Just Freedom: Inside Florida’s Decades-Long Voting Rights Battle

The story of an extraordinary expansion of voting rights and the obstacles holding back its implementation

Florida Book Awards, Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction

When Florida citizens voted in 2018 to pass Amendment 4 to the state constitution, which promised to restore voting rights to people with past felony convictions, the decision was celebrated as a civil rights victory and the nation’s largest expansion of voting rights in almost 50 years. In Just Freedom, Daniel Rivero details the advocacy and action that led to this moment—and shows what went wrong in the years after the amendment’s passing.

The story begins in the Reconstruction era with Florida’s 1868 lifetime voting ban for people with past felony convictions. The infamous 2000 Bush/Gore election brought the ban to national attention, sparking a wave of activism against it. Rivero follows the 18-year path to Amendment 4 through the grassroots work of people including Howard Simon of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and Desmond Meade, a formerly incarcerated man and president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.

A journalist who has covered this story for many years, Rivero uses court documents, meeting transcripts, archival videos, interviews, and eyewitness courtroom scenes and street marches to peel back the layers and reveal the motives that supported and opposed this human rights initiative. He shows how political polarization, implementation challenges, and monetary interests have stalled the amendment from becoming fully realized to this day.

At once a contemporary legal tale and a series of interwoven stories of people at the center of the fight, this is the account of how 1.4 million Floridians gained the right to vote—and the obstacles still preventing them from doing so. Just Freedom will raise questions and provoke conversations about the lasting hold of Jim Crow–era policies, the power of money, and the nature of the American criminal justice system.

Daniel Rivero is an award-winning investigative reporter, producer, and host for WLRN Public Radio in Miami. His investigations have appeared in the Miami Herald, NPR, the Guardian, ABC News, Splinter, and other outlets.