Why #NeverAgain Can’t Fight Alone Against Gun Violence
The conversation around current gun control advocacy have set up the NRA as the biggest antagonist, but as young activists rally behind the power of the vote, very little has been mentioned of the other opponent the movement faces: voter suppression.
By Stephanie Frescas
At the Washington D.C. March for Our Lives event, speakers had a warning: “Politicians, either represent the people or get out,” Cameron Kasky, an Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student, declared. “Stand for us or beware: The voters are coming.” Voters will have to face some roadblocks, however.
As a previous dispatch discussed, extremist politicians have implemented laws across the country that transparently suppress voting rights — especially that of youth, people of color, women, the poor, and the elderly. Rev. William J. Barber, II, president and senior lecutrer of Repairers of the Breach, and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival, spoke at the March for Our Lives event, citing “the same politicians who refuse to pass sensible gun reform are also suppressing your votes. Since 2010, 24 states have passed voter suppression bills that target African-Americans, Latinos, poor people and students,” he said.
Florida, the center of the national media’s current coverage of gun control advocacy, has certainly not been immune to these attacks.
Governor Rick Scott, who’s announced a Senate bid, started his tenure with a barrage of voter suppression efforts. In 2011, he signed HB 1355, which slashed early voting from 14 to 8 days, imposed severe regulations that resulted in various groups halting their voter registration efforts, invalidated mail-in ballots if their signature didn’t match the signature on record — without allowing these voters to rectify the problem, or even notifying them, and eliminated a provision that allowed voters whose name or address had changed due to marriage, divorce, or a move by a military family, to change the information at the polls.
“A lot of tactics that were used to get the people out to vote were directly targeted,” Reverend Ron Rawls, with the Poor People’s Campaign in Florida, recalls. “Churches were able to do what we call ‘Souls to the Polls,’ so the Sunday before an election we took huge groups straight from church to the polls. But, immediately, when this new governor came in, he reduced the early voting. A couple years later the public justice ruled that that was unconstitutional and violated the Voting Rights Act, so they increased the number of days that we could use for early voting. But the state of Florida was still able to have the discretion of local counties supervising the elections. So they were able to withhold the Sunday portion.”
HB 1355 was just one step in his effort to suppress the votes of Floridians, however. Scott also asked his Secretary of State to conduct a purge of non-citizens from voter rolls in 2012, which resulted in a highly-flawed list of 182,000 suspected non-citizen voters, which was narrowed down to 2,700 people, 60% of whom were Hispanic. Additionally, the purge was suspiciously, and illegally, close to Florida’s primaries. But Governor Scott defended the move, even after the Department of Justice notified Florida that, amongst other offenses, the purge took place after the federal deadline for election changes.
The majority of HB 1355 and the 2012 voter purge were eventually struck down by a mixture of the still-in-power Voting Rights Act, the court of the Northern District of Florida, and the Florida Supreme Court. But one of Governor Scott’s most severe voting suppression measures has stuck to this date.
In 2016, the Sentencing Project estimated that 6.1 million were disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. This form of suppression is especially harsh in Florida, where 1.5 million were disenfranchised, with one in five African Americans unable to vote. Governor Scott’s predecessor had implemented a process where people who finished sentences for non-violent felonies were automatically up for re-enfranchisement. Scott reversed this policy, however, and required anyone who wanted to regain their right to vote to wait 5–7 years before even applying. Applicants then face a clemency board, headed by the governor. There is no oversight to the decisions of the clemency board — they can deny or grant re-enfranchisement for whatever reason.
“Unfortunately, even after the grueling process that we undergo, [the] majority of applications are ultimately denied,” Jessica Younts, Program Director at the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) laments.
Florida’s current disenfranchisement policy is not only cruel and distinctly undemocratic — it may affect crime rates. While the Florida Parole Commission reported that around 33% of previously convicted felons commit new offenses, only 11% of those who had been re-enfranchised did so.
Though Younts is one of the few that made it through the process with their right to vote restored, she looks back on it as a torturous experience. She put in her application in 2008, years after fully serving her sentence. As she waited, she went on with her life. She started law school, she finished law school — and by 2011 her application had yet to even be reviewed.
“Thankfully, an attorney offered to represent me pro bono,” Younts says. She attributes this as the reason she was able to get to her clemency hearing, and ultimately regain her right to vote. But even with a professional to help her, being at the mercy of an essentially unregulated procedure was “humiliating, degrading, and harsh.”
“The process requires an intrusive interview and investigation,” she shares. “Then, at the hearing, your past is publicly displayed in front of an audience, only to then be ultimately judged by people who know nothing about you but what they see on paper. Some people may feel that somehow we deserve this sort of treatment, but this is all after we served our sentence, remained a law abiding citizens up until the point of our hearing — which can be up to 15 years post incarceration — went through the rigorous application, investigation and hearing process, and made it way all the way up to Tallahassee.”
After having her life picked at by strangers, Younts was granted her right to vote in 2013 — over 10 years after her release from prison.
Thanks to an immense effort spearheaded by groups like the FRRC, an amendment was placed on the ballot for Florida’s mid-term election that would automatically restore the vote to non-violent ex-felons who have served their sentences.
Although this is a wonderful success, felony disenfranchisement is only one of a myriad of voter suppression efforts in Florida. Governor Scott’s measures are not the only source of suppression, by far. Florida is also notorious for its partisan gerrymandering, for one. The state’s photo ID requirement has been in place since 1998. 90,000 people reported instances of voter intimidation during the 2012 elections.
All of this is not to say that “the voters are coming” is a hollow threat. But the attacks against voting rights are so widespread, that it will inevitably affect any movement looking to change the status quo. It’s a challenge worth strategizing for, especially if we want to end gun violence not just in Florida, but across the country. According to the report, The Souls of Poor Folk: Auditing America 50 Years After the Poor People’s Campaign Challenged Racism, Poverty, the War Economy/ Militarism and Our National Morality, “23 states have adopted some form of voter suppression laws since 2010.”
The immediate solution lies in linking yourself to as many people as possible. Building a movement that reaches across platforms, to form a force with numbers that can’t be diluted by corrupt vote-suppressing policies. So many marginalized groups are organizing and fighting to have their voices heard — what if the #NeverAgain movement joined the 27,000 DACA recipients in Florida? The 2.5 million uninsured? The 2.97 million living below the poverty line?
A movement can only improve as it includes as many voices from vulnerable communities as it can. Gun violence terrorizes people in this country across racial and economic boundaries. To create an agenda that will truly fix the problem, we need to include all the voices affected by it.
The wave of gun control advocacy currently being reported by national media is being led by mostly white, well-off teenagers. They’ve made efforts to include and raise the voices of black and brown peers across the country, but the efforts have been uneven — students of color from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, for example, have spoken out against their exclusion from the #NeverAgain movement. These students have pointed out that a conversation about ending gun deaths should include police violence. They’ve expressed that they don’t feel safer with more police patrolling their school, but are instead afraid of racial profiling.
As an activist involved with numerous causes and groups, Rev. Rawls has attended his fair share of rallies and marches. And he’s noticed a pattern. Whether he’s fighting to remove Confederate monuments, or for gay rights, or against guns, the same people keep coming to the rallies to fight against him. Rev. Rawls saw a lot of familiar faces at the March for Our Lives rally he attended in Florida.
“The same people that protest everything that I do, on racial issues, those same people were there protesting the March for Our Lives,” Rev. Rawls explains. “They were saying the same things. [But there were a] bunch of kids, bunch of middle-class people, and it surprised them. They’re talking about gun control, but no way did they ever think that the confederates and white supremacists were gonna come out and fight against them.”
“People have to begin to understand how all of it is interconnected,” he goes on. “We have a lot of things in common, and we need to stay together.”
