EIGHTEEN

THE HOME STRETCH

WHEN I WAS IN RECOVERY, my prayers were always about wanting to do God’s will. They started out simply. On any given day, my mission was to not use drugs and to do something that would make somebody’s life better, even if it was just to make them smile. I wanted to learn something new and to be a better person than I was the day before, understanding that I’m not going to be perfect and it’s not about the end. It’s not about reaching your final destination. It’s about the journey.

I tried with all my might to hang on to that message as we got closer and closer to having our ballot initiative become the focus of national and even international attention. The journey is where everything fits. I kept that in the back of my mind, not to pray for personal gain but for the wisdom and the strength to be the best that I could be. If winning a fight is what would bring that about, then let’s win. If losing a fight is what would bring that about, then who am I to object?

WE WERE COLLECTING OUR PETITIONS UP AND DOWN THE STATE OF FLORIDA AT A STEADY clip. But I didn’t realize what kind of paradigm shift in our exposure was possible until comedian Samantha Bee of the TBS show Full Frontal featured our ballot initiative. That was a game changer and put us out there like nothing had before. Before showing the six-minute clip that featured me and Neil Volz, we had about seventy thousand petitions signed. After that episode aired, we were swamped with people mailing in petitions. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of miles I’d driven around Florida, and all the conversations I had, the people who I talked to represented a drop in the bucket. At the time, we didn’t have money for advertising. The campaign was moved through word of mouth; that was how we were able to build momentum and raise awareness. Being on national television allowed us to reach all kinds of living rooms we wouldn’t have had access to, either because we didn’t have the connections or because there are only so many hours in the day. Now it seemed I couldn’t go a whole day without someone stopping to tell me, “Hey, we saw you on Samantha Bee!”

Initially, a young man named Tyler, who was working for Full Frontal, reached out to us. What I have come to understand is that even for a national show, there is more often than not a local connection, somebody on the team who either lives in Florida or used to live in Florida. That was the case with Tyler, who told me, “We’re interested in doing something around your efforts.” We were game for it. Every little bit helped.

They filmed two segments. For the first one, they came down to Florida and filmed us in West Palm Beach. I spoke at an event there, and they had a table where we were getting people to sign petitions. The camera crew followed us to the hotel and filmed us talking to people and collecting more petitions. The second segment we filmed in the studio in New York, where we spoke with Samantha. Our conversation flowed so naturally. Nothing was scripted, and it came out amazing.

We were so appreciative of Samantha Bee, because there are plenty of folks who will air an episode about something and that’s that. But the folks at Full Frontal actually created a website for us and encouraged people to fill out the petition, which you could download at home. That, to me, went above and beyond. This was not just a show to highlight an issue. Samantha Bee changed the game.

A few months after that, John Oliver did a piece on us that actually helped to bolster the work started by Full Frontal. I even went on Fox to talk to Tucker Carlson about felon re-enfranchisement. It didn’t matter if the show was conservative or progressive; I wanted to spread the message to everybody.

Carlson was advancing his own agenda, but he wasn’t totally against us. And his own viewers were siding with us. We heard people saying that yes, they were conservative, but this was the right thing to do or that we were onto something here. There were folks who were Republican but were impacted by being disenfranchised and were speaking out.

That was very encouraging to me and got to the root of what I had been saying all along. Too often we limit ourselves on certain campaigns or movements, because we assume there are certain audiences we can’t be in front of. We limit who we talk to, but when we limit who we talk to, we limit the number of people to support us. Then we allow other folks to form their own opinions without even having a conversation about it. I was always of the mindset that said, “No, this is an all-American issue. We need to get buy-in from everyone.” Just like when I first started collecting petitions, I went straight to conservative people. Others might say, “Oh no, conservative people are going to be against your initiative because they think this only helps Democrats.” To which I replied, “No, this is for everybody. People who vote Democrat are not the only people who get in trouble.” No matter what your political party is, you can lose your right to vote.

Being bold and not setting up walls and being willing to go in front of any audience to talk about this was all made easier because, at the end of the day, I knew that what I was talking about was honorable. What I was talking about was based on values that are shared by everyone, especially when you talk about forgiveness and redemption and restoration. I looked forward to being in front of audiences others might be convinced would not agree with me. I have been successful with that more often than not.

WHEN I LOOKED AT ALL THE MAIL THAT WAS COMING IN NOW BECAUSE OF OUR NATIONAL exposure, I felt buoyed about our chances of success. If you think about it, someone had to actually go to a site to see the petition. They had to download it, then print it out. They had to sign the petition. Then they had to put it in an envelope, address the envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it. That’s a lot of steps someone is taking to support this. I could not help but believe that if someone would take the time to go through all that to give us a petition, then getting them to eventually vote for our cause was not going to be as big of a deal.

I had people actually write me letters, using their own stamps to connect with our cause. I had never experienced that before. Donations were coming in from major and minor sources alike, and from people as far away as Washington State and Massachusetts—you couldn’t get much farther away from Florida than that.

Some folks were contributing recurring donations; every month that twenty dollars would come from someone out of Seattle or that fifty dollars from someone in San Francisco. We were able to start hiring staff, and we got an office. We had a campaign manager. All of that was great. Throughout this process, though, even as we were getting professionalized, the one thing I was very adamant about was that we could not fail to recognize the heartbeat. We could not lose sight of the people who were directly impacted. We could not lose sight of all of the volunteers and that grassroots spirit that kept the campaign afloat. We couldn’t lose that identity.

Once we had collected enough petitions, or more than enough petitions, we braced ourselves for what was purported to be the next battle. We were told that a tough fight awaited us in the Florida State Supreme Court before we could get on the ballot for 2018. Either the state attorney general was going to oppose it or groups on the outside would submit an amicus brief saying that our initiative should not be allowed to move forward. There was also a fiscal impact conference. At the same time the State Supreme Court does its review, the State of Florida holds hearings and invites people to discuss the economic impact of a particular amendment on the state. For instance, if a certain amendment passes, is it going to cost Florida’s taxpayers a certain amount of money? If not, is it going to save the taxpayers money? Those fiscal impact statements are always attached to any amendment that makes the ballot.

None of these bad things actually happened. The state attorney general didn’t challenge the validity of the ballot; she conceded to its constitutionality. No one submitted an amicus brief against our amendment. If there was an amicus brief, it was one that was submitted for our amendment, not against. The State Supreme Court approved our language (constitutional language)! Now we had to collect enough signatures to get it on the ballot! The language says:

No. 4 Constitutional Amendment Article VI, Section 4. Voting Restoration Amendment. This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis.

The Florida Division of Elections approved the language on April 20, 2018, for the election that coming November. We were to be Amendment 4.

Between April 20 and November 6, Election Day, our efforts were all-consuming. There was no more back burner. We had passed a certain threshold. It needed to be all systems go. If something cropped up on my path that wouldn’t actually benefit the ballot initiative, I would not spend much time on it. This was something serious, and I had to remain keenly focused on the work we were doing. The vote itself might be months away, but there was no time to waste. I’d always heard that when you do ballot initiatives, you only get one bite at the apple. I had to make sure that bite counted.

We had to make sure that our issue did not fade from people’s minds, but we wanted to stay true to the core of the message at the same time. We still wanted to connect felon re-enfranchisement in the mind of voters to someone they knew and someone they loved. I continued to travel around the state, visiting colleges and talking to kids about Amendment 4; some of their parents were impacted by felon disenfranchisement. I went on radio shows, such as Hot Talk, hosted by Jill Tracey, which reached the Miami area, and Monica May in Orlando, who hosted The Tom Joyner Morning Show. I would be on the radio in northwest Florida. I would be on the radio in South Florida. I would talk to anyone and everybody about this.

In Florida, the primaries are held in August; the ballot initiatives aren’t on the primary ballots, of course, but it was a chance to talk to voters. By now we were very familiar with the voting locations and aware of the opportunity that presented itself to us there. In August of 2018, we fanned out across all of the polling places, passing out materials and reminding people to vote “Yes on 4” in November.

This period could best be summed up by the convening we had before the election. I came out to give the introductory speech, but this time the soundtrack wasn’t a heartbeat. This time it was the opening of the song “Lose Yourself” by Eminem, where he asks if you had only one shot at everything you ever wanted, would you really let it slip? The message was, This is our moment. No one ever thought we’d get this far without major funding. No one ever thought this controversial issue would make the ballot. But here we are, and we have a choice. Are we going to seize this moment and give it all we got?

Publicly I had to put on my best face, while privately the campaign was wearing on me. Our polling numbers were high; that wasn’t the problem. We were polling consistently well throughout the entire state, which was an amazing feat in and of itself, because in Florida, what the polls say in south Florida isn’t necessarily what the polls say in north Florida. To be polling well in every area of Florida brought a level of confidence.

My concerns came from the unexpected. I didn’t know if some misleading attack ads were going to drop at any minute, from a previously unknown group, and if they did, what kind of impact that would have. I also bore a pressure that I never revealed to anyone, but it was a weight that I carried on my shoulders for so long. Typically, when you see a campaign like ours, the person at the helm of those campaigns is not somebody who’s Black. It’s going to be somebody white, with an impressive resume, somebody who’s well-connected. Here I was, a Black person. Not only a Black person, but a formerly incarcerated person who was leading this.

There is an implicit bias that in order for something to be successful, somebody white has to be leading it. The reality is that there are so many talented African American and Latinx Americans, so many people of color, who have the capacity to actually lead things. Typically what you see is those people as a deputy or second in command. But the ultimate person calling the shots does not look like me and definitely does not have the background that I had. I didn’t want our initiative losing to be an excuse for people not to trust the leadership of returning citizens. I didn’t want our losing to be an excuse for people not to trust the leadership of a Black person. They might not say it out loud, but that would be the implicit understanding for many people as to why people of color are not at the helm of major movements and major campaigns.

That was something that stayed with me. And then there was just the relentlessness of the timeline for the initiative. When you think about a campaign, most last a year or less. I was like that person who was running for office, but I had been on the campaign trail for over four years. That’s every day, waking up, thinking about the issue of felon disenfranchisement and problems associated with the issue and connecting the dots, thinking about the campaign and doing something to further it. It was a constant grind, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I hadn’t taken a real vacation where I was able to totally unplug in years.

While there were other organizations that strongly supported Amendment 4 and were engaged in the campaign, none of them had committed 100 percent. They had their own organizational missions that led them to other issues they had to deal with. Amendment 4 was all there was for FRRC. We put everything on the line for it. We put everything on the table.

I had been struggling with diverticulitis for a while. Then the stress of a multiyear campaign, constant worrying and being on the go, not eating right or sleeping enough, day after day, caused me to have flare-ups. I didn’t realize the toll that it was taking on me. There were a couple of times when I came very close to having a rupture that could’ve been devastating to me. Doctors kept telling me I needed surgery, but I was scared that if I took any time off, the movement would stop. When my condition finally became too severe, I had no choice but to go under the knife. I finally had surgery in 2018, during the campaign. They had to cut out parts of my intestines. When I looked at the wounds on my stomach, I thought, This campaign literally took a chunk of me. This is my pound of flesh I had to sacrifice for the cause.

Those last months had been really, really rough. But now they were over. All of the time I had spent wondering if Amendment 4 was going to pass or not, if we were going to go down in flames or we were going to be victorious, came down to one night. We had a watch party at a house we rented just for this purpose, and it was starting to fill with people who were waiting on me. I did not want to know the results. I was made aware of all the media coverage we were getting; we were in the middle of the spotlight of the country—in some cases, the world, because news outlets globally were covering tonight’s results. I was hiding away, because I knew I was going to have to do one of two things: I was going to have to give a victory speech, or I was going to have to somehow or other give a speech that would continue to inspire people in spite of the fact that we had lost.

As I mentioned, I rarely write any notes before I speak, preferring just to let what I have to say come from my heart and matching that to the temperature in the room. My wife came to check on me a few times while we were waiting for the election results, but basically everyone else just left me alone. Then I got the call to come down to the ballroom; it was getting close to that time. As soon as I walked in the door, that’s when it was announced that we had won. I saw so many elated faces. I didn’t have a clue who had been invited to the watch party; I was not involved in the planning of it. So many folks were hugging me as I tried to make my way to the stage. We got over 350,000 more votes than we needed to pass the initiative; we needed 60 percent of the vote total, and we got almost 65 percent. Over five million people had voted “Yes on 4.”

When we won Amendment 4, I knew how important it was. But even I didn’t grasp just how important. Every time someone would talk to me about what had just been accomplished, it would start to overwhelm me, and I would just shut down because the thought of the magnitude of what we did was too much for my mind to bear.

The minute we won, and for days and weeks and months afterward, my cell phone and my office phone were bombarded. I was receiving emails and instant messages from folks who were returning citizens, who were besides themselves with excitement, wanting to know where they could register to vote.

I also got hounded by people who wanted to know where the list of returning citizens was so they could register them right away. When folks called me to ask that questions, I would say: “Where do you think they are? Do you think there’s a special place that people with felony convictions hang out? No, they’re in our homes, in our communities, at the shopping centers, churches. There’s no special place for returning citizens.” I started feeling like returning citizens were going to be turned into some pawn in a partisan battle, that folks were just wanting to seek out people like me and register me because they thought I must be a Democrat and that they’d never have to worry about losing a race again.

That showed me how we reduce people’s humanity, and that went against what Amendment 4 was all about. We were about lifting up a person’s humanity and connecting with each other along those lines. To now be experiencing this onslaught of requests for returning citizens, it opened my eyes to one of the reasons why I think a lot of Americans who are registered don’t even bother to go vote. Are we being seen as individuals with specific concerns on our minds and in our communities? Or are we just looked at as more votes to add to the coffers? Should registering people to vote be a purely transactional interaction, or should it be more of a transformational one? The driving force behind registering people to vote should be the belief that the more people participate in elections, the more accountable politicians will be to the voters, and the more vibrant our democracy will become.

After I registered for the first time, I went on the news station in Orlando, and a reporter popped the question. I knew it was going to come at some point. “Did you register as a Democrat or a Republican?”

My answer was, “I registered with no party affiliation.”

The reason why I did that is because I believe that I fought too hard and waited too long to get my voting rights back to give it away to just anybody. I really felt that as returning citizens, we have an opportunity to shake up the status quo. When you looked at the state of politics today, there is such a hard partisan divide. What you see is partisan bickering, not coming together and trying to forge some type of compromise. You see a lot of the civility erode in our political system, where folks are hurling insults at each other and refusing to sit down and have conversations to find their common ground, to see where the connections are or where there’s alignment or agreement.

I may have shocked a lot of people when I registered with no party affiliation (NPA), but returning citizens are such a large force in Florida. We now potentially have a new voting constituency of over a million people. If we allow ourselves to be consumed by the Democrats and the Republicans, it will continue to be business as usual. We actually have an opportunity to shake up the status quo and force both sides to really rethink how they are going about their business. That was my thinking.

Let’s restore the joy of voting instead. Amendment 4 could be more than just about returning citizens being able to register to vote. It could be about more than even a celebration of an expansion of democracy. It could shift the entire culture around voting. And what better person is there to talk to people about how valuable the right to vote is, and how we honor that by actually voting, than someone who has lost the right to vote and has had to fight to get it back? We could engage in conversations with everyone and create a movement that will re-energize folks. There are so many people in our country who are registered to vote but don’t vote. There are so many people who are eligible to register to vote but don’t want to be registered. We could create an environment that makes voting exciting again, something that people look forward to doing rather than feeling it’s something they have to do, like it is some burden they have to bear. We can take this moment and parlay it into a much bigger moment of engaging American citizens throughout the country, letting that energy and excitement be contagious. That is why Amendment 4 passed, because it brought people together across political and racial lines to agree on something and to move something forward out of love.