A battleground appeared set over the fate of Florida’s votes, ahead of a presidential election, in a state that has often determined the outcome. It remains unresolved before the primary on Tuesday, where Florida has the greatest number of delegates up for grabs.

Yet as Mr. Irving stepped away from Mr. Washington that day, he could see that the chief resistance he faced on the way to canvassing in Gainesville might not have been from Republican lawmakers.

It came from the former felons themselves.

“How do you ask someone to vote for the state that put you away?” said Mr. Irving, who served a one-year prison sentence on drug crimes and now faces new charges that may leave him behind bars again. “In prison you are stripped of your rights. You are treated like an animal. And then you’re going to release someone and tell them to go out and vote? Doesn’t that sound a bit crazy to you?”

The irony that he, the man trying to register people to vote on these street corners, may soon be unable to vote if he loses his trial, isn’t lost on Mr. Irving. At 6-foot-4, with gold front teeth and inked tear drops among the many tattoos he got between stints behind bars since 2006, he looks like many of the former felons he aims to register. Today he works for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, a nonprofit, where Mr. Irving aims to register about a dozen new voters a day.

“Did you know that we’re voting for state attorney this year?” he began at a housing project on the east side of Gainesville, as a group of onlookers leaned in over the balcony.

Mention of the prosecutor’s office immediately brings back memories that many residents of the block share, whether the recollections are of their own trial in the courthouse, or a series of court dates that involved a neighbor or a friend. Sometimes there is the story of a plea bargain that the judge didn’t honor. Another may tell of a son bludgeoned by a prison gang.

Rarely does the story end in someone saying they wished to cast a ballot.

“How old are you, bro?” asked Mike Allen, a 51-year-old who stared down Mr. Irving skeptically.