The state of Florida currently does allow former felons to seek clemency. Five years after finishing all terms of their sentence (including probation and parole), former felons can apply for clemency (“restoration of civil rights,” in official parlance). In 2016, 473 former felons were granted clemency by the state’s Board of Executive Clemency, according to a spokesperson for the Florida Commission on Offender Review. A total of 3,188 people applied. The number of clemency grants shifts depending on who occupies the governor’s mansion. 30,672 people had their civil rights restored in the last two years of Charlie Crist’s term as governor. (He served just before the current governor, Rick Scott.)

Harrison doesn’t mind the disparity because he trusts the process. “Depending on who happens to be in the governor’s mansion there may be more or fewer, but it does work because, in fact, clemencies are granted,” he told me. “Since before the Civil War, actually, the Florida Constitution has said convicted felons lose the right to vote,” Harrison explained, so he chooses to defer to that long-standing policy. Much has changed since then—before the Civil War, there were no black voters in Florida—but he thinks the current clemency process should remain. The clemency process is currently being challenged in federal court, and in March a judge ruled that the current system is “so arbitrary as to be unconstitutional,” according to The Miami Herald. If the amendment passes, this case would be rendered moot.

Volz applied for clemency once but grew frustrated when the board kept telling him he hadn’t properly filed all his paperwork. In his opinion, this drawn-out process isn’t necessary. Volz is the chairman of his county’s homeless coalition, and he works with the drug-and-alcohol-recovery program there, but he still doesn’t feel like he can engage fully. “People who have paid their debt back to society and done everything that the judicial system asked them are not fully able to participate in their communities” if they can’t vote, he said. “Yet if we all got in buses and moved to Texas tomorrow, we could vote there.” Volz insisted that once former felons are again able to vote, they “can be helpful in bringing about a more inclusive democracy.” The reason, he explained, is that because they’re barred from the political system, they haven’t fallen victim to the “hyper-partisanship” that’s so common in America right now. “Suddenly, conversations become a little bit more about issues, a little bit more about how you can work together and do things as a community,” he said.

Meade sees it the same way. “For a while, a long time ago, I was a strain on my community,” he confessed. “Now I’ve become an asset … I should be able to vote.” People like him are “in our homes, they’re in our neighborhoods, they’re in our churches,” he said, and they “are left to suffer and to walk around with a scarlet letter” even after they have finished their sentence. Myrna Pérez, the deputy director of the Democracy Program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, thinks that allowing people with past criminal convictions to vote is crucial for their success in society. “If you want people who have engaged in antisocial behavior to get in the habit of doing pro-social activities, there’s nothing more pro-social than voting,” Pérez told me. “It is really an act of love and belief and hope and commitment to something as big as the country and to your neighbors.”