Former felons in the Sunshine State who are fighting a requirement that they pay all outstanding fines and fees before being able to vote may have scored a recent win at the Eleventh Circuit, but with just eight months to go before the general election and the state vowing to battle on, time may be running out for them to cast a ballot in 2020.

A three-judge panel on Wednesday unanimously upheld a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle preventing Florida from blocking the 17 indigent plaintiffs from registering to vote. The court ruled the requirement on fines and fees, as it currently stands, is a violation of the U.S. Constitution's equal protection clause because it punishes those who cannot pay more harshly than those who can.

However, the court said nothing prevents the state from collecting fines and fees from ex-felons who have the ability to pay, meaning that if the ruling stands — and there's still plenty of litigation left — the state will have to set up a process to determine which ex-cons are genuinely too poor to pay their fines.

Gov. Ron DeSantis indicated Wednesday that he plans to seek a rehearing of the Eleventh Circuit decision, while the state Legislature, which is currently winding down its session, has no plans to amend S.B. 7066, the state law passed last year that implemented Amendment 4, a voter-approved state constitutional amendment that restored ballot rights to former felons. The state law requires former felons to pay all legal financial obligations before being able to vote.

Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee has not provided any guidance on the issue either, according to Sean Morales-Doyle, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law who is working on the case on behalf of the plaintiffs. A spokesperson for Lee did not respond to a request for comment.

"Judge Hinkle described this as an 'administrative nightmare,'" Morales-Doyle said. "The Legislature should be acting on this. It's a shame they're saying publicly that they're not going to do anything about this."

The majority of the estimated 1.4 million former felons in Florida are believed to have unpaid fees and fines. At a hearing last fall, the plaintiffs put forth University of Florida professor Daniel Smith, who compiled data from 58 of the state's 67 counties and identified 542,207 people with felony convictions who had completed their terms of incarceration and parole. Of those, 80% had outstanding legal financial obligations, according to the Eleventh Circuit's opinion.

The Legislature's Office of Program Policy and Government Accountability found that in fiscal year 2017-2018, the courts successfully collected just 9.31% of fines and fees imposed in felony cases.

Attorneys for the state have argued that conducting "ability to pay" hearings would be an undue administrative burden, although the Eleventh Circuit noted that Judge Hinkle's preliminary injunction largely left it up to the state to determine what kind of procedure it wants to implement.

"It is not as though this is the first time the state will be making individualized determinations about a criminal defendant's financial situation on a large scale," the Eleventh Circuit said. "The state already has a procedure by which criminal defendants can attest to their income and assets in order to determine whether they qualify for a public defender."

To reach its decision, the Eleventh Circuit applied heightened scrutiny when considering the constitutionality of the legal financial obligation requirement. It's here that the state could attack the ruling in the event the court agrees to rehear the case, according to professor Darren Hutchinson of the University of Florida's Levin College of Law.

Hutchinson said that while discrimination based on race, gender or ethnicity is always viewed with heightened scrutiny, typically classifications based on wealth or class have been examined with the less strict rational basis standard.

He added that the Eleventh Circuit stated clearly that it is within a state's right to ban felons from voting or place restrictions on their voting rights, which could bolster Florida's argument.

"If they can ban it altogether, why can't they have that additional requirement to pay their obligation?" Hutchinson said. "You're dealing with a situation where they don't have to restore it in the first place."

Morales-Doyle said the plaintiffs' team is looking toward the bench trial before Judge Hinkle scheduled to begin April 6. At trial, the plaintiffs plan to pursue additional claims beyond the equal protection clause claim on which the Eleventh Circuit already ruled, including a claim that the fines and fees are a poll tax that is prohibited by the 24th Amendment, according to Morales-Doyle.

He said they also will pursue claims for intentional race discrimination and violation of due process and a claim under the National Voter Registration Act.

That trial, which Judge Hinkle has said will not be postponed, is expected to last about a week, and the judge said he plans to rule quickly after its conclusion. Whether thousands of felons will be able to cast votes in November will then depend on how quickly any appeals from the judge's decision get resolved.

"Federal courts are generally good about expediting appeals when there's an election coming," Morales-Doyle said. "I hope it will be sooner rather than later."

The plaintiffs are represented by Michael A. Steinberg of Michael A. Steinberg & Associates, Paul Smith, Molly Danahy, Jonathan Diaz, Mark Gaber and Danielle Long of Campaign Legal Center and Chad Wilson Dunn of Brazil & Dunn.

The state of Florida is represented by Charles J. Cooper and Peter A. Patterson of Cooper & Kirk PLLC, Ashley Moody and Joseph W. Jacquot of the Florida Attorney General's Office, and Joshua Pratt and Nicholas Primrose of the Executive Office of the Governor.

The case is Jones et al. v. Governor of Florida et al., case number 19-14551, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

--Additional reporting by RJ Vogt. Editing by Philip Shea and Jill Coffey.