Vote Your Voice: Florida Justice Center critical to returning citizens
J.S. showed up at the Fort Lauderdale office of the Florida Justice Center (FLJC) this past fall to find out if he was qualified to vote in the presidential election.
A 50-year-old Black man, J.S., whose name has been abbreviated in this story to protect his identity, had been out of prison for years after serving an eight-year sentence for a drug conviction. He had never voted before, and like many returning citizens, he prioritized getting a car, finding a job and starting a family. Now he wanted to become a fully participating member of society — part of a tide of formerly incarcerated people whose eagerness to vote in the recent election, advocates say, dwarfed numbers they’ve seen in the past.
Unfortunately, J.S. started the process too late to be qualified in time to vote in the Nov. 5 election, and he didn’t know that he owed back fines and fees to the state.
“People don’t know [that the process may take two months], and people who come to us in October are surprised that the vetting won’t be done by the election,” said Darrell Guilford, director of programs for the FLJC. “We have to break the news to them.”
The FLJC is the only nonprofit legal aid organization active in all 67 Florida counties that conducts complete FBI and Florida Department of Law Enforcement background checks, including fingerprint checks, as part of its process to determine voter eligibility. If an FLJC attorney determines a client to be eligible, they submit a request to the Florida Clerk of Courts for an advisory opinion so that the client can register without fear of prosecution.
Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center awarded the FLJC a three-year, $150,000 Vote Your Voice (VYV) grant. The VYV program was established in 2020 through a partnership with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta and is making $100 million in grants available to help grassroots organizations in the Deep South build capacity and extend their voter outreach and civic engagement efforts over the next decade.
Since the FLJC began in 2019, it has conducted more than 1,000 eligibility checks, including some 300 in 2024. Nearly 90% of the clients self-identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color and have an average annual income of $12,800. With the grant, the organization hopes to serve another 4,000 people annually, in part by deepening its reach to younger clients of color and, particularly, to returning citizens in North Florida, where impoverished communities have the least access to legal services.
“It is vital to our democracy to ensure that those who register to vote are doing so legally and with confidence,” said Robin Brulé, Vote Your Voice program officer for the SPLC. “The Florida Justice Center is dedicated to ensuring that all of us have a seat at the table in this democracy.”
‘The state wasn’t gonna let me vote’
FLJC staff know they are up against a state that seems intent on making voting as difficult as possible for returning citizens.
Voters in 2018 approved Amendment 4, a ballot initiative that enabled approximately 1.4 million returning citizens to exercise their franchise, but the state Legislature quickly gutted it, passing a law that required the repayment of fines, fees and restitution before they could register. The law, together with the state’s out-of-date, technically flawed system to verify the exact amount of fines and fees owed — which returning citizens often don’t know — has left many unable to register.
“It was a politically motivated scare tactic to keep people from registering to vote,” said FLJC Executive Director Jessica Younts. “Amendment 4 wasn’t about how returning citizens are going to vote. It was about giving people back the ‘right’ to vote.”
Younts helped draft Amendment 4 when she was vice president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. She said it was no surprise that the Legislature went against the will of almost 65% of voters who supported the ballot measure by creating implementation legislation that limited the reach of the amendment.
Younts and other advocates point to the larger, societal damage that voter suppression laws impose on returning citizens.
“Conditioning voting rights on the payment of fines and fees creates a modern-day poll tax that disproportionately affects low-income individuals and communities of color, perpetuating a cycle of disenfranchisement and inequality,” Younts said. “In essence, denying voting rights to individuals with felony convictions — especially based on an inability to pay — weakens the fabric of democracy, hinders rehabilitation efforts, and perpetuates social inequalities.”
J.S.’s situation is a case in point. When the FLJC’s Guilford conducted J.S.’s eligibility check, he discovered that J.S. owed about $2,000 in fines and fees to the state.
“His whole energy, his whole demeanor changed,” Guilford said. “He was crushed.”
The law meant that J.S. would have to choose between taking care of his family or paying the debt over time, because he couldn’t afford to pay it all at once. When Guilford explained that the FLJC could set up a payment plan for him so that he could vote in the 2026 midterm elections, “that isn’t what returning citizens want to hear,” Guilford said.
“They think that if the state won’t let me vote now, they won’t let me vote the next time. ‘No matter what I do, they will find a reason for not letting me vote.’”
Guilford recalls what J.S. told him: “I knew they wasn’t gonna let me vote.”
Education is key
While the majority of the FLJC’s work is devoted to background checks, the other programs are driven by education. Staffers travel the state to hold training sessions with returning citizens, law school students and regional attorney associations to combat the combination of misinformation, disinformation and the lack of reliable, retrievable data to determine remaining court debt.
In September, the FLJC co-hosted its first education session aimed specifically at women returning citizens in collaboration with the Ladies Empowerment and Action Program (LEAP).
LEAP supports and advocates for women who are transitioning from incarceration. Their numbers have climbed significantly in recent decades. The number of incarcerated women in the U.S. is nearly seven times higher than it was in 1980, according to the Sentencing Project, and is the fastest-growing demographic in today’s jails and prisons.
The increase is driven, in part, by disproportionately higher arrest and incarceration rates for Black people and teens. Black women are incarcerated at 1.6 times the rate of white women, and teen girls are the fastest-growing demographic among incarcerated females. They are incarcerated at more than 2.5 times the rate of white girls.
FLJC staff attorneys are also using money from the VYV grant to train members of third-party voter registration organizations to ensure they make no mistakes when filling out registration forms. In 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 7050 into law, raising fines on these nonprofit organizations so high that they threaten their existence. The law makes the submission of a registration form with incorrect information — even when unintentional — a third-degree felony, which means another stint in prison for a returning citizen.
During the training, attorneys first ascertain how each third-party voting group’s staff and volunteers help returning citizens fill out registration forms.
“Typically, they read the form to clients, fill it out with their answers and have the client sign it,” said Alex Saiz, director of legal services for the FLJC. “They assume that the Commission of Elections will tell clients if they can’t vote. We told them, ‘You can’t just assume that the client is filling it out right because if it’s wrong, it’s a felony.’ We tell them they have to ask new voters more questions to gain more information from the client but ultimately to have their clients contact us so we can take the next step.”
Other institutional roadblocks remain.
The Department of Motor Vehicles is federally mandated to provide voter registration services. It registers over 70% of new voters, the most of any organization in the state, yet it doesn’t check returning citizens’ registration forms. As long as a Floridian produces a driver’s license, the DMV gives them a registration form.
“They put the form in someone’s hand and ask, ‘Are you eligible to vote?’ If the client gets it wrong [not knowing whether they owe court debt], they go to prison,” Saiz said.
He invokes an old saying to explain how the state has historically denied the franchise to certain groups of citizens based on their expected voting preference: “In America, voters choose their representatives. In Florida, representatives choose their voters.
“Back in the day, a returning citizen had to petition each person on a panel composed of the governor, chief financial officer, head of the Department of Agriculture and the attorney general … and if they [those officials] didn’t think the person would vote for them, they would deny them the right. This is just that on a bigger scale.”
Saiz offered a common, hypothetical example.
“Two men get arrested for cocaine possession. Both received credit for their time served and fined $500 in court costs. One guy can pay, the other can’t. Same crime, but one gets to vote because he is deemed trustworthy, and the other doesn’t. Five hundred dollars is the real answer to the question of why one gets his voting right back. That’s why our goal is to get people in compliance with the law.”
Picture at top: Last year, the Florida Justice Center, which assists returning citizens in determining whether they’re eligible to vote, was awarded a three-year, $150,000 Vote your Voice grant. (Courtesy of FLJC)
