Amid the highlights of the US midterm election results—apart from the Democratic victories in Congress--was the triumph for voting rights in the state of Florida. The nation’s third largest state, which often plays an important role in presidential elections, voted overwhelmingly to approve a constitutional amendment restoring the right to vote for those with a felony conviction. This is a major step forward in a nation where millions of people are denied a basic right of citizenship, based on laws rooted in a legacy of racism.

Passing with 64% of the vote, in excess of the 60% supermajority threshold required for passage, Amendment 4 restores voting rights to Floridians who were convicted of felonies, provided they have completed their sentences. The measure excludes people who were convicted of murder or felony sex offenses.

The impact of the new law is sweeping, affecting 1.5 million people in Florida who have been stripped of their voting rights due to a criminal record, or 9.2% of the state’s voting-age population. For people of color, the implications of Amendment 4 are even more pronounced, as the measure grants the vote to 20% of African-American adults in Florida who have been barred from the franchise due to a felony record—and a staggering 40% of African-American men.

Many would be surprised to know that in the so-called “land of the free,” the right to vote is not automatic for many. In a nation that originally limited voting to white-male landowners and regarded enslaved people as three-fifths of a person with no citizenship rights, the right to vote has been granted to marginalized groups only through protest, and in some cases such as the US civil rights movement, bloodshed and martyrdom.

During the Reconstruction era following the American civil war, liberated black people had the right the vote, and took advantage of it, electing 2,000 black officials, a governor of a US state, senators and members of Congress - many of them former slaves. The pathway to political empowerment for black people ended when white men retook control of the Southern states, presided over a rollback of civil rights, and denied voting rights to African-Americans by law and through intimidation, threat of physical violence and death. Felony disenfranchisement laws have their origins in the era of American apartheid, the days of racial segregation, as a means of suppressing black aspirations and rendering them invisible.

Florida’s felon disenfranchisement law dates back to 150 years ago, when white elites were faced with the prospect of thousands of new black voters rendering white men a minority of the state’s voting electorate. A lifetime voting ban on people with a felony record muted black political power, with a racialized regime targeting black men and singling them out for punishment with trumped-up charges and crimes designed solely for them. The laws eliminated thousands of black people from civic participation for life and made them unavailable as political competitors.

Across the country, as of 2016, 6.1 million people were unable to vote because of a felony conviction, with Florida accounting for roughly one quarter, according to the Sentencing Project. This includes 1 in every 40 adults, 1 in every 13 African-Americans and 1 in every 56 non-black voters. With the recent changes in Florida, of the 34 states that impose voting restrictions on past criminal convictions, only Kentucky and Iowa are the only remaining states imposing lifetime disenfranchisement, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Although the changes to the Florida law are a positive and decisive step in furtherance of democracy, America is experiencing a voting rights crisis. For all of the ample evidence of foreign intervention in US elections, American officials are effectively denying the rights of their fellow citizens, working in earnest to rig elections, and block people of color, students, the elderly and others at the ballot box through restrictive voter ID laws.

The rightwing US Supreme Court has gutted the enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states and localities to deny racial minority groups’ access to democracy with reckless abandon. Between 2014 and 2016 alone, states purged nearly 16 million voters from their voter rolls. The nation’s high court also allowed the unlimited role of money in politics—legalized corruption-- with its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Gerrymandering of electoral districts amplifies the voice of the majority, entrenches the powerful and sidelines the interests of marginalized groups.

And in this most recent election, as black candidates Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams were poised to capture the respective governorships of Florida and Georgia, the civil rights group NAACP is investigating voting irregularities in those states.

Despite these many challenges, the restoration of voting rights to the formerly incarcerated in the Sunshine State is cause for celebration, as those who have served their time and paid their debt to society should have the opportunity to participate as productive members of society.