Can Donald Trump vote in the 2024 election? Here’s what you need to know

On By Littum



CNN
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While Florida generally makes it challenging for people in the state with felonies to regain their voting rights, former President Donald Trump had no problem casting a ballot for himself Tuesday in Palm Beach.

Trump was convicted earlier this year in Manhattan of 34 counts of falsifying business records tied to making pre-2016 election cash payments to adult movie star Stormy Daniels. Trump, the first former US president to be convicted of a felony, is scheduled to be sentenced on November 26.

Under Florida law, if a voter has an out-of-state conviction, Florida will follow that state’s laws on how a felon can regain their voting rights.

For Trump, that means he will take advantage of a 2021 New York law that allows people with felonies to vote as long as they are not serving a prison term at the time of the election.

For other Floridians with felony convictions, the rules are not so simple.

“Florida is really behind on its laws,” said Blair Bowie, director of the Campaign Legal Center’s Restore Your Vote project, which is focused on ending felony disenfranchisement.

A successful 2018 ballot initiative that restored voting rights to those who had completed the terms of their sentences was killed by state Republican lawmakers. They passed a law requiring all fines and fees associated with a conviction to be paid—a process that can be cumbersome since there is no centralized system to track such outstanding fees.

The Republican measure, which added the requirement that all fines and fees be paid, was challenged in court, but a conservative appeals court ultimately upheld the law. Still, the lawsuit revealed how records of the outstanding debt are kept at the county level and are often incomplete.

But the bureaucratic morass is not something Trump has to contend with, because he was sentenced in New York.

“The bottom line is that it should be that easy for everyone, not just Trump,” Bowie said.

This story has been updated with further developments.