The Field: The Fight For Voting Rights in Florida

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode contains strong language. During much of this election cycle, Julius Irving of Gainesville, Fla., spent his days trying to get former felons registered to vote. He would tell them about Florida’s Amendment Four, a ballot initiative that extended the franchise to those who had, in the past, been convicted on felony charges — it added an estimated 1.5 million people to the electorate, the nation’s largest voting expansion in four decades. On today’s episode, Nicholas Casey, a national politics reporter, spends time with Mr. Irving in Gainesville and explores the voting rights battle in Florida. Guest: Nicholas Casey, a national politics reporter for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Former prisoners can now go to the polls in Florida. But fines remain one obstacle. Believing anything will make a difference is another. That’s where Julius Irving comes in.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Oh, I see him. He's actually out there talking to someone trying to get them to sign up.
0:24.0	Hey, I see you. I see you out there. I think you already started to work. That's good.
0:29.0	Yeah, yeah. Well, while waiting, you have to set an opportunity to come over here and try to get you to see.
0:34.0	Ah, don't problem. Okay. We'll walk to where you are right now.
0:37.0	Okay. Okay.
0:42.0	So while he was waiting on us, he was trying to register somebody.
0:45.0	Yeah, he went ahead and started work. Yeah.
0:48.0	Okay.
0:51.0	From the New York Times, this is the field. I'm Nick Casey in Florida.
1:02.0	Oh, yeah.
1:04.0	I'm a little bit disappointed.
1:06.0	I was fond of walking the can. I was interested in what I do and what I do.
1:10.0	So earlier this year, daily producer Rachel Cuesta and I went down to Gainesville.
1:17.0	I'm not going to have to do whatever.
1:19.0	Because after decades of restricting former felons from voting, one of the few states to do so in late 2018,
1:26.0	the state passed an amendment called Amendment 4, which automatically restored a person's voting rights at the end of their sentence.
1:33.0	And overnight, it added nearly one and a half million new eligible voters to the ranks.
1:39.0	I get to raise the vote. You're not raising already.
1:41.0	We went to meet Julius Irving, who works for a group that was trying to get this new voting population registered ahead of the November election.
1:50.0	I'm a committee member. Listen, no, listen, no. That's good, right?
1:54.0	And you said that 60 people at all the time wrote Amendment 4, got passed in 2018.
1:58.0	What can be the federal can actually vote now?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.