2016: Meet the voters candidates are leaving behind

TALLAHASSEE, Florida – At the state capitol, the Florida Board of Executive Clemency is seated high above several dozen petitioners.

On this day in December 2015, one of the most cherished rights in American democracy is at stake: The right to vote.

In most other states, the petitioners wouldn’t need to appear before a board at all. Former felons in most states — save those who have committed the most serious crimes — have their civil rights automatically restored after the completion of their criminal sentences. But across the country, some 5.85 million voters have lost their right to vote because of a felony conviction. One quarter — or 1.5 million — are in Florida.

Florida joins only Kentucky and Iowa in requiring former felons to appear before a board to win back their civil rights,  a process that can take years — if it happens at all. 

But Florida State Sen. Jeff Clemens, a Democrat representing Palm Beach County, says clemency is part of the "basic human rights that we've established in this country .... a part of the fabric of who we are."

“This really is not a Democrat or Republican issue,” Clemens said. “It's a simple fairness issue and it's an American issue. We founded our government on the basic principle of one person, one vote, and even though in the past obviously we've discriminated, we like to believe that we don't do that today.”

Each of the 42 petitioners at the December hearing had to go through a rigorous investigation by state officials — who then submitted their recommendations to the clemency board — to reach this point.

Over the course of several hours, the petitioners approach the panel one by one to answer for past misdeeds, and to prove that they have been law-abiding citizens since completing their criminal sentences. 

Hampton and the other felons granted a hearing in December are just some of thousands more who have waiting for years to appear before the Clemency Board.

Many, like Chris Poole, were caught up in the drug trade that swept across South Florida in the 1980s and 1990s. Back in 1992, Poole completed a four-year prison term on a federal drug charge. 

“I broke the law, and I accepted the responsibility for that. But I didn't think I was going to have to serve this sentence for the rest of my life,” Poole said. “Like the old saying … ‘You do the crime, you do the time.’ I did the time. But I'm still doing the time. So I've been actually incarcerated since 1987.”

The right to vote in Florida becomes even more important when considering the state’s history of close elections. The most memorable came with the 2000 presidential race, when 537 votes separated George W. Bush and Al Gore from the White House.

In this context, the disenfranchisement of 10 percent of Florida’s voting population, and nearly one-quarter of voting age African-Americans, could have a dramatic impact on who becomes the next president in November.

State Sen. Clemens, who represents the same county where a flawed ballot led to epic voting problems during the 2000 Presidential election, said the current clemency rules reflect a history of racial disenfranchisement in Florida that dates back to the Jim Crow era.

“It's clearly an effort in my mind to make it more difficult for African Americans to have a say in their own governance,” Clemens said.

In Clemens' mind, there's also no reason to restrict the rights of the many nonviolent felons who go through the system. 

"If you get caught with a bag of weed or were selling some drugs when you were young, and maybe made a mistake, that shouldn't prevent you from spending the rest of your life paying taxes but not being able to have any say in how those taxes are spent," he said. "That's really not what America is all about.”

Some states have tried to loosen restrictions on felons’ voting rights. In Virginia, the two most recent governors, Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Terry McAuliffe, have taken steps to make the restoration of voting rights more of an automatic process.

In February, the Maryland legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to allow felons on probation or parole to vote in November's election. 

In other states, the issue has become a pendulum that swings between automatic restoration or not, depending on which political party is in power. 

For instance, in Kentucky, outgoing Gov. Steven Beshear (D) issued an executive order in late November to restore the voting rights of about 140,000 non-violent ex-offenders who had completed their sentences.

But only weeks later, the new governor of Kentucky, Republican Matt Bevin, suspended that order, saying the matter needed to be handled through legislative, not executive, action.

In Florida, former Gov. Charlie Crist, who took office as a Republican and later switched parties, made rights restoration an automatic process in 2007, granting clemency to about 150,000 former felons.

But those changes were reversed, too, after Scott’s administration tightened the process in 2011, again requiring felons to appear before the Clemency Board. 

At the December hearing, America Tonight requested interviews with the governor and members of the clemency board about the process, but their representatives said each of the members didn’t have time to speak with us.

Toward the end of the hearing, Hampton was called to stand before the Clemency Board. After introducing herself, Hampton acknowledged to the mistake she had made in 1997.

“I admit my guilt and my wrongdoing,” she told the board. “As I tell my kids, everybody makes mistakes, and you have to learn from your mistakes. I learnt from my mistakes and from that day forward I turned my life around.”

After pressing her about her confession, and asking about the age of her children, Scott moved for a restoration of civil rights. The other members of the board agreed.

After waiting 15 years, Hampton had finally regained full citizenship. This November, she will bring her 7-year-old son into the voting booth with her as she casts her first vote.

“I’m going straight home and to tell them mom has her rights back to vote. I’m pretty sure they are going to be ready for this first adventure,” she said outside the hearing room in December. “I don’t know the reason that it took this long … Maybe they don’t have enough people working the system, maybe it was just paperwork ... but even if it took this long to get me here, I got it.”

— Christof Putzel, George Lerner | Editing by Erica R. Hendry

Hassan Igram’s graphics company began in the back of his grandfather’s grocery store. Today it employs more than 100 people. It’s the kind of immigrant success story that has played out in America countless times. Igram’s family happens to be from Syria, which has made him and other Muslims in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, targets this campaign season — despite having settled in this city for more than a century. In this America Tonight excerpt, Joie Chen and David Martin talk to Muslims in Iowa who say they’re being left behind by the 2016 campaigns.

At 24 weeks into her pregnancy, Nancy Glynn sat in a New Hampshire hospital room, preparing to be induced for labor. The doctors explained there were complications. The options were limited; she could deliver now, or risk having a stillborn.

“So obviously, you know, life is better for a chance than not at all,” she said.

The baby, Sawyer, was born on June 27, 2015. He lived for about an hour.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed three months of paid leave. The plan — which he and a group of Democrats have formally introduced in the FAMILY Act — would be funded through a federal payroll tax on workers of an estimated $1.61 a week. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s plan involves a similar 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, but relies on a tax increase on the wealthy to support the policy.

In what may be the most surprising proposal, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has proposed a plan that would incentivize companies to create their own paid leave policies through a series of tax credits for those who offer between four and 12 weeks of paid leave. Rubio continues to be the only Republican candidate with any policy change on paid leave, albeit not a federally mandated plan. Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have come out against new policy.

“I think the Presidential race is absolutely indicative that these kind of policies are catching more and more attention at a national level,” D’Allessandro said.

The shift reflects growing support for paid family leave across the country. Eighty-one percent of likely 2016 voters think policies like paid family leave are a good idea, according to a poll by the pro-leave advocacy group Make it Work.

In Ohio, a swing state, a voters can make or break presidential candidates. But residents of East Liverpool say politicians have ignored them for years. At the heart of their grievances is the WTI hazardous waste incinerator, which is just 320 feet from some East Liverpool homes. Its emissions include mercury, lead and other toxins. Residents report a high cancer rate and say many of their neighbors have moved away. In this America Tonight excerpt, Joie Chen and David Martin speak with local residents and the activists trying to shut down the incinerator.

SCHURZ, Nevada - Violent family fights. Suicide threats in the middle of the night. A 4-year-old girl beaten so badly her face was beyond recognition.

In Tammy Carrera’s years as the social services director on the Walker River Paiute Indian Reservation, a 325,000 patch of river valley between the mountains and desert lakes of Central Nevada, she had seen every side of what it’s like to lose hope — the anger, the depression, the substance abuse, the isolation.   

“We have so many things and so many issues that need to be dealt with. And if I can just be a little bit a part of that …. Oh, it brings out emotion in me,” she said. “You know because it's real, it's what we have to deal with here. Suicide, drugs, alcohol … no hope.”

The land in Nevada, home to more than 3,000 Walker River Paiutes like Carrera, is inhospitable, dry and desolate. The Walker River Paiute Indian Reservation, 39 miles south of Fallon, has the largest concentration of Paiutes in the state, but just one smoke shop – a squat ranch-style building set behind a set of gas pumps. In Schurz, the reservation’s only town, the buildings are sparse. A single elementary school sits nearby; there was a hospital, once, but it’s since shut down. Today, it’s a single-story community health clinic.

Here, political promises are easy to make but hard to keep. Few know that better than Carrera and the other Paiutes. For example the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868, promised Native Americans housing, education, health care and exclusive use of tribal lands bordered by Nebraska and the Dakotas. But while the agreement kept the peace for a few years, it failed to deliver. Soon, the U.S. Army took the land back; though Native Americans won compensation for the land a century later, they’re still displaced, fighting to reclaim it.

But at the same time, his administration has, Carrera says, “failed to provide the funding so that we can update our law and order codes.”

“They don't supply any training on that,“ she says. “Now, we have laws for it … but [no] funding to do it.”

As Nevada approaches its 2016 caucus in February, the state’s Native Americans have two choices: Sit back or step up.

Many Walker River Paiutes leaders, like Carrera and Cynthia Oceguera, a tribal elder who returned to the reservation last year, have chosen the latter.

Despite their skepticism that change will come, the Paiutes have one of the highest voter turnout rates among Indian tribes.They’re trying to force change rather than waiting for it to come

“We find that some of the politicians, if it doesn't affect them, they don't care,” said Oceguera, who is trying to clean up what she says is decades worth of environmental neglect — and hold leaders accountable.

To most of the country, Oceguera says, the reservation is “out of sight, out of mind.”

Unlike the state’s larger cities , like Fallon,  Reno, and Las Vegas,  there are no casinos in Schurz — or any other real business development.

“Poverty is a huge problem here because we don't have jobs available,” Oceguera says. “We don’t have economic development that we should have here.”

In 2008, Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucus by five points, but then-Sen. Obama, who spent more money and time in the state's rural areas, won the overall delegate count.

Clinton was just one of many candidates who “don't touch base,” Carrera says, though she’s making an effort to now.

“They probably hit the larger cities in Nevada, so they kind of leave behind the rural areas and they don't come out and promote what they're doing,” she said.

When this year’s election rolled around, the Clinton campaign stepped up its efforts, holding eight outreach events with Native Americans in Nevada this summer alone.

Otherwise, Oceguera says, being on the reservation can be an isolated, and at times lonely, existence.

For Oceguera, it wasn’t always this way. She was born and raised on the Walker River Paiute Reservation in 1954 and remembers the days when there was hope instead of hopelessness; when the land provided instead of poisoned.

She left the reservation with her small children in 1980 to pursue degrees in dietetics and business from the University of Reno, Nevada. Last year, she got a call from her cousin, then the chair of the tribe’s council.

“We need your help,” he said.

“Why?” she wondered.

Most others had given up.

In 2013, Obama told the Tribal Nations Conference that “the health of tribal nations depends on the health of tribal lands. So it falls on all of us to protect the extraordinary beauty of those lands for future generations.”

But after years of broken promises from Washington, those words are hollow for Oceguera.

Oceguera is also trying to clean up the reservation’s dumping ground. For years, residents have rolled their sedans and trucks over the soft earth to a six-foot trench, dumping bags of trash and other junk — old couches, vinyl photo albums, cans and bottles — into the narrow crevice several thousand feet away from the main road.

Something is always burning; low flames and embers are scattered in the pit and alongside it. When a trench becomes unmanageable, it’s filled with dirt and replaced with a fresh hole. The stench of burned plastic and waste is thick, weighing the air down like heavy curtains.

Oceguera wants to raise taxes a few dollars to pay for better trash collection. It’s a fight for which she hasn’t gotten much support. Change is slow on the reservation — from residents and elected officials alike. Still, she has faith in the process.

“We have to believe that we're still going to be heard,” she said. “No matter what.” 

Some people on the reservation share Oceguera’s faith. But Carrera says many more suffer in silence. It can be difficult to convince police to conduct safety checks on tribal land — they don’t want to be held liable for taking a suicidal suspect into custody — though sometimes they’ll follow Carrera as she drives those that need help to the nearest treatment center.

Still, says Carrera, because she’s been through the reservation's worst, she’s in a position to fight for its best — and more importantly, earn trust and inspire action.

That’s why come November, for the first time in many years, she’ll likely drive 250 miles on a two-lane ribbon of highway — from her new home in McDermitt, Nevada, where she’s relocated to help farther-flung Paiutes  — back to the reservation to cast a vote. She’s been torn over the years on whether her voice makes a difference, or whether politicians know she exists at all.

Despite everything, Carrera is optimistic — and she wants to bring others with her to the polls, too.

Suicide, drugs, alcohol, no hope – it’s real, she says. But “we need to be out there telling them what we need. And what's required for us to take care of our people,” she said.

If people like she and Oceguera won’t, who else will?

— Sarah Hoye, Todd Reed, Erica R. Hendry