TALLAHASSEE, Fla. 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.

She was making the trip to get back her right to vote.

Over two decades ago, Cannarile, now 45, lost that right, as well as the rights to sit on a jury and purchase a firearm. In 1993, she was charged with a felony when she pushed a police officer trying to arrest her during a fight. Then age 20, she was placed on probation without a formal conviction being imposed. The following year, however, she violated her probation by smoking marijuana and was sentenced to 18 more months of probation and officially judged guilty of the original felony.

Because she was convicted of a felony in Florida, Cannarile lost a range of civil rights for life. Years later, she set out on the very long path to getting them restored. She had to apply to a panel, made up of the state governor and other top state officials, to ask for those rights back, and then she had to wait.

That June morning, Cannarile was finally set to stand before the Executive Clemency Board consisting of Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and Agriculture and Consumer Services Commissioner Adam Putnam and ask them to pass judgment. Together, the panel members act as the moral conscience of the community. They have the power to decide who can be fully accepted back into society and who cant.

There are more than 1.5 million people like Cannarile who have been removed from voting rolls in Florida because of felony convictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. The state has the largest population of disenfranchised felons in the country. The public policy center estimates those voters make up around 10 percent of Floridas voting population .