A federal appeals court earlier this month affirmed a controversial Florida law requiring people with felony convictions to pay court fees in order to have their voting rights restored. With less than 50 days until the November election and with the state’s voter registration deadline nearing, the 6-4 ruling all but ensures hundreds of thousands of Floridians won't be able to participate. This is an update to our 2018 episode “Real Voter Fraud: Felony Disenfranchisement’s Civil Death Sentence,” which examined how more than one million Floridians are barred from voting due to a past felony conviction. More broadly, six million Americans are outlawed from casting a ballot due to Jim Crow-era felony disenfranchisement laws. According to The Sentencing Project, “Black Americans of voting age are more than four times as likely to lose their voting rights than the rest of the adult population, with one of every 13 black adults disenfranchised nationally” 

Our guest in this episode is Julie Ebenstein, a staff attorney at the ACLU Voting Rights Project.