America's Disenfranchised

Why Restoring Their Vote Can Save the Soul of Our Democracy

Desmond Meade

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501763755
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Derechos civiles en política

The Lawrence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal, presented by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State, recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world.

Voting is foundational in a democracy, yet over six million American citizens remain stripped of their ability to participate in elections. Once convicted of a felony, people who complete their sentences reenter society, but no longer with the civil rights they once had. They may return to school, secure employment to provide for their families, and become law-abiding, tax-paying citizens—sometimes for decades—and still be denied the voting rights afforded to every other citizen.

Desmond Meade, director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and a returning citizen himself, played an instrumental role in the landslide 2018 Amendment 4 victory in Florida, which used the ballot box to restore voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians with a previous felony conviction. Meade argues how, state by state, America can do better. His efforts in Florida present a compelling argument that creating access to democracy for those living on the fringes of society will create a more vibrant and robust democracy for all. He is the winner of the 2021 Brown Democracy Medal for his continuing work to restore voting rights and connect Americans along shared social values.

The Campaign

Whether we realize it or not, denying formerly incarcerated people in Florida the right to vote has affected everyone in this nation. Not just because of the effect it has on the individual returning citizen or voter, but also because it justifies and encourages the practice of excluding American citizens from engaging in the most telling act of citizenship. We saw this play out in the 2000 Bush-versus-Gore election contest. The felon disenfranchisement policy was used as a pretext to remove 12,000 eligible voters in an election decided by fewer than 550 votes. The 2000 election heightened the role that voter suppression tactics can play; particularly in close elections, and as Ari Berman reported in The Nation, “empowered a new generation of voting rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot, and remade a Supreme Court that would eventually gut the centerpiece of the VRA.”7 Eliminating felon disenfranchisement is one of the first steps toward creating the kind of democracy that works for everyone in this country. It sets a bar for inclusiveness. If we recognize that access to the ballot box should be granted even to the citizens who may have committed a crime, then it would be unacceptable to deny access to anyone else. The more inclusive the access, the more vibrant the democracy, and the more vibrant the democracy, the better it is for everyone.

Prior to our Amendment 4 campaign, Florida was one of only a handful of states that permanently disfranchised people with felony convictions. Alongside states such as Kentucky, Virginia, and (formerly) Iowa, Florida distinguished itself primarily due to the sheer volume of disenfranchised citizens. As I have noted, at its height, 1.68 million people could not vote due to a previous felony conviction. Consequently, Florida, by itself, accounted for approximately one-quarter of the nation’s disenfranchised adults. There were more of them here, in my state, than the population of over fourteen other US states and territories, and over forty countries in the world. In essence, not letting returning citizens vote in Florida is like denying the right to vote to the entire population of Maine, Rhode Island, Alaska, or Wyoming.

The fact that Florida is also a key swing state in presidential elections expands the impact of felon disenfranchisement beyond our state borders. We’ve seen several presidential elections in the last twenty years determined by the outcome of races here, and the difference in those races is almost always narrow, such as the 550 votes in the 2000 election. To know that there were times when the fate of our country hung in the balance in a state in which over one million citizens were denied the opportunity to cast a ballot spoke to a failing of our democracy, but also of an opportunity to empower and infuse a significant base of citizens into the messy but exciting world of democratic politics.

My Story

Most people know that my involvement in the restoration of voting rights in Florida originated in my own experience as a returning citizen. This journey is related at greater length in my book, Let My People Vote: My Battle to Restore the Civil Rights of Returning Citizens, but here’s the short version: from 2001 to 2004, I served a sentence in a Florida state prison, experiencing firsthand the plight of incarceration and then the persistent stigma, penalties, and discrimination that comes with life after release.

Reentry isn’t easy. I had no plan and few possibilities. Like most other returning citizens, my first concern wasn’t voting. It was basic survival: Where was I going to live? How could I get a job? How was I going to continue recovery and treatment for the addiction that landed me behind bars to begin with? I was alienated from my family, had no income, and soon became homeless again. In a cycle I had experienced before, I descended back into drug dependency and was close to giving up hope on myself and on life. In fact, in August 2005, I found myself on the railroad tracks, having decided that suicide was the only escape from the torment I was experiencing.

But the train never came. Having failed at suicide, I crossed the tracks, and somehow that moment put me in motion in a new direction. Ironically, the same addiction that led me to prison eventually also led me to advocacy. I enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program and, after I completed the program, I moved into a homeless shelter. Then, in January 2006, I enrolled in community college. The goal was just to stay as busy as possible with structured activity in order to continue my recovery process, and at the same time gain some skills to make a living. I chose to enroll in paralegal studies—a natural direction since I had worked on my own case while incarcerated, petitioning the court to file a belated appeal. I had been successful and then went on to help others with their legal paperwork as well.

For me, those encounters with the law eventually translated into a passion to reform the Constitution, but achieving that goal actually prompted a much larger transformation. Over the years, I became a student of the law and then a law school graduate. I started as an activist looking to address my own issue, but I became an organizer across key constituencies and eventually the face of a movement that would one day outline a comprehensive vision for returning citizens and their communities.

Embracing the law in a more systematic way helped me shift focus from my own problems and history to a bigger perspective that expanded my sense of purpose. To satisfy that end, I first got involved with the Homeless/Formerly Homeless Forum, a community organization focused on combating homelessness. It was through this group that I first came to understand that returning citizens could not vote in Florida and that the process of getting voting rights back was a long and cumbersome one—fraught with barriers and unlikely to yield results.

In August 2008, I attended a convening of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC). At that time, the FRRC was a loose collection of allies and advocates—little more than a listserv. I didn’t know anyone at the meeting except other homelessness advocates, but the meeting had a tremendous impact on me. I gained an understanding of the effect that my conviction had on my right to vote, and I was introduced to the history of felon disenfranchisement and its disproportionate impact on African Americans. When I started fully engaging in the monthly conference calls with the FRRC, I realized the breadth of felon disenfranchisement’s impact on the country. All of a sudden, I was struck with an epiphany that made me understand my real purpose in life: to inspire others with hope for change. At that moment, I fully embraced service and stepped up my participation in the FRRC’s regular conference calls.

In another sign of divine providence, I was nominated by a total stranger to become the next steering committee secretary. Even though I did not have any experience and I definitely did not type well, I accepted a job whose duties included taking copious notes during the meetings and preparing meeting minutes for the subsequent meetings. Those calls featured legal experts from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the Advancement Project, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Sentencing Project, and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), among others, often discussing the many aspects of the felony disenfranchisement issue. I learned a lot about the law and the issue through this work. For one thing, efforts to restore voting rights to Florida’s disenfranchised, formerly incarcerated people were not new. In 2000, in Johnson v. Bush, legal advocates at the Brennan Center led an effort representing more than 600,000 Floridians to challenge the state’s constitutional provision that permanently disenfranchised people.8 They had not been successful, but advocates were also not deterred.

Recall that in Florida the only way to restore a person’s right to vote once it has been stripped away was as a favor granted by the governor. The only viable way to change that policy was by constitutional amendment. In 2003 there had been a previous citizen-led ballot measure effort to change the Florida Constitution regarding voting rights for returning citizens, but the petition had gathered only a few hundred signatures, well short of what was needed. Legal experts on the monthly FRRC calls continued to strategize, however, looking at recent developments from other states that might inform our local efforts. In particular, we looked at whether a state allowed constitutional amendment initiatives, and if not, we looked at a state’s legislative and executive branches’ attitudes toward felon disenfranchisement. In Virginia, which was one of the four states that permanently disenfranchised its citizens who had been convicted of a felony, there was no option to engage in a ballot initiative, but there had been a concentrated grassroots effort to convince the state’s governors over the years to use their executive powers to address the issue. We were even able to use in our message some of the language that Virginia’s conservative attorney general and governor used in supporting the restoration of civil rights.

We discussed how Florida voters could put something on the ballot if they gathered enough signatures and met all the criteria. Many of the experts of the day thought this tactic was too uphill, particularly after the passage of Jessica’s Law in 2006, which galvanized public opinion against sex offenders and imposed more severe restrictions against people who commit these crimes.9 Polling at that time showed low public support for enfranchising sex offenders.

FRRC allies focused their attention instead on legislative and executive advocacy. And they had some success. In...