You may have heard the news. Our friends and partners at Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) got one step closer to getting rights restored for people with past felony convictions.
This week, FRRC president Desmond Meade announced that his team did it — they got enough petitions certified to put the issue on the referendum this year.
While there’s much more work to do, at Advancement Project we couldn’t be happier; we remember when Desmond’s effort to restore the right to vote were but a dream. Our executive director Judith Browne Dianis and our managing director, Edward A. Hailes, recorded a message congratulating Desmond and the FRRC squad on their historic feat:
Restoring the right to vote in Florida is urgent. Florida is one of just a handful of states with laws that permanently disenfranchise people with past felony convictions. The other states include Virginia, Iowa, and Kentucky.
In Florida, almost 1.7 million people – more than ten percent of the adult population – are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. Making matters worse, the state’s process for restoring the right to vote is an archaic, arbitrary, confusing, uphill and uneven process that leaves little chance for second chances.
Stay tuned for more from the Advancement Project team. There’s much more work to do, but today, we tip our hat to the FRRC team.