The Florida Democratic Party blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis as “a Jim Crow governor” after he said he would sign legislation critics say was deliberately crafted to defy the will of voters who wanted to make it easier for ex-felons to regain the right to vote.

Speaking Tuesday in Miami, DeSantis said he will sign Senate Bill 7066, which would require ex-felons to pay all fines, court costs and court-mandated financial restitution before they can again become eligible to vote.

Critics of that legislation say it thwarts the will of voters who last fall supported Amendment 4, which sought to make it easier for ex-felons to again become eligible to vote.

>>PREVIOUS STORY: Ex-felon bill, with financial constraints, awaits DeSantis signature — or veto

The constitutional amendment, approved by 65 percent of voters, said ex-felons who had not been convicted of murder or a sexual offense will have their voting rights restored “upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.”

The amendment makes no reference to fines, fees or financial restitution, but Republican legislators, and now Gov. DeSantis, have interpreted “all terms” to include such costs.

Democrats say that interpretation, enshrined in SB 7066, is simply a tactic to dilute the impact of an amendment that could restore the voting rights of 1.4 million to 1.5 million people.

>>READ ALSO: Florida felon voting rights: Who got theirs back under Scott?

With minorities over-represented in the state’s prison system — and likely over-represented among those with felony convictions — barring ex-felons from voting has boosted Republican prospects, as minorities tend to vote for Democratic candidates.

SB 7066 passed the House and Senate last week on party-line votes, with Democrats in opposition and Republicans lined up behind it.

Felon disenfranchisement has ties to the Jim Crow era of racial oppression, when governments throughout the South erected a variety of barriers to prevent freed black residents from voting. Poll taxes, known to be more onerous for people of limited financial means but permissible at the time because they did not specifically target voters based on race, were among those barriers.

Democrats have said SB 7066 is a throwback to those efforts.

“The Republican Party of Florida is willing to wear the mantle of passing a modern day poll tax,” said Juan Penalosa, executive director of the Democratic Party of Florida. “Gov. DeSantis is willing to be a Jim Crow governor.”

Penalosa said the party is considering legal action.

“Everything is on the table,” Penalosa said.

Joe Gruters, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, rejected the notion that the GOP was playing racial politics.

"We reject that premise entirely," Gruters said. "All we did was implement the will of the people. The idea that this is anything other than that is simply not the case."

DeSantis, like Republicans in the Legislature, said SB 7066 puts into law the meaning of Amendment 4.

“The amendment says, if you read it, you have to complete your sentence,” DeSantis said. “And I think most people understand you can be sentenced to jail, probation, restoration if you harm someone. You can be sentenced with a fine. People that bilk people out of money, sometimes that is an appropriate sentence. That’s what the constitutional provision said. I think the Legislature just implemented that as it’s written.”

In 2017, during a hearing before the Florida Supreme Court, Jon Mills, an attorney for one of the groups that supported Amendment 4, told justices that ex-felons would have to pay fines, fees and financial restitution before they could again become eligible to vote.

On Wednesday, Myrna Perez of the Brennan Center for Justice, which helped craft Amendment 4, sought to cast Mills' comments in a different light, saying that the questions asked by the justices required more thought and legal analysis.

In any case, Perez said, the Legislature did not have to interpret the amendment the way it did.

"There is a little bit of reasonableness that we should expect from a legislature," she said. "In this case, they are exploiting the power that they have. This, in our view, was an improper overreach by the Legislature."

Some supporters of Amendment 4 anticipated that Republicans in the Legislature would craft legislation to limit its impact.

"We knew this was a possibility," Perez said. "To make something bulletproof to prevent a legislature from monkeying with something is not realistic."

Florida currently strips all felons of the right to vote and requires that they go through a time-consuming clemency process overseen by the governor before they can again become eligible to vote.

An investigation by The Palm Beach Post last year found that DeSantis’ predecessor, Rick Scott, restored voting rights to a disproportionately low percentage of black felons. The investigation also found that Scott restored voting rights to a higher percentage of Republicans and a lower percentage of Democrats than any of his predecessors since 1971.

Since January 8, when Amendment 4 went into effect, 30 percent of those who registered to vote in Florida have been Republican. About 30 percent were Democrats, with 40 percent choosing no party.

About 60 percent of those who registered after January 8 are white. Some 16 percent of newly registered voters are Hispanic, and 15 percent are black.

Those figures include people who moved to the state recently and those who are not ex-felons.

Perez said her organization is getting calls from disappointed Floridians.

"We're getting calls from people who say they feel duped," she said.

Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, wrote DeSantis a letter Wednesday urging him to veto SB 7066, which he says erects a variety of voting barriers that had not been in place before.

“The bill’s definitions of murder and felony sexual offenses are so broad that they improperly exclude individuals for unrelated or inapplicable crimes far beyond what is required by the language of Amendment 4,” Kubic writes.

Another problem, Kubic wrote, is that the bill would require ex-felons, whom he describes as returning citizens, to pay even in instances when their financial obligations are no longer part of their criminal sentence.

“This will have a disproportionately adverse impact on Black and Latino returning citizens, who have much less wealth than white families,” Kubic wrote. “To have the state legislature create a law that effectively bases the eligibility to vote on the ability to pay is counter to the promise of Amendment 4 and is unconstitutional.”

Kubic points out other aspects of the law, including that it requires ex-felons to state on their voter registration form whether they have a felony conviction.

That requirement, Kubic wrote, “will subject them to stigmatization, the potential for discrimination, and ultimately will chill voter registration.”

Staff writer Chris Persaud contributed to this report.