One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

Republican governor Rick Scott has made that task doubly difficult. The Florida Office of Executive Clemency, which he leads, meets only four times a year and has more than ten thousand applications waiting to be heard. An ex-offender cannot even apply to have his or her voting rights restored until fourteen years after all the sentencing requirements have been met. The process is therefore daunting enough as it is, but Scott has slowed it down considerably.112 His predecessor, a moderate Republican turned Democrat, “restored rights to 155,315 ex-offenders” over a four-year span. Since 2011, however, Scott has approved only 2,340 cases.113 As a result, the state is able to gain the extra representatives in Congress that its population—including the prison population—warrants, while, similar to the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise, politically silencing millions of citizens who give the state its additional clout and power in Washington, D.C.