| No Images? Click here   Around 2 a.m. on a Thursday in June, Faith Kiss Cannarile got in her car and began a nearly five-hour drive across the state with her 18-year-old daughter, Sophia, to appear before Florida Gov. Rick Scott and beg for mercy.So begins the story of one woman's journey to gain back her right to vote, something she lost when she was convicted of a felony decades ago. Getting back that right, however, involved standing before the governor of Florida as he asked her questions to determine her moral standing in society. Does she smoke? he wanted to know. Does she eat dinner with her children? These are just some of the questions thrown around by a board in Florida as they played moral judge on its citizens.Read more about what happened to Cannarile here and how Sam Levine, HuffPost's reporter who covers voting rights, got the story below.How did you come to this story?In February, a federal judge struck down the way Florida, through a panel of top state officials, restores voting rights to former felons. The opinion was stunningly scathing and the judge focused on the "unfettered discretion" the officials had in choosing how voting rights were restored and said the process was "worse than a coin flip."His language really got my attention. I knew there was a really long backlog of people waiting to get their voting rights restored, but I didn't really know how the panel worked. I wanted to understand more about the factors the officials consider and who the people appearing before the panel were and how they prepared for a huge 10-minute hearing to determine whether they got their rights back. How do you convince the governor and top officials of your state that you "deserve" to get the right to vote. What "proof" do those officials need? I wanted to see who the people going through this process were and what it actually looked like.What was challenging about the reporting?Clemency proceedings in Florida are entirely confidential. I didn't know who was going to appear at the hearing until a few days before it happened. I didn't know what their offenses were, when they had committed them and what other information the panel was considering. After someone appeared before the board, I would try and catch them as they left and get as much information as possible. I then used Florida court records to verify what they had told me. I wish I had more of an opportunity to dig into and tell the stories of the people who appeared.What surprised you?People aren't required to appear before the commission for their hearing, but it was clear the applicants thought showing up in person made a difference. The lead woman in my story left her house at 2 a.m. the morning of the hearing to make sure she could appear in person before the panel. Other people had driven 8 hours and come with family members. Gov. Scott and the panelists always gave people who showed up a lot of time to make their case, but they would decide the cases of people who couldn't be there more quickly. I don't have empirical evidence for this observation, but it seemed that showing up in person helped someone's case.I was also taken aback by how long people had been waiting for their hearing. Anyone who appeared before the board has to have been crime free for at least 7 years after they were released, but many of the people I talked to had started the process to appear before the board in 2007. That means they had been waiting over a decade just to get a hearing. This meant that a lot of middle-aged people were there to apologize for things they had done at a very young age.Lastly, I was surprised by the kinds of questions the board asked. Sometimes the questions were personal: Do you go to church? Do yo have kids? Any kind of infraction could be used against someone. A parking violation, outstanding fees, getting busted with marijuana. The panel even asked people to explain charges that were never prosecuted or dropped.What do you hope readers will take away about voter disenfranchisement?Regardless of how people feel about disenfranchising felons, I hope my story forces them to think about what Florida is asking people to show before they can get their voting rights back. What do we we really want from people before we accept them back into our society? How long should they have to wait?And why do we use the ability to vote as something to excise people from our communities?Anything else you want to add?When I go to vote, it usually takes me a few minutes and then I forget about it. All of the people I spoke to talked about how on election day the sadness they felt at seeing everyone else with their "I Voted" sticker and knowing they weren't able to vote. Being able to vote for them wasn't just about being able to elect a candidate, it was a gesture from the community of forgiveness and to say that they could be part of it again.PS: Maine is experimenting with a new way to vote, allowing voters to rank their choices, rather than having to pick just one. Meanwhile, North Carolina is asking its state residents in a ballot measure in November to choose whether or not they need to present photo identification every time they fill out a ballot. And before you go be sure to read Levine's other stories about voting in America.
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