More than 1.5 million people in Florida are permanently barred from voting, running for office, or serving on a jury due to a criminal record. Today, nearly one in four African Americans in the state are disenfranchised by this policy, as the Presidential Primary descends upon his state,
Sheena Meade is campaigning to be the youngest African-American woman to ever represent Central Florida in the state legislature, and her husband Desmond Meade couldn’t be prouder, but he can not vote as a former felon.
Meade is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to allow Floridians convicted for non-violent crimes to automatically have their voting rights restored after completing their prison sentence, parole and probation. He and the other members of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition are more than two-thirds of the way toward gathering the roughly 68,000 signatures needed to force the State Supreme Court to consider putting the measure to Florida voters in 2018.
After years of advocacy by Meade and other members of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, then-Governor Charlie Christ ordered his Clemency board in 2007 to begin automatically restoring the rights of most ex-offenders who had fully paid their debt to society. But a Tea Party groundswell put Governor Rick Scott in office in 2010. Scott rolled those changes back, which Meade said felt like a “dagger in his heart.”
Since then, only a small handful of citizens have had their voting rights restored, while 11,000 people who have applied are still waiting for an answer.
Currently, Floridians seeking to get their voting rights restored after fully serving a felony sentence have to do the following:
- Wait between five and seven years.
- Obtain court documents for every charge they have ever been convicted of in any jurisdiction.
- Answer a series of questions Meade calls “extremely intrusive” about their own and their family members’ income, drinking habits, and other details. Any legal infraction, even a speeding ticket, can tank an applicant’s chances.
If the applicants are lucky enough to get a hearing before the Clemency Board, which only holds such hearings four times a year, they have to travel to the State capitol in Tallahassee, which is hundreds of miles away for many Floridians. If an applicant can’t afford to take time off work to make the hearing or can’t afford transportation, it counts against his or her case. Applicants who do make it to their hearing are given five minutes to tell the Governor and Clemency Board why they should get their rights back. If the Board deems their reasons not compelling enough, they could return empty-handed.
While Florida leads the country in the number of people barred from voting by a criminal record, 6 million people across the U.S. are disenfranchised by similar polices. It is no accident that Africans Americans are disproportionately represented in this group, and that most of those impacted live in former Confederate states like Virginia, Kentucky, and Florida. With voting eligibility left up to State governments, the U.S. has developed an arbitrary patchwork of laws. Someone serving a felony sentence in Maine can cast a ballot from prison, yet Florida residents like Meade are barred for life unless their individual petition to the governor is granted.
After tracking the tens of thousands of prisoners released between 2007 and 2011, the Florida Parole Commission found that ex-felons who had their voting rights restored were much less likely to commit another crime. Yet the state’s prison population has more than tripled in the past few decades, while the number of people approved by the governor to regain voting rights has slowed to a trickle.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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