Meade keeps up battle to help Florida felons vote again

More than four years after Amendment 4 was approved by Florida voters, confusion reigns for felons who have no simple way to find out if they’re eligible to vote.

At the same time, well-publicized financial support to solve the problem from LeBron James’ organization and other national groups has started to dry up. And Florida, which has never been welcoming, has started to turn openly hostile after a newly formed elections police charged 20 felons across Florida with voting illegally.

Yet, Desmond Meade, the head of the Florida Rights Restoration Commission that spearheaded the amendment to restore to non-violent felons the right to vote, says he’s firmly staying in the fight.

“Voting should not be something where people should be scared to do [it],” Meade told the Orlando Sentinel in a recent interview at the FRRC’s Orlando office. “So what we’re trying to do is work the system, utilize whatever tools and avenues we have. … We’re going to double down our efforts.”

Meade’s group was recognized earlier this month as worthy of one of the most prestigious awards of all. The FRRC was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the two Quaker groups that successfully nominated the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the prize in 1964.

The nomination “serves as validation of the work that we’ve been doing, and it shows to justify our mindset in leading by love, rather than by hate and fear,” Meade said.

More than 2,000 felons, including Meade, registered to vote in the first few months after Amendment 4 went into effect in 2019. But despite getting nearly 65% of the vote in the 2018 election, the amendment immediately faced a series of new hurdles.

The Legislature passed a law requiring felons to pay back all fines, fees and restitution before they could register. The law affected an estimated 500,000 people, with the total amount owed potentially in the billions of dollars.

But the state has no single source of information on it.

Matt Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst, said an administration that wanted to help felons could have made a huge difference.

“You could have a government taking steps to let people know, ‘Hey, you qualify. Hey, you can register. Hey, here’s the form, you just need to mail it back,’” Isbell said. “But obviously, you weren’t going to have that from this administration, this Legislature. … It was something the state didn’t want to begin with.”

Instead, just before last year’s primary election, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election police arrested 20 people in a sweep across the state, including three in Orange County who said they had been told they could vote and were granted voter cards.

“They did not go through any process. They did not get their rights restored and yet they went ahead and voted anyways. That is against the law and now they’re going to pay the price for it,”

At least three of the charges have been dropped, including a judge who ruled the state did not have standing to charge a felon from Orange County. But others, including inmates in Alachua County who registered in a prison voting drive, have pleaded no contest and were given 12-18 month sentences.

Meade said Florida has “a responsibility to make sure that it dots its i’s and crosses its t’s. When you talk about election integrity, it starts and ends with the state. So the state has a responsibility to hold up its end of the bargain.”

While the charges largely involved felons convicted of violent crimes, who had been specifically excluded under Amendment 4, Meade said the arrests only added to the confusion around the issue and had a “chilling effect” on efforts to register voters.

Concerns rise “when you’re seeing the images or videos on TV of people getting arrested or hearing stories of SWAT teams going to arrest people, taking people out of their homes in their pajamas,” Meade said. “We started getting people calling concerned that they’re going get arrested ... So some people are just erring on the side of caution because they’re seeing how things are going.”

Central Florida elections supervisors couldn’t confirm whether that was the case, with Bill Cowles in Orange County and Chris Anderson in Seminole County saying they haven’t received many calls or in-person requests from felons about their status either before or after the arrests.

“I can tell you right now, I’ve never told a felon that they were fine,” said Anderson, a Republican. “We can’t do that. That’s not even something that we’re actually able to do. We don’t have access to those databases. … That’s not how it works.”

Cowles agreed that there needs to be a single resource, such as a hotline, for people to find information about their voting status. But in the meantime, he said, “third-party voter registration groups, and others who are doing voter registration, have got to be honest with the applicant.”

“If they say, ‘Well, I’m not sure about my rights,’ then you should say, ‘Well, maybe you should wait and go determine your status before you complete this form,’” said Cowles, a Democrat. “... There needs to be caution by these groups.”

Flow of money starts to dry

Meade said the FRRC has so far raised $30 million and has spent about $28 million on paying off more than 40,000 felons’ fines and fees. That includes working within the court system to try to have felons’ fines and fees reduced by a judge.

“It also creates protection for any future attempts of prosecution,” he said. “This person now has a court order [and can] say, ‘The court said I can vote, so there’s no intent to defraud.’”

But raising the necessary funds has become more difficult.

In 2020, basketball superstar LeBron James and his group More Than a Vote pledged $100,000 to the FRRC. “This is a fight about their constitutional right to vote being denied,” James wrote in a tweet.

Today, the More Than a Vote website no longer seems to exist, and its social media lies dormant.

A New York Magazine story from October was headlined, “LeBron James doesn’t talk about politics anymore.”

“Now that he’s the all-time scoring champion, maybe we need to re-engage him and see how we get him to be more active in the work that we’re doing,” Meade said, referring to James’ recent breaking of Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record.

James and other national figures aren’t the only ones who have seemingly turned off the spigot when it comes to money and support.

“We had a couple of years in which we just raised a ton of money,” Meade said. “That flow of money has drastically died down. The excitement of an election causes people to give, and when it’s not an election year, people are not induced to give. But we do what we can.”

But money is still coming in from various groups. Meade pointed to a giant check for $200,000 from the Miami Dolphin Foundation sitting in the back of the FRRC’s conference room.

“It’d be great, if we get the Tampa Bay Bucs and, and the Jacksonville Jaguars to join on this,” Meade said. “... We can never raise enough money.”

Meade said later that the Nobel nomination could help spur more contributions to the cause.

“[It] definitely elevates the profile of the organization,” he said. “And just reminds people of the importance of the work.”

‘It was a beautiful thing’

The Republican backlash to Amendment 4 lies in original partisan expectations from both parties that felon voting would benefit Democrats, Isbell said. But he was one of the earliest voices in pointing out that those expectations would not match up with reality.

“I never, ever believed in the hype around it as some sort of like Democratic [stopgap], that most of these voters would be Democrats,” Isbell said.

While there’s currently no reliable way of tracking a felon’s political party, “it’s not reshaping the voter role in any notable way,” Isbell said. “Voter rolls are still getting more Republican. … It’s not like it’s led to some massive shift in the voter rolls, partisan-wise.”

From the beginning. Meade and his organization, including deputy director Neil Volz, a Republican, have pointed out that felony convictions cut across party lines.

“It’s so easy to get into the partisan narrative on this issue, even with the recent arrests,” Meade said. “‘Oh, my God, [DeSantis] is going after Democrats.’ And the reality is, some of the first people that got arrested were registered as Republicans. … It’s not about Democrats, it’s not about Republicans. It’s about who should have access to our democracy.”

Meade mourned for the overwhelming sense of unity and jubilation felons such as himself received when they first were able to register in January 2019. Meade was convicted of drug and firearm charges in 2001 before turning his life around and earning a law degree.

“[There were] balloons and red carpets and stuff like that,” Meade said. “It was a celebration. It was a beautiful thing.”

But even as the path got harder, each individual story was just as beautiful, he said.

“I’ve seen people walk in [to court] broken and walk out” able to register to vote, Meade said. “And you just see a different spirit within that individual. And that keeps us going. So while it would be great if we could snap a finger and help everybody out, the reality is that we’re doing this one person at a time.”