Push to restore felon voting rights growing

Desmond Meade of Orlando has traveled from the Panhandle to Miami, all for the cause of restoring voting rights to 1.6 million non-violent ex-felons such as himself. But there is so much more to do.

“I’ve put over 150,000 miles on my car,” said Meade, the head of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. “Whether it’s the rural parts of the state or the urban centers, the message is thesame.… Second chances. That’s what it’s all about.”

Meade, a former addict convicted on drug and firearm charges in 2001 who later earned a law degree, successfully gathered more than 70,000 verified signatures for his petition to place an amendment to the Florida Constitution, which then triggered a review by the state Supreme Court.

But despite the successful hearing, in which the court allowed the process to proceed, Meade and his group still have a monumental challenge ahead.

They need about 700,000 more signatures by Feb. 1 to get the amendment on the ballot next year — and even then, it still needs more than 60 percent of the vote to become law.

“It’s very tough when you look at history,” said Darryl Paulson, emeritus professor of government at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. “It’s going to take [an] educational process, and it depends how much money the restoration movement can raise.”

Paulson estimated there’s probably “no better than a 50/50 chance” the measure gets the required number of signatures by 2018.

“But even if not, then Darryl Paulson, emeritus professor of government at USF-St. Petersburg

you try again,” he said. “Many amendments to the Florida Constitution don’t succeed the first time and did the second time,” including the medical marijuana amendment that failed in 2014 and passed in 2016.

Meade, however, was extremely optimistic. On Tuesday, he eagerly showed a video of boxes and boxes of envelopes that have been mailed to the coalition, so many that they haven’t even counted them yet.

“Thousands of people took the time to download the petition, print it out, fill it out, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, take it to the mailbox and mail it,” Meade said. “That’s a lot of steps people are doing, but thousands of people throughout the state? That’s impressive.”

“Florida has the most regressive policy in respect to the felon-voting issue,” Paulson said. “Nobody has such an extreme policy that can even come close.”

Florida is one of just four states to permanently bar felons from voting, even after they’ve served their sentences and probation.

A clemency boardmade up of Gov. Rick Scott, state Attorney General Pam Bondi and others meets four times per year, hearing 75 cases on average and granting clemency to fewer than half — leading to a backlog of more than 10,000 cases, Paulson said.

That’s on top of ex-felonswaiting five years after completing a sentence, probation and parole, plus an additional seven years if it was a drug offense, before they can even be considered.

“Gov. Scott believes in the clemency process and that in order for felons to have their rights restored, they have to demonstrate that they can live a life free of crime, show a willingness to request to have their rights restored and showrestitution to the victims of their crime,” a governor’s office spokeswoman said.

In other states, said Akosah, “there’s a lot of momentum to make the process more automatic and more fair.” Recently, Nevada is restoring rights to second-time felony offenders, while Arkansas defined the “moral turpitude” language in its felonvoting laws.

In Florida, though, “People hear theword ‘felon’ and have an automatic reaction to it,” Paulson said. “People have to realize [the restoration petition] doesn’t apply to violent felons like murderers and rapists.”

Felonies in Florida — half of which don’t result in prison time, Paulson said— include driving with a suspended license, disturbing turtle eggs in nests, “cutting lobster tails,” trespassing on a construction site, and— as both Paulson and Meade cited — releasing helium balloons, which got a Broward County man arrested and charged with a felony in 2013 for harming animals through pollution.

Residents can find a copy of the petition at the Florida Division of Elections website at dos.elections. or fromthe group’s website, floridarrc.com.

slemongello@ orlandosentinel.com