For over a year, the Florida voter registration form has had a new box you can check, saying that you are a former convict, but you have completed all terms of your sentence including all fines and fees. You have to affirm under penalty of perjury that everything is complete.  if you truly believe that you have completed everything, if that is the best of your knowledge, and they find that you owe something, the form says that they might charge you for perjury. If you look at forms in other states, those forms say that it's not perjury if it's to the best of your knowledge.
So Florida's new form is uniquely cruel and unfair. It's entrapment. 
In spite of that, so far about 85,000 new voters have filled out the form with this box checked.
But the state has no means to figure out if these applicants are telling the truth.
There is no central database of who owes what court fines.
The University of Florida had a team of law professors try to verify 153 of the applications.  They called all the officials that might have records, and paid to get copies of the judgments. if any of you have tried to get government records before, you know that this usually takes weeks, and you usually have to pay per sheet. In almost every case, the University of Florida team said that the judgments and records were ambiguous. 
The state supreme Court has not been asked to rule on if any of this is fair, or if this would really count as perjury.
The ACLU challenged all this in federal court, and it went all the way up to the supreme Court, but the US supreme Court correctly decided that this is a state issue.
It is obvious that the state legislature has not made a good faith effort to uphold the amended state constitution. They could have made the form and process more forgiving, or they could have funded a process for people to quickly figure out what they owe and to whom. They did neither.

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My fellow southpaw Mark Brunell will probably always be my favorite Jaguar.

There is a difference between a "convict" and a "felon".

Convicts with a felony (generally democrats) shouldn't be allowed to vote to begin with.

Commit a felony you lose your right to purchase a firearm and so you should lose the privilege of voting.

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world.  Those who understand binary and those who don't.

There is a difference between a "convict" and a "felon".

Convicts with a felony (generally democrats) shouldn't be allowed to vote to begin with.

Commit a felony you lose your right to purchase a firearm and so you should lose the privilege of voting.

That's not what the Florida Constitution says, brohamus.
Your problem is with the Florida Constitution, not with me

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My fellow southpaw Mark Brunell will probably always be my favorite Jaguar.

For over a year, the Florida voter registration form has had a new box you can check, saying that you are a former convict, but you have completed all terms of your sentence including all fines and fees. You have to affirm under penalty of perjury that everything is complete.  if you truly believe that you have completed everything, if that is the best of your knowledge, and they find that you owe something, the form says that they might charge you for perjury. If you look at forms in other states, those forms say that it's not perjury if it's to the best of your knowledge.
So Florida's new form is uniquely cruel and unfair. It's entrapment. 
In spite of that, so far about 85,000 new voters have filled out the form with this box checked.
But the state has no means to figure out if these applicants are telling the truth.
There is no central database of who owes what court fines.
The University of Florida had a team of law professors try to verify 153 of the applications.  They called all the officials that might have records, and paid to get copies of the judgments. if any of you have tried to get government records before, you know that this usually takes weeks, and you usually have to pay per sheet. In almost every case, the University of Florida team said that the judgments and records were ambiguous. 
The state supreme Court has not been asked to rule on if any of this is fair, or if this would really count as perjury.
The ACLU challenged all this in federal court, and it went all the way up to the supreme Court, but the US supreme Court correctly decided that this is a state issue.
It is obvious that the state legislature has not made a good faith effort to uphold the amended state constitution. They could have made the form and process more forgiving, or they could have funded a process for people to quickly figure out what they owe and to whom. They did neither.

State=bureaucratic nightmare

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For over a year, the Florida voter registration form has had a new box you can check, saying that you are a former convict, but you have completed all terms of your sentence including all fines and fees. You have to affirm under penalty of perjury that everything is complete.  if you truly believe that you have completed everything, if that is the best of your knowledge, and they find that you owe something, the form says that they might charge you for perjury. If you look at forms in other states, those forms say that it's not perjury if it's to the best of your knowledge.
So Florida's new form is uniquely cruel and unfair. It's entrapment. 
In spite of that, so far about 85,000 new voters have filled out the form with this box checked.
But the state has no means to figure out if these applicants are telling the truth.
There is no central database of who owes what court fines.
The University of Florida had a team of law professors try to verify 153 of the applications.  They called all the officials that might have records, and paid to get copies of the judgments. if any of you have tried to get government records before, you know that this usually takes weeks, and you usually have to pay per sheet. In almost every case, the University of Florida team said that the judgments and records were ambiguous. 
The state supreme Court has not been asked to rule on if any of this is fair, or if this would really count as perjury.
The ACLU challenged all this in federal court, and it went all the way up to the supreme Court, but the US supreme Court correctly decided that this is a state issue.
It is obvious that the state legislature has not made a good faith effort to uphold the amended state constitution. They could have made the form and process more forgiving, or they could have funded a process for people to quickly figure out what they owe and to whom. They did neither.

State=bureaucratic nightmare

But did it have to be this way? Why not just let people register when they say that, to the best of their knowledge, their sentence is complete? That's what Georgia does.

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My fellow southpaw Mark Brunell will probably always be my favorite Jaguar.