By Zerline Hughes Spruill
Eight years ago today, on Nov. 4, 2018, I was in Miami, two days before Election Day, knocking on doors with actor Jesse Williams. One woman opened her door, found the man from “Grey’s Anatomy” on her porch asking whether she’d thought about voting, and reacted as if we’d brought her a prize. In fairness, we had, though the thing we were actually selling was a constitutional amendment, and those are much harder to gift-wrap.
At the time I was managing director of communications for a national racial justice organization. I worked alongside grassroots groups on campaigns that ranged from getting police out of schools to restoring the vote to people who had served their sentences. In Florida that fall, the fight was Amendment 4, which would return voting rights to roughly 1.4 million Floridians with past felony convictions. My team booked broadcast interviews across the state, organized actions on the ground and sent a bus rolling through Florida to keep the amendment in front of voters who might otherwise have skipped to the bottom of their ballots.
It passed with nearly 65% of the vote, a decisive and bipartisan win with no asterisk. Then the Legislature added one in 2019. A new law required people to pay every outstanding court fine, fee and restitution order before they could vote, which disqualified nearly 800,000 of the people the amendment was meant to cover. By the 2020 election, fewer than 8% of Floridians with felony convictions had registered. Voters said yes, and the statehouse said yes, if you can afford it.
My history with this issue goes back further than that bus. In 2006, at The Sentencing Project for four years, I curated a weekly, national felony disenfranchisement newsletter for scholars, policymakers, advocates and incarcerated people. In it, I explained how Virginia’s lifetime ban, which could be lifted only if a governor personally restored your rights, compared with laws in other states. It also covered issues few people were paying attention to, like the growing number of elderly people in prison. That was every week — years before Facebook, Instagram, Substack or Beehiiv, and before anyone called it “content.”
Yesterday, Virginia voters approved Amendment 3. It automatically restores voting rights to people when they’re released from prison, writes a fundamental right to vote into the state constitution for the first time, and ends a lifetime ban adopted in 1902 by state leaders who were open about wanting to limit Black political power. Starting in January, no one leaving a Virginia prison will have to petition a governor and hope whoever holds the office that year is inclined to say yes. Advocates estimate more than 260,000 Virginians had been barred from voting because of felony convictions.
I was watching election results from a cruise ship, which is not where I pictured myself on the day a fight I joined 20 years ago finally came through. The result surprised me. I had stopped following the issue closely and had come close to giving up hope that Virginia would ever get there. What I did know was that people kept doing the work, my own colleagues among them, which meant there was still an opening.
So how long does a win take? In Florida, it took 18 years of organizing to pass Amendment 4 and one legislative session to take a large piece of it back. In Virginia, it took 124 years to undo the ban, and 20 years of my career. The work is long and the wins are rare, which is exactly why the people who keep showing up for it matter so much.
What’s the longest you’ve waited for a win, and did you recognize it when it finally arrived? Tell me in the comments.
