say,
"Hey, please pray with me.
"I haven't voted in 40 years.
"All I wanna do is vote."
So that's the spirit
of this entire effort.
And I'm so grateful to be a part of it,
grateful for the leadership
and the people who are gathered here,
because I know that we can do great things
for real people's lives in Florida
and expand democracy
and fulfill the spirit
and the hope and the
purpose of Amendment 4
by doing that together.
So I'm just really grateful
that you all included me on this
and look forward to where we go from here.
- Thank you, Neil.
I think you wrapped this panel up.
It is on the hour, and you
brought together all the pieces
and your own personal side to it in a way
that truly is compelling.
I feel fortunate to be
part of this effort.
I think this is one step,
and I am sure that Professor Sukhatme
and all of your work with
all of the people here,
it's just the beginning
of helping in Florida
and helping in other places.
We had some questions,
but to keep to the time
there were a couple of
questions that we can answer.
We have specifically about the case
that we can send you the answers.
So Sam Hardman and Victoria Scheinman,
we will get back to you on those,
but I wanna thank all of our panelists
for setting the stage,
putting forward the issues,
explaining the real problem
that's at issue here
and discussing this Free
Our Vote initiative.
And Professor Sukhatme, it's there.
Tell us one more time where the website is
and how we can access it.
And with that, I think we can close.
- And thank you to everyone again
and again, all the panelists.
I just enjoyed listening
to you all of your stories,
and I hope the audience did too.
The website's FreeOurVote.com.
Check it out and feel free to email me
with any suggestions and thoughts,
and spread the word.
So thank you very much.
- Thank you everyone.
