In Florida's Election: It May be Legal, but is It Right?

by Chris Farrell
September 24, 2020 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16541/florida-election-felons

Those are 32,000 votes deemed pro-Biden in a state where 537 votes decided the presidential election in 2000. Florida, a critical swing state, has 29 electoral college votes that could determine the presidency.
One is left to wonder about what appears to be a slick, well-financed, lawyered-up, manipulation of the electoral process. It appears to have less to do with a legitimate, grassroots campaign to rehabilitate persons who have paid their legal dues for past misconduct than it does as a cynical, orchestrated, vote buying and manipulation process.

Last week, the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Florida's law requiring convicted felons in Florida to pay court-ordered fines, fees and restitution before having their voting rights reinstated. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, together with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, has "paid off monetary obligations for 32,000 felons in Florida" so that they can vote. Pictured: The Elbert P. Tuttle U.S. Court of Appeals Building, home of the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Image source: Warren LeMay/Wikimedia Commons)

Last week, the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Florida's law requiring convicted felons in Florida to pay court-ordered fines, fees and restitution before having their voting rights reinstated. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who raised more than $16 million for this purpose, has, together with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, "paid off monetary obligations for 32,000 felons in Florida" so that they can vote.

Those are 32,000 votes deemed pro-Biden in a state where 537 votes decided the presidential election in 2000. Florida, a critical swing state, has 29 electoral college votes that could determine the presidency.

The organization Bloomberg is working with in this reinstatement effort is the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). The FRRC has received an unspecified amount of funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF). There isn't a specific grant listed in the OSF's 2018 Internal Revenue Service filing, but it identified FRRC as a grantee in an April 2019 Facebook post.

FRRC's partners include the Alliance for Safety and Justice, which is a project of Tides Foundation -- a public charity and financial supporter working to advance "progressive" causes and policy initiatives -- and received $1.2 million from the Open Society Foundations between 2016 and 2018. At present, there is no publicly available documentary connection with George Soros' Safety and Justice PAC, a Florida affiliate.

It is informative to examine the other organizations involved in supporting the objectives of Bloomberg and his colleagues at the FRRC. Other FRRC partners include:

The Center for Community Change, received $2.1 million from OSF in 2016 and 2017.
Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which received $700,000 from OSF in 2017.
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, which received $410,000 from OSF between 2016 and 2018.
Live Free, a social justice project of Faith in Action. Faith in Action received $3.1 million from OSF between 2017 and 2018, and
The Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights, which has received more than $7.3 million from OSF since 2016.

The president of the FRCC, Desmond Meade, is also the chair of the Floridians for a Fair Democracy PAC, which has received significant financial support from the Brennan Center, the ACLU, New Ventures Fund, the Advocacy Fund, the Tides Foundation, Organize Florida and other Soros-funded entities, as well as numerous liberal mega-donors. It has also received funding from the FRRC and the Alliance for Safety and Justice. (Florida's campaign finance database is not particularly user-friendly, but the full list of contributors is there.).

Perhaps this is just one example of "democracy in action?" Perhaps it is not? One is left to wonder about what appears to be a slick, well-financed, lawyered-up, manipulation of the electoral process. It appears to have less to do with a legitimate, grassroots campaign to rehabilitate persons who have paid their legal dues for past misconduct than it does as a cynical, orchestrated, vote buying and manipulation process. Nothing illegal, of course! Just the opposite -- perhaps hyper-legal -- in a way that manipulates the law and the process in ways the Left is most comfortable with when winning is all that counts.

Chris Farrell is a former counterintelligence case officer. For the past 20 years, he has served as the Director of Investigations & Research for Judicial Watch. The views expressed are the author's alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.

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Comment on this item

14 Reader Comments

Denis Coghlan • Sep 27, 2020 at 23:13

Of course, in the voting booth, secrecy prevails.
There's no way to guarantee the purchaser will get what he paid for!

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af • Sep 25, 2020 at 01:06

This is illegal in Florida, and the AG is making noises about going after Bloomberg. Throw him in jail.

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Jed • Sep 24, 2020 at 17:05

Again the question that begs to be asked is, NOW WHAT? Free and fair elections are the bedrock of American democracy. We know all the bad things that are being done to undermine and subvert if not completely destroy the American model.

What can we do about it?...Nothing!....Why? ... Because Democracy itself prevents us from doing anything to protect and preserve it.

And that brings me back to what I have said said repeatedly here. Democracy is its own worst enemy. The very freedom and rights it guaranties are being used to destroy.

Sometimes acts of tyranny are needed to preserve democracy.

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Eric Russell • Sep 24, 2020 at 15:59

the same title can be applied to the Florida Legislature. they used their right to create laws to subvert the will of their electorate. The citizens of Florida voted to restore the franchise to former felons who have served their time. In a blatant act of voter suppression, they imposed a burden on these potential voters in order to suppress their right to participate in a legal process. while it was legal for them to impose this penalty, is it actually right for them to impose an additional penalty on people who have served their debt to society? When they were sentenced, there was no declaration of additional penalties.
The entire purpose of this act is to keep people from voting because a partisan legislature fears how they will vote.

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Bonnie • Sep 24, 2020 at 15:48

October 5 is the deadline to register to vote In Florida for the November 3rd election. So maybe it will be too tight a time frame to be completely successful in buying these votes. One can always hope.

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Harvey L • Sep 24, 2020 at 10:32

I don't know what it is about the present Democrat party but they seem to think they are royalty in a republic and they seem to behave as though it is their right to govern. This is the same ethos of the Ayotallahs in Iran Erdogan in Turkey and of course Xi ping in China.

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Danny Kleinman • Sep 24, 2020 at 10:09

The right to vote is not, nor should it be, contingent on paying one's debts, whether to private individuals, corporations, or government. A law can be illegal as well as immoral, and so can a court's decision. That happened in the case of this Florida law, which in effect requires the votes of ex-felons to be bought, whether by the ex-felons themselves, their friends and families, or politically-motivated outsiders like Michael Bloomberg. Yes, buying of votes is obscene, but in this case it's court-ordered. Many more votes still are bought in the old-fashioned way, by promising tax cuts to the voters or contracts to corporate donors. That's obscene too.

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Michael Garfinkel

Danny Kleinman • Sep 28, 2020 at 06:54

Paying one's private debts is not at all the same as paying one's debts to society.

Nor is voting for a candidate based on promises made by the candidate "obscene."

This is referred to as "choice" in a free society, and it is not analogous in any way, shape or form to the imposition of penalties for malfeasance.

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Erica Ling • Sep 24, 2020 at 09:15

Now I understand the phrase "scraping the bottom of the barrel."

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Russell • Sep 24, 2020 at 08:04

Surely this is bribery to buy votes? If it isn't illegal, it ought to be.

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Dorothy Davies • Sep 24, 2020 at 06:44

This shows how shockingly cynical the left wing are, and how lacking in moral fibre. There should be a law passed that anyone having their fines etc. paid for them by a charity, etc. should have to be of good behaviour for say one year (or more) before their right to vote is reinstated.

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Erica Ling

Dorothy Davies • Sep 24, 2020 at 09:24

When will we cease to expect the left/Marxists/communists to operate by our concepts of morality? Ours is based on Judeo/ Christianity-the concept of good and evil. The left rejects that. Their parameters are Race, Sex, Class, and Power (lessness )

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Geoffrey Rogg • Sep 24, 2020 at 06:20

I am not advocating it, but how in heavens name do the Democrats believe that working middle class Americans would accept a marginal win by Biden with all these questionable shenanigans employed to secure a morally corrupt victory without grave social unrest. What Bloomberg is doing totally circumvents the principle that it is the felon who is supposed to redress personally his debt to society. This should be sued as being a corrupt act.

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Ruth Temple-Murray • Sep 24, 2020 at 05:48

Vote buying (aka - vote rigging) has been fine tuned in Africa and while it has proved to be counter productive to the tenants of democracy the world conveniently brushed the blatant abuse of power to rig the voters result, aside. You can't have one rule for some and another rule for others. Clearly the ideology of democracy has not been "managed" or "regulated" as it should have been - because, for the sake of a "result" despots have taken the helm and driven Africa to ultimate abuse (abuse of themselves). God help America!

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