The voter registration group Power On! is concentrating on mostly black communities.
By ROBERT KLEIN
Published October 27, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Local grass-roots activists are working to help hundreds of local felons regain their civil rights - especially the right to vote.
"Most of these people have committed only one crime, and some committed those crimes many decades ago," said Mary A. Saunders, chairwoman of the Midtown-based Communities United for Equality Now, and coordinator of the rights-restoration movement for a voter registration group called "Power On! No, the Lights Are Not Off in South St. Petersburg."
Saunders said nearly 30 local felons will be able to vote Tuesday because of efforts by her and others in local churches, community organizations and civil rights groups.
Saunders emphasizes that the campaign is to get people to vote, not to vote for a particular party or candidate. "I'm strictly nonpartisan," she said.
Civil rights are not restored to Florida's felons unless they apply to the state and, in most cases, argue their cases before a clemency board - a process that can take years.
On Tuesday, a lawsuit over felons' voting rights in Florida went to a federal appeals court, which will decide whether to order a trial in a dispute over whether the state's lifetime ban on felon voters is illegal. It is too late for the felons to get to vote in next week's presidential election, but their lawyers argue a new trial should be ordered for future elections.
The numbers seeking their rights back will grow, said Gypsy Gallardo, campaign strategist of Power On!
Another 550 local felons have taken the first step in appealing to the state for restoration of their rights: They have filled out application forms supplied by the activist groups.
Power On! is concentrating these efforts in the predominantly African-American communities of St. Petersburg's Midtown, Largo's Ridgecrest and Clearwater's Greenwood, she said.
The reason: About 30 percent of 8,000 black residents that Power On! workers encountered during recent voter registration efforts said they couldn't vote because of felonies.
"These people have paid their debt to society," Gallardo said. "If we further solidify the mindset that people are not full members of society, it keeps people ever on the fringes. It runs counter to the goal of integrating people back into society after their release."
Local and national activists point out that many felons hold down jobs, raise families and pay taxes.
Activists have discovered that a disproportionately large percentage of African-Americans nationally are denied the right to vote because of felony convictions, according to researchers at the Sentencing Project, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
The Sentencing Project reports that nationally, more than 4-million felons cannot vote. Thirteen percent of black men are unable to.
Florida permanently denies felons the right to vote unless they go through the application process. This state, Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska and Virginia have the toughest laws in the country regarding restoration of felons' rights, according to the Sentencing Project.
Florida law allows only a small percentage of felons to have their rights restored after simply filing applications to the state. The vast majority - about 90 percent - of Florida's felons must also bring their cases before the state's clemency board to request that their rights be restored.
Only a handful of cases are heard every year.
An estimated 400,000 Floridians remain disenfranchised because of this, according to the Florida Equal Rights Voting Project.
"No state has more stringent proceedings than Florida," Saunders said.
In 2001, Gov. Jeb Bush reduced some of the paperwork felons had to file in order to regain their rights, but the process still is daunting, said Saunders, who leads much of the effort to restore felons' rights in St. Petersburg.
Efforts to streamline the process need to go further, said Winnie Foster, director of the Sojourner Truth Project, a Midtown activist group also working to help felons regain their rights.
"Some of these people are being put through hoops," Foster said. She called for the state to work faster and review more applications in a shorter period of time.
Complicating matters is a July 2003 settlement between civil rights groups and the state. The state agreed to assist nearly 125,000 felons who did not receive proper information on how to regain their civil rights upon release from incarceration.
The settlement is sure to open up the process to thousands of potential voters, activists say, but it has resulted in a massive backlog of cases.
Some say restoration of felons' voting rights should be automatic. "It's a question of fundamental fairness," said Alessandra Meetze, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. "Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy."
Others disagree.
The Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative organization that opposes affirmative action and bilingual education, says civil rights should not be restored automatically to felons and that all clemency requests should go up for review. The group thinks taking away these rights deters crime.
Power On! and other groups are rarely approached by those who want their rights restored. Activists often have to seek out felons in low-income neighborhoods and other areas.
The level of participation stems mostly from a lack of knowledge about the process, says Saunders. Still, they're not giving up.
"I want to clear St. Petersburg up by the next (presidential) election," Saunders said.
Robert Klein is a reporter for the Neighborhood News Bureau, a program of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
