Voting privilege or right implies racial bias

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By MARTIN DYCKMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 13, 2001

TALLAHASSEE -- We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Privileges, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .

Sounds funny, doesn't it?

So is voting a "privilege?" Or is it a "right?

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines privilege as a "right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage or favor." In other words, it is given, and can be taken away.

A right, on the other hand, is a "power or privilege to which one is justly entitled." It is inherent; it is inalienable; it cannot be taken away. It is mightier than a mere privilege. The difference matters because of what Florida Senate President John McKay said at a press conference the other day in answer to a question about new voting machines and how to pay for them.

He said he believes "that voting is a privilege, and there's a responsibility that goes along with the privilege."

So he doesn't think it's the state's responsibility to pay for optical scanners to read ballots at the precincts, where mistakes could be caught in time for voters to correct them.

"But if any of the counties want to pay for it," he said, "God bless 'em."

It sounded for a moment as if George L. Hollahan Jr., had returned and was posing as the Senate president he never got to be.

Hollahan, who represented Dade County from 1957 to 1972, made himself legendary with one short speech on the Senate floor. Alas, it was to say that "Freedom of speech is a privilege, not a right."

McKay did not seem to realize he was on a long and shaky limb. A reporter offered him safer footing by asking if he really considered voting a privilege as opposed to a right.

"It is a privilege to vote. It is a privilege to select your leaders. It is a privilege as well as a right," McKay said.

There's more at stake than semantics. The Republicans who run the Legislature remain unpersuaded that Florida's voting equipment and methods are significantly responsible for the voter errors that gave them the presidency.

But to McKay's credit, he's not as dogmatic on that point as the true believers in the House. McKay seems willing to at least lend counties what they would need to buy precinct-based optical scanners or, better yet, touch-screen voting computers. And his elections committee, which wrote a thorough and fairly balanced report on the November election, has already set to work on legislation.

If most errors were voter errors, said the report, "that is not to say that the mistakes were entirely the voter's fault. Voters had a lot of help from error-prone voting system designs and confusing ballot designs."

The House, on the other hand, is moving more slowly than an Alpine glacier before global warming. Leon County election supervisor Ion Sancho said a staffer there told him the elections committee would not get busy unless some "big person" told it to, and so far no big person has. The committee's agenda for its only meeting this week reflects nothing about the technology issue.

The committee is, however, scheduled to hear two bills that profoundly involve the question of whether voting is a privilege or right. They would amend the constitution and the laws to restore the franchise to most of the Floridians -- estimates vary from 525,000 to half of that -- who were barred from voting because of felony convictions.

The ban is for life, even if the crime was nonviolent. Most offenders can be enfranchised only by petitioning the governor and Cabinet, which involves a 16-page application that's as daunting as a security clearance, and there is a long list of disqualifying factors. People who have recently completed their punishment are processed automatically, but only if their crimes were minor and they owe less than $1,000 for fines or restitution. It is a mystery why Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet insist on defending this in a federal civil rights lawsuit when they could be using their absolute powers of clemency to speed up and simplify the process of restoring voting rights.

Florida's earlier constitutions disenfranchised only people convicted of bribery, perjury and other "infamous" crimes, a category clearly aimed at political offenses that have an obvious nexus to voting. Not until the slaves had been freed was the ban expanded to all felonies and (for a time) to all thefts.

The racial implications are inescapable. Why won't Florida face them?

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