John Legend visits Florida to advocate for restoring voting rights for felons

Oct 4, 2018

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On Wednesday, singer John Legend visited a group of Florida high schoolers to encourage the youths to use their power to cast their ballot and vote, the Miami Herald reports.

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“Doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on, it doesn’t matter what background you come from, all of us believe in democracy,” Legend said to a packed crowd at Evans High School in Orlando.

The Grammy, Oscar, Tony and Emmy award winner was also in town particularly to cast his support for Amendment Four, a Florida constitutional ballot measure asking voters if they support automatically restoring the right to vote for people with prior felony convictions. The measure excludes those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense.

If 60 percent of Florida voters cast a ballot in favor of restoring these rights in November, electoral politics in the state could be reshaped completely since Florida is an important swing state. It could also affect how other states address the same issue in the future.

Only Florida, Kentucky, Virginia, and Iowa bar felons from voting for life unless they seek clemency. As it stands, approximately 1.6 million Floridians, about one in four African Americans, are not permitted to vote.

That would restore voting rights for 1.5 million people.

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“What we’ve seen in the Amendment 4 campaign has been something that Florida has never seen before,” said Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition during a pre-concert press conference with Legend.

“Over one million Florida voters signed a petition that said: ‘It is time to fix this broken system.’”

Meade and his wife Sheena, the organizing director for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition have reportedly been trying to change the voting rights laws since he was convicted of a felony over 10 years ago. When Sheena ran for the state legislature in 2016, he was not permitted to vote for her.