The forum in downtown Flint, Michigan, on the warm early afternoon of Oct. 3, was in many ways a typical election-season scene. A handful of politicians—in this case, candidates for seats on the Michigan Supreme Court and Michigan Court of Appeals—had arrived, some flanked by young staffers, all toting stacks of glossy campaign flyers. One by one, the candidates stood at a lectern to deliver well-practiced stump speeches to several dozen voters who had gathered in a large room on makeshift bleachers and plastic chairs. They offered short biographies, argued that their work and life experiences qualified them for the bench, and asked the crowd to remember their names when voting. 

But, for all its familiar trappings, this event was quite a rarity, because it took place inside the county jail, with candidates appealing to an audience of incarcerated people. 

“You’re going to go back home one day,” Clerk Domonique Clemons, the top elections official in Genesee County, told the crowd at the start of the forum. “If you want roads that you can drive on, you want a community that has trash that gets picked up, you want a community with good schools—that all comes down to that one vote.”

More than half a million people in the U.S. are held in local jails on any given day, and, unlike people held in state prisons, most are awaiting trial and remain eligible to vote. Yet they are hardly ever included in the democratic process, let alone part of forums like this one.

People in jails are largely cut off from voter information. They seldom exercise the right to vote because actually casting a ballot from any of the roughly 3,000 jails across the country is usually an enormous struggle, if not practically impossible. This is due in major part to general indifference, and sometimes even outright resistance, from local officials and sheriffs who oversee county jails and control ballot access for people in custody. 

The candidate forum inside the Genesee County jail in Flint stood out in comparison. Outside advocates had worked for years to persuade local officials to boost civic engagement and voter registration for the more than 500 people detained there daily, and they’ve gotten Chris Swanson, the elected sheriff in Genesee County, to partner with them. In 2022, Swanson hired two formerly incarcerated organizers who circulate information about elections and voting to people detained inside, help them register and cast ballots, and plan candidate forums. 

Percy Glover, one of these organizers, had spent time after leaving prison volunteering to boost voter participation at the jail, until he was hired to do this work full-time. 

“Without us, people don’t know they can vote, don’t know who they’re voting for, and don’t understand what they’re voting for,” Glover, who was once himself detained in this jail, told me when I visited Flint last month. “My job is to make voting real.”

Oct. 3 marked at least the tenth forum inside the jail since 2021; prior events here have featured candidates for mayor, city council, school board, and Congress.

Ahead of the October forum, Swanson pulled visitors into a side room where he explained how civic engagement for those in custody connects to his broader goal: “We’ve been doing the same thing over and over, and we’ve seen generational incarceration, generational poverty, generational addictions,” the sheriff said. “What reduces crime? It’s not more money, more police, more harsh sentencing. It’s value. When you give people another path, they change the way they make decisions.” In 2020, Swanson’s jail also launched IGNITE, an education and job-training program that has spread to jails in at least a dozen other states, and counting.

Swanson says he wants to normalize election participation in the jail, and that this work stems from his belief that people there deserve access to the democratic process just like any other voters. “The right to vote—that is so powerful as your individual right of freedom, and I’m going to push that on every level,” Swanson told me. 

Still, there is much about Flint’s jail that undercuts Swanson’s rhetoric. 

Lots of people are detained here awaiting trial for very long periods—sometimes years. And in many ways, jail policies keep them isolated from the world beyond the facility’s walls; they cannot go outside, for instance. Swanson only began allowing limited in-person visits from some family members this past summer, following a damning lawsuit from civil rights groups that alleged county officials had conspired with a private telecom company to profit off ending in-person visitation and pivoting to costly video calls. 

In May, The New Yorker reported on Swanson’s policy of blocking visits from families. “They’re trying to break us,” one incarcerated source told the magazine. Another said they watched people locked up in Flint “break down into despair.”

Amani Sawari, an advocate for jail voting who lives outside of Detroit, who is also the editor of a quarterly political zine called Prisonality that she mails to thousands of incarcerated people around the country, told me the programs to encourage civic participation at the Genesee County jail are the “gold standard” for any groups or communities looking to build political power behind bars. 

But she said she also struggles to square the jail’s standout qualities with the casual cruelty of its conditions. 

“When it comes to programming, they have something to be proud of, and there’s Percy’s leadership, the forums,” Sawari said. “But when it comes to the food, the conditions, the bunks—it’s still jail. It’s still carceral. It just sucks.”

Glover acknowledges these complaints. “The design is very inhumane, like most jails. There’s absolutely no level of comfort. I mean, look around,” he said. But, he adds, he is focused on controlling what he can.

He estimates he’s helped 2,000 people vote from jail in the last few years, and I learned quickly how important Glover’s work has felt to people detained in Genesee County. In the jail lobby, before I took a tour of the facility, I encountered a father and daughter named Carl and Katarena Maddox, who had both been incarcerated at the jail and released earlier this year. They had returned that day to celebrate their graduation from a jail-based education program. Both told me they had attended a candidate forum while detained there.

Katarena, 24, voted for the first time in her life from jail this summer during Michigan’s primary election. “It was a memorable first,” she told me. “It made me feel as if I was part of the community, because nobody has ever introduced me to voting the way the Genesee County jail did.” 

Carl, 56, told me he’s been locked in this jail on and off since he was 18, and is now determined to stay free. He said that not once during his dozens of stints at the jail did staff ever mention voting—until last year, when Glover helped him register and cast a ballot for the first time in his life.

“Percy made us part of the process,” Carl said. That stuck with him: Carl said he’d attended a candidate rally in the area in September, as a free man, and that, the night before we met, he had made a point to watch J.D. Vance and Tim Walz debate on TV. “I’m seeing myself differently than I ever have. Voting, being in my community, is a big part of that,” he added.

Swanson, a Democrat, has ambitions to run for governor, and this month cruised to re-election. He was appointed to the post in 2019, made headlines in 2020 for marching with protesters after George Floyd’s murder, and then won his first election for the office later that year. That was the same year the jail launched IGNITE, which stands for Inmate Growth Naturally and Intentionally Through Education. Swanson and other jail leaders are evangelical about the program, which has been praised by a team of researchers at Harvard, Brown, and the University of Michigan who concluded in a paper this year that IGNITE and the “culture change” it’s brought about led to a sharp drop in recidivism and improved morale in the jail.

But it was difficult to reconcile that with my many observations that the jail remains, in many ways, just another embodiment of the callousness of mass incarceration. 

Detainees there are fed slop. The housing units seem just as uncomfortable as those in other jails I’ve visited, and one of them is so crowded that some people have to sleep in a common area, without the relative privacy of a cell.

The judge candidates were directly confronted with the realities of pretrial detention on Oct. 3, during the question-and-answer period that followed their speeches. One man in the back of the crowd asked the candidates how they’d ensure due process. He said he’d been in the jail for three years, awaiting trial. 

“I want to apologize to you,” responded Adrienne Young, a Michigan Court of Appeals judge and former public defender who would go on to narrowly win a new term on Nov. 5. “Three years waiting for an outcome and being separated from your family is an unimaginable loss for you and for your community.”

The vast majority of people in custody at this jail have not been convicted—that is, they’re detained despite still being presumed innocent—and the average length of stay as of this summer was more than 200 days, according to the jail’s staff. The situation is common across Michigan, and across the country, in large part due to a cash bail system that keeps people who cannot afford their freedom locked up. Some Michigan lawmakers want to reform this system during the upcoming lame-duck session.

After the forum, I caught up with the man who asked the question about due process. He told me that he is 42, and that he had never voted until Michigan’s primary election this year, when Glover helped him register and request a ballot. He said that the candidate forum was the first time in his life that anyone running for office had spoken to him. 

Here and all over the country, sheriffs are armed with broad discretion over access to ballots and information about elections. They typically get to decide whether to allow elections officials, or organizations or individual advocates, inside jails to assist people in registering to vote or obtaining a ballot. They control the flow of mail in and out of jails. They also control the flow of information relevant to voting, like ballot guides, local newspapers, and official campaign material. They decide whether to allow candidate events like the one I attended in Flint. 

And typically, in this state and elsewhere, jails have done little to facilitate democratic participation. When it comes to civic engagement, the Genesee County jail soars over a bar that could hardly be set lower: A 2021 statewide review by the Michigan nonprofit Voting Access for All Coalition found that only about a quarter of the state’s 83 counties reported having any policy in place to assist jailed people with voter registration. Anyone voting from a Michigan jail is necessarily doing so by absentee ballot, since jails there do not double as polling places, and the review found that less than half of counties reported any program to assist in that process.

“It was shocking,” Angela Davenport, executive director of the coalition that conducted this review, told me. “There’s no consistency at all.”

This matches Sawari’s experience. She told me that most officials across Michigan ignore the issue of voting rights for people in jail custody. Sawari said a small corps of advocates, herself included, has been trying to change this by going directly into jails and doing the work that the government will not. But, she said, sheriffs sometimes won’t let them in, and officials often seem totally uninterested in helping the people they detain act on their constitutional right to vote.

“We don’t expect the staff of a sheriff’s office to be voting experts,” she told me. “The problem is they feel like voting is a privilege, and that people in jail shouldn’t have access to that privilege.”

Sawari recounted a recent exchange with the top elections official in Macomb County, the third most populous county in Michigan. (The 2021 statewide survey by the Voting Access for All Coalition had found Macomb County had no programs in place to facilitate registration or voting.) “We were trying to get into that jail for years,” Sawari said. “They were unresponsive. So we contacted the county clerk, because they could help resolve a lot of registration issues if they were willing to go into the jail. The clerk, when we sat with him, was like, ‘There are people in the jail that can vote?’ He had no idea.”

Sawari added that the clerk still did not commit to making a greater effort to help people in jail vote, even after that conversation. (The Macomb County clerk’s office did not respond to multiple interview requests from Bolts.) 

“Jails become dark holes of civic engagement for folks confined, because there’s no pathway to activating their rights,” Sawari continued. “They’re just stuck, stuck in the walls.”

In this context, at least, Sawari and other advocates are glad they’ve made major progress in Genesee County. Sawari said, “Them raising the bar gives us something to point to for other jails that aren’t doing anything.”

Percy Glover’s first encounter with the Genesee County jail came in 1993, when he was in his early 20s and locked up on a second-degree murder charge—the tragic result, Glover says today, of what began as a simple neighborhood rivalry among poor, aimless, bored, short-sighted young people with access to weapons.

After prison, he went back to school and then worked a slew of jobs, eventually landing at the State Appellate Defender Office as an advocate who helped people accused of crimes with re-entry and family reunification. It was not until he was on that job, six years ago, when he got a call from someone he knew at The Advancement Project, a national nonprofit promoting racial justice, that he even learned people in jail could vote. 

The Advancement Project was poised to spearhead a jail-voting pilot program in Flint, Glover says, and it asked if he was interested in joining. He was, and soon after visited the jail—it was his first time in there since his incarceration—with the then-county clerk and a couple of others. They together helped more than 300 people register to vote, Glover says. He kept up that work for years on a volunteer basis, before joining the staff of the sheriff’s office. In early October, besides organizing the forum, Glover was busy hanging informational posters and distributing absentee ballot request forms, to then collect and submit them to elections officials.

He has also expanded his work beyond Genesee County, including by advocating for legislation last year that made Michigan the first state in the country to automatically register people to vote as they exit prison and regain their voting rights.

State laws concerning voting and democratic engagement for incarcerated people are generally extremely flimsy, where they exist at all. Only one state, Colorado, requires jails to establish polling places, and that law only passed this year, only requires a few hours of voting access per cycle, and only applies to certain elections. Glover hopes Michigan will consider a law similar to Colorado’s.

When I arrived in Flint a couple of days before the jail’s candidate forum, I encountered Glover outside the lockup wearing a sharp navy suit with a sheriff’s badge pin on the lapel, and a pair of immaculately clean black and white Jordans. 

He’s 56 and has lived here his whole life, save for the years he spent in state prison. He came up in the 70s and 80s, when, in key ways, Flint bore little resemblance to its current form. The city’s population, which verged on 200,000 when he was born, has today shrunk to under 80,000. Job loss and white flight have produced stark segregation: Flint is majority-Black and 65 percent non-white, while the rest of Genesee County is 85 percent white. Flint accounts for about a fifth of the county’s overall population, but more than half of the local jail population.

Glover remembers a childhood in a busy city with lots of auto workers, blocks of homes with real curb appeal, kids playing. He remembers that his grandparents lived at the confluence of three sections of housing that each had their own elementary school.

We took a drive around Flint, shortly before the judicial candidate forum at the jail, Glover narrating—“Empty, empty, empty”—as we passed vacant buildings along a wide street with almost no traffic. The three elementary schools by his grandparents’ place have all closed.

He told me he believed from a young age that he would do something great one day, and that he feels now, 50 years later, that he is fulfilling that dream through his work at the jail. 

Glover says his interest in civic engagement at the jail is fueled by all he did not have—all that many young people in Flint today also do not have—that might have kept him out of jail in the first place: “Somebody taking any time to care, to ask me what I was feeling, what I’m thinking. Somebody showing me a career opportunity: Have you ever thought about going to school? Exploration.”

IGNITE, the program inside the Flint jail, is optional for those held there, but very popular, in part because it comes with incentives: Participants can earn extra time on digital tablets, which they can use to watch media and communicate with loved ones. They get access to special activities, such as time in the jail’s music recording studio. They get to wear different clothes; rather than the standard-issue orange one-piece jumpsuit one gets when booked into this jail, those involved with IGNITE get to wear two-piece burgundy outfits. “If you do what we want you to do, you’ll get a reward for it,” Major Jason Gould, one of the sheriff’s top officials, told me. He said he did not realize, until IGNITE, how much it matters to wear two garments instead of one: “It makes a big difference when they go to the bathroom,” he said.

IGNITE participants meet five days a week, for an hour before lunch and for an hour before dinner, for classwork ranging from math to art history. They are given job training in a variety of fields, and can, through a local community college program, apply for employment that they can begin after release from jail. 

Peter Hull, a Brown University economist who co-authored the recent report on IGNITE, told me he approached the program skeptically. “My broad sense was that these programs rarely work very well, and that in fact there’s a long history of programs like this being tried and eventually scrapped,” Hull said. But his research team found that even one month in the IGNITE program was enough to make a participant 25 percent less likely to commit “misconduct,” defined by the jail as any of a number of acts of violence or disobedience, while in the jail, and 18 percent less likely to be sent back to jail within a year of being released.

“This wild thing happened,” Hull said, “where analysis after analysis was just showing the same thing. I beat up the numbers as hard as I could, and it really does seem like something is happening here.”

The day before the October candidate forum, Glover and Major Gould took me around the jail for a tour. We wandered the five-story building for about 90 minutes. 

The November election was still about a month out, and on this day Glover was hanging a bunch of posters, given to him by Sawari and other outside advocates, with information about voting eligibility and ballot access. Glover taped them on walls throughout the building and at doorways in cell blocks. “YOU CAN VOTE!” read one poster.

I watched him hang the first poster in the jail’s booking area. It was brightly colored and read, “Have a criminal record? In Michigan, yes, you can vote.” Alongside the posters hung advertisements placed in the jail by criminal defense attorneys. A few feet away from Glover, a group of men in orange jumpsuits, freshly returned from court, stood facing a wall, all shackled together. I saw two incarcerated men wearing white outfits, and Gould told me that these are “trustees” of the jail—a distinction that a few dozen people are given for good behavior and trustworthiness. These men were eating lunch, unrestrained.

“We depend on these guys, the trustees, because they’re doing all the work that, basically, the deputies don’t want to do: trash, serving food, sweeping floors,” Gould told me. “We couldn’t operate without them.” 

I asked if the trustees get paid for their work, and Gould said, “No. The pay is they don’t have to be in a cell all the time.”

Later, inside the housing units of the jail, people in orange jumpsuits (those not participating in IGNITE programs) and burgundy outfits (the IGNITE folks) surrounded Glover as he hung posters and chatted with them. Lunch hour was winding down, and I passed by a stack of discarded trays with food scraps. The meal looked disgusting: tired green beans and white bread and two dishes—one brownish and one milky-white—that I could not identify. Gould told me the food here used to be a lot worse.

Glover had already started collecting absentee ballots, work that would ramp up in the days to come. He’d also distributed nonpartisan voter guides from the League of Women Voters, containing basic information about what was on the ballot. 

A young man approached him to say he was excited about voting but that he didn’t know anything about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. “Who should I vote for?” the man asked, and Glover told him he couldn’t answer that question. Glover told me that kind of encounter is not unusual, hence the importance of the candidate forums. 

Inside the jail, I met Emmanuel Burks, a 28-year-old IGNITE participant. He voted in Michigan’s primary this year but otherwise had voted just once before in his life, during a past presidential election. “We don’t really have a voice in here. They feel like we’re just criminals. There’s an image about us,” he told me, but then added, of Glover, “he’s giving us a chance to open our voice, our mind, be heard.”

Gould said he’d show me the outdoor space, where people jailed here can get fresh air a few times a week. When we got there, though, I was struck by the fact that it is not really outdoors, but is rather a plain room with brick walls, half of a basketball court, one hoop, and two open-air, vertical, barred windows that let through some breeze. 

I mentioned to Gould that Glover’s work on civic engagement and IGNITE and the general culture change those programs are meant to signal did not erase the many ways in which the people locked inside here are kept isolated. How can the office pitch itself as so humane when the folks in its custody are unable to touch actual earth, or feel a raindrop—or, until recently, ever hug their own family members—sometimes for years on end?

Gould didn’t dispute the premise, but told me, “They’re not supposed to be here more than a year. That’s how it was designed.” 

In the jail’s one women’s unit, I met Windy Weatherford, who has been locked inside for two and a half years, awaiting trial. 

She was deemed such an excellent IGNITE participant that she was elevated to one of two special cells in the women’s unit that feature nicer linens and thicker mattresses than what the rest of the population gets. I learned that these relative luxuries were purchased through a donation made by NBA player and Flint native Kyle Kuzma. His name is posted in big block letters in the corner of the cell block. 

“We do have some nice orthopedic mattresses, and it helps,” Weatherford told me. “You feel like you’re sleeping on concrete on the other mattresses.” 

The next day, at the forum, Glover stood off to the side as the candidates for office each gave pitches. Some of them noted how unusual the event was.

“This does not happen for the people I formerly represented,” Adrienne Young, the public defender-turned-appellate judge, said. “I’m here because you matter, and you should vote because you matter.”

Afterward, I spoke with Kyra Harris Bolden, who was running in a hotly contested race to retain her seat on the Michigan Supreme Court. (Bolden would go on to win, helping solidify a liberal majority on the court.) She told me that candidates like her are typically steered by consultants toward a very different type of campaigning from what she was doing that day. “You get a list of registered voters and you target that population of people that you know are going to vote. Your absentee voters, your vote-in-every-single-election people,” she said. 

Bolden recently experienced how public institutions shun people involved in the criminal legal system. After joining the court at the start of 2023, she hired a formerly incarcerated man as a law clerk. but this gave way to a public outcry, led by one of Bolden’s fellow Democratic justices, who felt the clerk’s criminal record disqualified him from the job. The clerk resigned within days.

Bolden told me it was her second time participating in a forum at this jail, and that she’d been invited to zero others across all the rest of the jails in Michigan. 

I spoke also with Latoya Willis, who was running in a contested race for a seat on the Court of Appeals. (She was nominated by Democrats and lost to Republican nominee Matthew Ackerman.) “I’ve never been to an event like this,” Willis told me. “It’s a huge voting population who still has a voice, and an important voice, because they see up close and personal what these judges do.”

Without this forum, she wondered: “How many people would even know that they still have the right to vote while they’re here?”

The post The Michigan Jail that Candidates Keep Visiting appeared first on Bolts.

Scott Deno, who oversees Colorado’s largest jail, says he takes seriously his role in helping people vote if an election rolls around while they’re under his custody. His jail, in Colorado Springs, holds more than 1,600 people on any given day, and most are being held pretrial or serving out a misdemeanor sentence, meaning that they retain the right to vote.

Testifying in February before a legislative committee, the chief of detention for El Paso County’s sheriff’s office told lawmakers he was “very proud” of his record on this front. “I can say with 100 percent confidence: if an incarcerated citizen is residing in the El Paso County Jail during the election season, they will have the opportunity to cast their vote in a secure and timely manner,” Deno said.

State Senator Tom Sullivan followed up a bit later in the committee hearing: “How many of the incarcerated people that you had actually voted in the last election?”

Steve Schleiker, El Paso County’s clerk and top elections official, a Republican who was testifying alongside Deno, took that question. 

“Zero,” he said. 

Amanda Gonzalez, the Jefferson County clerk, was present at the hearing for that admission. “It was a wild moment,” she told Bolts. “You could feel it in the room.” 

El Paso County is no outlier. A statewide review by the nonprofit Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition found that in the 2022 general election, only 231 people voted from the state’s jails. Some 6,000 people are held in jails across Colorado every day, a population that’s disproportionately Black and Latinx.

Gonzalez, a Democrat, said she has talked to sheriffs who run these lock-ups but dismiss these numbers. “To me, this is just a civil rights issue,” she added. Like their counterparts around the country, Colorado sheriffs have substantial power over whether the people in their custody get to exercise their right to vote. Sheriffs decide whether to allow outside groups, like the League of Women Voters, inside jails to assist people in registering to vote or obtaining a ballot. They control the flow of mail in and out of jails. They also control the flow of information relevant to voting; formerly incarcerated people in Colorado and other states have told Bolts that they never were notified of their voting options while they were jailed.

The Colorado legislature on Friday adopted a first-in-the-nation reform last week to fix this. Senate Bill 72, which now awaits the signature of Governor Jared Polis to become law, would give people held in local jails a lot more opportunities to obtain and cast a ballot.

It would require that sheriffs establish polling stations within local jails across Colorado each general election to operate for at least one six-hour period. It would also require every jail to designate a ballot drop-off location, for those who want to vote by mail.

Colorado would be the first state to enact a mandate of this sort. Nevada, Massachusetts, and Washington state have recently passed initiatives meant to make jail voting easier, but none feature the central requirement of Colorado’s: turning local jails into in-person polling places.

“It’s really a gold standard for what all states can aspire to,” Carmen López, an expert on jail voting for The Sentencing Project, a national research and advocacy organization, told Bolts. “Folks in Colorado who are in jails will have the voting experience that the rest of society in Colorado has. I think that’s really important.”

SB 72 builds on recent efforts in Denver, where local officials set up in-person voting from jail starting in 2020, to great effect so far: The jail’s turnout rate has occasionally surpassed the city’s overall rate. Elections workers and outside voter-engagement groups have also been able to enter the Denver jail to register people to vote and help them access ballots.

Just a few cities outside of Colorado, including Chicago and Dallas, have set up similar programs for jail voting.

The reform does not affect who is already eligible to vote. Colorado, like nearly every other state, bars people from voting while they are incarcerated if they’ve been convicted of a felony, and SB 72 keeps it that way. Rather, the bill seeks to improve ballot access for a group of people who already have the right to vote but face major barriers to actually using it.

Should Polis sign SB 72 into law, it’ll go into effect in time for this November’s election. (A spokesperson for the governor’s office declined to tell Bolts whether Polis, a Democrat, would sign the bill. Several people who’ve worked closely on it said they expect he will.) This bill would not apply to primary elections; its proponents say they hope to expand it in the future.

This bill sailed through both the House and Senate. It received broad support from Democratic lawmakers who run both chambers, and it also garnered some Republican votes.

But Colorado’s county sheriffs largely opposed the legislation, and their statewide association lobbied against it. Some county clerks, the local officials who oversee local election administration, also resisted the reform. During Colorado’s 120-day legislative session, which ends on Wednesday, a parade of local officials from all parts of the state asked lawmakers to reject, or at least neuter, SB 72. 

“We already serve this voting group,” testified Sheri Davis, the Republican clerk in suburban Douglas County.

“What we are currently doing across the state works,” said Democratic Sheriff David Lucero of Pueblo County, not far from Colorado Springs. “I would ask you to vote ‘no’ on this.”

Shannon Bird, one of the few Democratic lawmakers who voted against the measure, pointed to local sheriffs’ opposition to explain her stance. “They were concerned that their jails did not have the appropriate infrastructure to support the requirements of the bill; they were worried about jail staff’s ability to ensure the safety and security of inmates and election staff during the voting process,” she told Bolts. She also echoed many sheriffs’ point that there’s just no problem to begin with. “All sheriffs I heard from made clear that individuals in their custody have a right, and are already able, to vote safely through Colorado’s mail ballot process,” she said.

Some local opponents of the bill also said it would demand too much of their offices, which in many cases are short-staffed. Schleiker told lawmakers the bill would be enormously expensive to implement; El Paso County spends $26 per voter during a typical election, he said, but would have to spend more than $2,000 per jailed voter, under SB 72’s requirements.

Proponents of SB 72 countered during the hearings that this would be neither expensive nor burdensome, and that, in any event, sheriffs must learn to see voter access as mandatory.

“This is not a favor we’d be doing for these citizens,” Colorado voting rights advocate Stephanie Puello told lawmakers in the February hearing. “This is a right that they are entitled to.”

Gonzalez, the Jefferson County clerk, estimates it would cost her county about $1,400 in total to implement SB 72, a far cry from the $2,000 per-voter price tag Schleiker predicted.

SB 72’s backers say they’ll closely monitor its rollout, given the lack of buy-in from many of the people who run Colorado’s local lock-ups and elections offices. Kyle Giddings, a civic engagement advocate for the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition who is himself formerly incarcerated, told Bolts that he is helping to gather a group of volunteers who can provide staffing and resources to any jail administration that is struggling to adjust to the reform, or is simply unmotivated to meet its demands.

“That starts on Day One,” Giddings said. “We’ve already had conversations with sheriffs that are very vocally against this bill, to say that after this bill passes we’re not going to disappear into the wind and hope they do their job. We’re going to be there the whole ride.”

Giddings and others said they intend to watchdog every jail in the state to make sure that eligible voters are granted meaningful ballot access. They intend to maintain regular communication with sheriffs and clerks to make sure those officials understand and respect the demands of SB 72; they also point toward the bill’s requirement that the secretary of state’s office provide training materials to local officials. 

Tova Wang, a senior researcher of democratic practice at Harvard University, told Bolts that she’s hopeful SB 72 has sufficient teeth to force even the most reluctant county officials to make voting from jail much easier.

“You can’t legislate motives, but you can legislate participation,” she said. “This is not that hard to do. It is sometimes the first time you do it, but after you’ve done it once, it’s not a huge lift. These concerns about resources and security—there have been a number of places able to address those challenges successfully. Denver has been doing it for a while now.”

Gonzalez, the Jefferson County clerk, says she has found that it doesn’t take much effort to bring turnout up in jails, especially when the baseline leaves so much room for improvement. When she ran for office, she said, she was “horrified” to learn about the virtually non-existent voter engagement program in her county jail: in a facility that holds about 1,000 people, she said, only three cast ballots in November of 2022. 

It’s not hard to see why that number was so low, she said, explaining that jail staff was not making much effort to publicize voting rights information.

“In Jefferson County,” she told Bolts, “the process was that there was just one sign posted with information. So a person would have to see the sign, want to vote enough to go to a deputy and ask for a voter registration form, then fill out that form. The deputy turns the form into the clerk’s office, the clerk’s office would generate a ballot, and get it to the voter. There are several barriers there where that would be a system that would not work for incarcerated voters.”

Led by Gonzalez, Jefferson County’s elections office partnered with the jail to make relatively inexpensive tweaks—creating a hotline that incarcerated people could call for free to ask about voting; advertising elections information inside the jail; and going cell-by-cell to offer voter registration forms, among other actions. About 100 jailed voters participated in Colorado’s presidential primary earlier this year, a large increase from the three who voted in 2022. 

One hundred people voting from Jefferson County’s jail still amounts to low turnout, and Gonzalez, who testified in favor of SB 72 at a House hearing, said she’s hopeful her county can keep improving. Under the bill, clerks like her would be able to supplement existing mail-voting efforts with the option for convenient, in-person voting. 

Colorado allows same-day voter registration, so Gonzalez says the physical voting centers could even grow voter rolls. 

But she said the best version of this reform will need real buy-in from sheriffs—something she has struggled to find in her own county. She questioned why so many sheriffs and clerks around the state are so unbothered by the fact that hardly anyone in Colorado is voting from jail.

“If you told me we had some precincts [outside of jail] with turnout rates of less than 1 percent, I’d be screaming at the top of my lungs about what is going on there,” Gonzalez said. “But our system has, unfortunately, a really long history of not including people of color, low-income people, and people involved in our criminal justice system. That’s exactly what we’re trying to fix. I don’t want those people ignored.”

The post Colorado Adopts First-in-Nation Mandate for Voting Centers in Jails appeared first on Bolts.

Brown explained that eligible voters in the jail could request and mail ballots, since confinement in jail is one the few situations that allow people to vote absentee in Texas. “Some people would have you think that we’re not allowing people to vote,” the Democratic sheriff continued. “Such is not the case. They are voting. It’s just that they’re not doing so at a polling station.” 

A few months after Brown’s video, in the November midterms, just one person voted from jail via an absentee ballot, according to county data obtained by Bolts, which is in keeping with the historical trends. Roughly 6,000 people are held inside the massive jail on the edge of downtown Dallas. The vast majority are incarcerated pretrial and many are likely eligible to vote, but few actually do. Only two people voted by mail from the jail in the 2016 presidential election. That number rose in the 2020 presidential election but remained a tiny share of the jail population, with 34 people returning a mail ballot.

Dallas activists had asked for a polling place to be installed at the jail for last year’s midterm elections, but faced pushback from some officials, including a county commissioner who called the issue “less than last on my list.” In her message posted to social media last summer, Brown questioned the feasibility of a polling place at the jail and claimed that adding one could compound short staffing at her lockup. 

But activists got their wish this past spring, when officials quietly approved a jail polling place for the May 6 municipal elections. “This is something we have actively been working on for some time,” Brown said in another post. “We are pleased to be able to expand voting for our inmates in Dallas County Jail.”

Twenty people voted in person at this new polling place on May 6. An additional ten returned an absentee ballot from the jail. While an increase from November, especially for generally low-turnout local elections, the numbers are still pale compared to the county’s immense jail population. Brown said in her announcement that her office would use the spring’s low-profile elections to iron out any logistical issues. “The municipal elections afford us the opportunity to do a trial run to fill these gaps,” she said. 

As far back as 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed voting rights for people held in pretrial detention who, unlike people in state prisons, haven’t been convicted of a crime. But whether people in local lockups can actually exercise that right often depends on county sheriffs, who run the majority of county jails. 

Nearly all jails make incarcerated people who want to vote request an absentee ballot through the mail and then send it back, which can be tricky given tight deadlines and mail delays. This system also misses people who enter the jail after the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot. In 2020, for instance, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ohio officials were not required to help eligible voters incarcerated after this deadline, even though election officials provide voting options for people hospitalized after that deadline. 

“There are a lot of issues with absentee ballots as the primary means for ballot access in custody,” Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, told Bolts. “People in mailrooms don’t know how to treat ballots properly… And the jail facility itself lacks training and accountability.”

Activists have played a vital role expanding voting access behind bars by visiting local jails to register eligible voters and provide election day information. But in recent years they have also started pushing for election-day polling sites in lockups.

 In 2020, the Cook County jail in Chicago became the first jail system in the country to install a polling place for eligible voters incarcerated on election day, and voting there continues to rise, with turnout at the jail surpassing the citywide turnout in the June 2022 primaries. The Harris County jail in Houston, the largest in Texas, followed suit with an election day polling place in 2021 after a long campaign from local activists to expand ballot access to eligible voters detained there. Dallas this spring became the second jail in Texas with an election day polling place. 

Still, emails from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office obtained by Bolts under an open records request show how jail and elections staff across the state often question how and even whether to let people vote from jail, a dynamic Bolts has covered elsewhere in the country. The state discouraged at least one large urban county from setting up a jail polling place after Harris County established one; when a county attorney in Bexar County, home to San Antonio, reached out for guidance last summer, an attorney with the secretary of state’s office wrote them back saying, “a jail would not be a permissible polling location.” 

This year, Texas Republicans, ever hostile to expanding ballot access, filed a bill to prohibit polling places in a jail or any other detention facility, but it never advanced. Voting rights activists say changes to voting laws that Texas lawmakers already passed in recent years could compound the problems people face trying to vote from jail, pointing to new absentee voting rules that resulted in more than 20,000 rejected mail ballots during the 2022 midterm primary elections. 

Alex Birnel, advocacy director with MOVE Texas, a voting rights group that pushed for a polling place at the Dallas County jail, told Bolts that, in addition to working with the county sheriff, activists also had to persuade other county officials. “While sheriffs deal with the logistics, you’ve got to be in conversations,” Birnel said. “It cannot be done solo. You need the commissioners’ court and county institutions to be involved.”

Dallas’ Democratic county executive, County Judge Clay Jenkins, eventually backed the idea, and last year he started pushing other county leaders to support putting a polling place inside the jail for the November 2022 midterm elections. “Most Texans agree that voting should be safe, easy, and accessible to all, and while Dallas County has taken several steps to ensure access to the ballot box, there is, unfortunately, one group of eligible voters who have been denied their right to vote for far too long: the over 5,000 pretrial inmates at our Dallas County jail,” Jenkins wrote in an op-ed last September. “Denying thousands of Dallas County voters the opportunity to cast their ballot, as we have done for so long, is wrong, and we need to fix it.” 

A coalition of advocacy groups, including the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project, kept up the pressure, writing a joint letter to the sheriff after she publicly dismissed the possibility of election-day voting at the jail. “Despite your claim that people in the Dallas County Jail already vote by mail, voting by mail on its own is insufficient to provide people in jail with the opportunity to vote,” the groups wrote in a Sept. 27, 2022 letter. 

“Because people of color are disproportionately incarcerated, denying ballot access to people in jail disproportionately disenfranchises Dallas County’s voters of color,” the groups argued, writing that failing to facilitate election day voting for eligible detainees “may give rise to liability under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” The letter also pointed to the county’s continued reliance on cash bail for determining who is jailed pretrial and said, “because many pretrial detainees are incarcerated solely because they cannot afford to pay bail, there is effectively a poll tax—wherein they must pay bail to vote.” 

While they resisted the idea before the midterms, Brown and other county officials ultimately agreed to election day voting at the jail by the time they were determining polling locations ahead of this year’s municipal elections. When asked if the jail will continue to host a polling place in future elections, the sheriff’s office told Bolts, “Yes, the plan is to continue having a polling location at the Dallas County Jail for inmates and one outside for the public as we did in May.”

As Dallas shifts on the issue, and while Republican lawmakers in Texas continue to create barriers to voting, Porter urged other local officials to prioritize expanding ballot access where they can. “Democracy should be a priority for everybody and access to the ballot should be a priority for anyone who has influence and concern for liberty,” Porter said. “It should be a priority for sheriffs and county officials to guarantee ballot access for people to be eligible to vote during custody. They are humans and eligible.”

The post Dallas County Jail Adds Election Day Polling Place After Pressure from Activists appeared first on Bolts.

Yet only five of Washington State’s 39 counties applied for that money, according to the Washington secretary of state’s office. And some local officials who blocked their counties from participating have been open that they don’t want to help people in jail participate in elections even though they remain eligible to vote. 

Last September, Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton went to the county board of commissioners with her plan to increase voter registration and participation for people incarcerated in the county’s two detention centers. Dalton, the chief local elections official and the only Democrat elected to countywide office in Spokane, said she’d been working with detention staff to improve ballot access in the jails. But Dalton needed the all-Republican board to apply for the newly created state grant to help her office cover the cost of training more jail staff on election procedures, making informational videos to show behind bars, and printing voter guides explaining how to register and ask for ballots while in lockup. (While auditors are their counties’ chief election officials, county commissioners still hold the purse strings and determine budgets.) 

The county’s commissioners, wary of more people voting behind bars, rejected her proposal. “So, if you’re a candidate that’s campaigning on a position of being tough on crime, obviously you’re not going to get a lot of votes out of the jail, and the inverse of that also could apply,” Commissioner Al French said during the meeting. 

Dalton responded, “We don’t speculate how people vote, we just need to make sure that they have the opportunity to register to receive a ballot and return that ballot.” 

In an interview with Bolts, French reiterated his opposition to measures that would make it easier for eligible voters to cast ballots from jail, arguing it “stacks the deck.” 

“We want to have a fair and open election, and to try and get voters who have a predisposition, it’s not in my mind consistent with free and open elections,” French said. 

The opposition from Spokane officials is in stark contrast to larger trends in the state to reduce the disenfranchisement of people entangled in the criminal legal system. In 2021, Governor Jay Inslee signed a bill, which was sponsored by Tarra Simmons, a formerly incarcerated lawmaker, restoring the right to vote for Washingtonians convicted of felonies automatically upon their release from prison—giving an estimated 20,000 people back their right to vote. Last year, Inslee proposed a state budget that allocated $628,000 to improve voter awareness, registration and turnout in county jails; the final budget that lawmakers passed quadrupled the amount available to counties. 

The program left it up to Washington State counties to apply for the funds, though. Other states have adopted stronger approaches to strengthening voting access; Massachusetts adopted a law last year that imposes new requirements on sheriffs and county officials to provide information and ballots to people in jail. 

The handful of Washington counties that participated only tapped about $250,000 of the $2.5 million that the state allocated as of this month , according to the secretary of state’s office, with the bulk going to King and Pierce counties, the most populous in the state (each received about $100,000). Counties that have participated—which so far also include Thurston, Benton and Kitsap counties—must submit a report to the state by February detailing how the funds were used and how turnout was impacted, but there are already signs of improvement. 

Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall told Bolts that ballots cast from the jail spiked from just three in previous elections to 40 this past November after her office used the $42,000 to hire more staff to help train detention officials and distribute voter guides inside the jail. “It was fantastic,” Hall told Bolts. “We partnered with our jails and they were cooperative despite a covid outbreak and being short staffed, and we ended up hiring some off duty sheriffs to help us make this effort.” 

The Washington State legislature could pass yet more measures this year to increase ballot access in county jails. Last week, Simmons filed House Bill 1174, which would require jails to provide incarcerated people information on voter registration and requesting a ballot at least 18 days before an election. The bill would also require each county auditor’s office to create a jail voting plan in coordination with the secretary of state’s office, which could encourage more counties to apply for the funding lawmakers have already earmarked for that purpose. 

“All too often those with mental health issues find themselves housed in our county jails. Our cash bail system also means that lower-income people are more likely to spend a significant amount of time in jail. We should not be writing these Americans off,” Simmons said in her statement. “My bill will require that county auditors make an effort to ensure that everyone in their county legally able to vote has that opportunity. Innocent until proven guilty is the basis of our criminal legal system. This bill simply asks that we live those values and protect the right to vote.”

Megan Pirie, co-founder of the Eastern Washington chapter of All of Us of None of Us, an organization that advocates for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, said being in jail presents numerous barriers to voting, including the limited availability of outside information like the elections calendar and details about candidates. Even if people know they’re eligible to vote, they might not know how to register or ask for a ballot behind bars (currently, people in Spokane County jails must request forms through the commissary). 

Pirie said Spokane activists asked but haven’t been allowed inside to help jail staff register and distribute forms ahead of elections. “We were willing to come in after hours, after people were done with court and register people to vote and were flat out told no,” she told Bolts. 

Asked about activists’ complaints, Dalton said allowing people from the outside to enter the jail to help facilitate ballot access would be a “bottleneck for providing voter services directly to the inmates.”

Activists also point to research showing that Black, Native American and Hispanic people are jailed at higher rates and for longer periods than white people in the local jails. “The ability to vote and engage in society that you did not necessarily feel that you belonged just carries 10,000 miles of value,” says Kurtis Robinson, vice president of the Spokane branch of the NAACP. “It is a real core underlying issue surrounding the issue of justice involvement. You cannot understand the importance of it and what it means when it’s not supported.” 

During the meeting last September, Dalton told the Spokane commissioners that beyond creating more voter education materials for the jail and working more closely with detention staff, she hoped to survey the jails to see how many of the roughly 700 people locked inside at any given time are eligible to vote. Many likely are: studies in recent years have shown 70 percent of people in Spokane County jails are pretrial detainees who haven’t been convicted. 

Dalton urged the commissioners to help her establish new processes around jail voting before the legislature ultimately forces them onto counties. Michael Sparber, the director of the county’s detention facilities, even assured commissioners the new efforts wouldn’t strain his department, saying, “I don’t anticipate it will cause a lot of manpower issues or even a dramatic amount of overtime at the jail.” 

But the commissioners weren’t swayed. “Haven’t you come to us and said you’re short on employees? Is this a good use of existing employees and time to go and sort of try to shave votes from the jail?” commissioner Josh Kerns asked Dalton. “I have concerns with this,” Kerns said after he finished questioning her. “I’m not sold on it. I don’t like it.”

Dalton said she would keep working within her existing budget to expand ballot access in the county’s jails and hopes the recent dramatic shakeup of the Spokane County commission could lead to more support for the kind of voter outreach program in the jail that she wanted to launch last year; a change in state law grew the commission from three to five seats last year, and in November voters elected two new Democratic commissioners. 

“It’s disappointing but it’s just a small setback,” Dalton said of the county’s refusal to apply for the state grant. “My office and the jail staff will continue to work together to do whatever we can to support incarcerated folks with their right to vote. It may not be as extensive as other counties but we will do what we can.”  

The post Efforts to Expand Ballot Access in Washington State Jails Face Local Pushback appeared first on Bolts.

Her attitude stands in stark contrast with the debunked conspiracies spread by Donald Trump’s allies demonizing ballot drop boxes and mail voting as the source of widespread fraud. Those conspiracies will feature in the general election to be Vermont’s chief elections officer. The state may lean hard to the left in federal elections, but Republican nominee H. Brooke Paige has echoed the former president’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; he is part of a large network of Republican election deniers running for secretary of state.

Bolts recently spoke with Copeland Hanzas about her concerns over  this rhetoric and about how she envisions the role of a secretary of state when it comes to championing ballot access.

Vermont is in the midst of major debates regarding how to strengthen democratic participation. Copeland Hanzas, who has served in the state House since 2004, helped shepherd the state’s new universal vote-by-mail system into law this year; she also supports towns in Vermont that want to expand their electorate by allowing noncitizen residents and 16- and 17-year olds to vote in local elections. (Two Vermont municipalities, including the capital city of Montpellier, just implemented noncitizen voting in local elections this year.) 

Bolts also talked to Copeland Hanzas about how she would expand voter registration, including for people who are in prison. Vermont is one of just three places in the United States, alongside Maine and Washington, D.C., where no incarcerated person loses the right to vote, though turnout rates from prison are low. “Why would they not be allowed to vote? They’re citizens of our country,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts.

You are running against a Republican opponent who has amplified Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. What concerns do you have about an election denier in this office?

It is highly worrisome to hear people echoing false claims and misinformation about the safety and security of our elections. It is a fundamental threat to our democracy, in that the purpose of these claims is to discourage people from participating in elections. And I think that is very undemocratic.

We’ve seen rising threats and harassment of local election officials. Are you concerned about that taking place in Vermont?

It’s certainly a concern. I haven’t been briefed in any formal way about the extent to which there may be actual threats, but I do hear anecdotally, talking with local elections officials, that the tension and stress around elections has definitely increased because of this misinformation. 

In Vermont, that is a really serious allegation: What you’re essentially saying is that your neighbor, who is duly elected to be the local elections official, is somehow part of a broad scheme to defraud the electorate. It’s just offensive and preposterous, and it is disheartening for people who care so deeply about democracy and local government that they have made their career out of acting as a town clerk. 

Vermont Digger called the three-way Democratic primary in August a race between “a technocrat, an activist, and a lawmaker.” You, the lawmaker, won. How do you envision the role of secretary of state, and do you hope to approach it more with the mindset of a voting rights “activist” or an elections “technocrat”? 

The role of the office is to be the defender of democracy. When I look at defending democracy, I think Vermonters need education on how to navigate within the system: How do you in fact influence your elected officials? If we don’t help people learn how to operate within a democracy and have faith in their ability to influence their leaders, and in the ability of governments to uphold the safety and security of elections, then we’re not going to live in a democracy long. 

Civics is boring if all you’re learning about is, ‘Here are the three branches of government, here’s the federal system.’ But people do get interested when you talk about it from the standpoint of, ‘Here’s an issue that you are passionate about—maybe you feel like you’ve been wronged—and here’s how you can advocate for a change in the system to right that wrong.’ In Vermont, you have the ability to protest your local government, participate in town meetings and lower the budget; you can vote to raise the budget, you can vote to strike the line items that suggest we should spend a million dollars on a new fire engine. I’m not going to pretend that every Vermonter knows how to participate in town meetings; the reality is a very small percentage of Vermonters actually go to their town meetings. But it is an example of democracy and action that we can point to; and when people understand that that’s possible at the local level, then it’s easier to help people engage in the idea of advocating at the statewide level.

Vermont is among just a few places that allow people to vote from prison. Nobody in Vermont is stripped of the right to vote when convicted of a crime. What do you think of that approach?

I absolutely support it. The right to vote is fundamental to your rights of citizenship, and so Vermonters need to have that protected and respected. And so I certainly support folks who are incarcerated being able to participate in our democracy. Why would they not be allowed to vote? They’re citizens of our country. 

Turnout is reportedly low among incarcerated people. What if anything would you do to address that?

Absolutely. I would refer back to two of my campaign priorities and would look for ways to make them available to incarcerated individuals.The first priority is education and outreach on civics. We need to extend that outreach to incarcerated individuals as well, so that folks understand how to vote. And my second priority is that the secretary of state’s office needs to be creating and publishing a voter guide in advance of the general election: contact information for the candidates, their website—and we could add to that a 100-word statement. That information needs to be made available to Vermonters so they can find the candidate whose values match their own, and that absolutely needs to be extended to incarcerated individuals. If you’re in prison, and you are reliant on whatever media sources you have access to, it’s no wonder people don’t vote. The secretary of state’s office needs to take a more proactive approach in making that information available.

Vermont has adopted automatic voter registration, which is triggered when people interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Would you support extending automatic voter registration to Vermont’s Department of Corrections as a way to increase participation among incarcerated people?

It’s certainly something that I would want to look into. We [lawmakers] directed the secretary of state’s office to collaborate with various state agencies outside of the Department of Motor Vehicles to explore the extent to which automatic voter registration might be simple and easy to extend to their systems. And I could see doing that with the Department of Corrections.

What other public agencies would you want to extend automatic voter registration to? There are various efforts to make the state’s Medicaid office a participating agency as well. 

We started that conversation several years ago with our Medicaid office. At the time, the Medicaid office asked us not to mandate that they go forward with it immediately; instead, they asked if they could work collaboratively with the secretary of state’s office and figure out the best way to implement that. I haven’t gotten an update. During the pandemic, there were so many challenges that we as lawmakers were having to unravel that extending AVR fell off of my radar. But it’s something that I will ask in the upcoming transition if I’m elected. I would like to know what are the barriers, and see if we can eliminate them and get this done for Vermonters. 

People who don’t ever intend to have a driver’s license should still be registered to vote so that they can be participating in democracy.

Two Vermont towns are set to allow noncitizen residents to vote in local elections this year. Why did you support these towns’ change when they came up in the legislature?

Yes, I absolutely supported that. I was chair of the Government Operations Committee when those charter changes from two municipalities came to our committee. I was surprised at first, but as we explored with constitutional scholars and historians, we realized that there is in fact precedent in Vermont history for noncitizen residents to be able to participate in an election, and that there is no prohibition against a community wanting to allow noncitizens to vote in their own municipal elections. We heard from these communities about why they thought it was important to be able to welcome people into the democratic franchise at the local level, sometimes as a transition or step to full citizenship, and other times as a recognition that somebody who is a resident is a longtime participant in the community.

There’s also the debate over the voting age, with one Vermont town trying this year to lower it to 16 in local elections. Do you support such efforts?

We considered that proposal from Brattleboro at the same time that we were considering the proposals on noncitizen voting. Brattleboro had an overwhelmingly supportive local vote to extend the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds, and we felt it was important to honor that wish. Unfortunately, the governor of Vermont, despite the House and Senate approval of the charter change, vetoed the bill, and we were unable to override the governor’s veto. 

I certainly would support other communities pursuing this. I think it’s up to the local community, whether they feel that works for them. I think the advantages lie in helping people understand democracy: What a great way to have relevant school lessons then when young people are going to actually be able to go out and vote.

Vermont recently adopted universal vote-by-mail, a move you supported, which means that anyone who is registered gets a ballot. The right has fought mail voting. Why do you support expanding it?  

That convenience factor for someone who is a single parent, or someone working two jobs, or someone who lives in one community but works in another. There are so many, many barriers to people being able to participate on Election Day. But the other thing is that, when you pick up a ballot on Election Day and you have three to five minutes with your ballot, it’s really hard to be able to figure out who you want to vote for. I think it really empowers people to be able to do a little bit more discerning of the candidates when they have the ability to do that at their kitchen table before the election.

The post Vermont Secretary of State Candidate Looks to Expand Ballot Access, but First She Faces an Election Denier appeared first on Bolts.

Patterson remembers that he was watching TV when news broke that the election was called for Obama. “All I could really think was I really wish that I could go out so I could vote for him.”

In recent years, Patterson has pushed for changes to prevent jails from disenfranchising other incarcerated people who remain eligible to vote but are routinely denied access. His advocacy alongside other Massachusetts organizers eventually proved successful. The Democratic legislature adopted provisions this spring expanding ballot access in jails as part of a larger voting rights bill, dubbed the VOTES Act, that Republican Governor Charlie Baker signed into law in late June. 

Under the VOTES Act, the secretary of the commonwealth, who is the state’s chief elections officer, must prepare posters explaining voting rights and procedures for jail officials to “display in prominent locations” inside their facilities, as well as written forms to distribute to everyone inside who may be eligible to vote. The law also directs jails to “ensure the receipt, private voting, where possible, and return of mail ballots” for incarcerated people and prohibits jail staff from opening and inspecting any completed mail ballots “unless it is to investigate reasonable suspicion of a prohibited activity.” It also requires sheriffs to track the number of people incarcerated in their jails who sought to vote, any complaints related to voting issues and the outcome of those requests. 

“I think this bill does an excellent job reaching into those who have been forgotten in voting and it gives them the ability to have their voices be heard,” Patterson told Bolts.

Massachusetts formally disenfranchises people while they are in prison if they have been convicted of a felony. Other residents remain eligible to vote, at least on paper, including if they are in jail. The average daily jail admission rate in Massachusetts is 10,228, according to 2019 data from the Prison Policy Initiative. Around 5,000 people jailed in the state on any given day are awaiting trial; numerous court decisions upholding the voting rights of pretrial detainees, who are legally innocent. Others in jail are serving misdemeanor convictions. 

Yet in practice, incarcerated people who are eligible to vote face numerous barriers to exercising that right, from difficulties obtaining mail ballots to mailing them and ensuring that they are counted. Advocates claim some election officials have even wrongly thrown out ballots coming from jails. 

“One thing we realized is that a lot of local officials don’t understand the law that people in jails could vote,” Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, executive director of MassVOTE, told Bolts. “In the past, local election officials would reject ballots coming from jails.”

“We see that people are constitutionally denied the right to vote for felony convictions,” said Austin Frizzell, an organizer at Mass POWER. “Yet we also see that people who do have the right to vote are also denied that right. The similarities behind these populations is that they are predominantly Black people and people of color.”

Katie Talbot, an organizer for Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts Action Fund, says that widespread misinformation and confusion over who can vote also prevents people in pretrial detention from understanding their own rights. “I was formerly incarcerated and I could speak to personal experience that when I was in jail I knew nothing about when elections were happening and what’s the process to vote,” Talbot said. 

Policies around jail voting, or lack thereof, vary in large part because jails are typically run by each county’s elected sheriff. Advocates who took part in past jail outreach efforts in Massachusetts pointed to the Bristol County Jail and the House of Corrections as an example of barriers to voting that incarcerated people face. Kristina Mensik, a policy consultant and co-chair of the Democracy Behind Bars Coalition said the sheriff’s office would not provide advocates with information on procedures around voting in lockup and the handling of absentee ballots. James Vita, a local defense attorney, told Bolts that the jail’s mail room is often so slow it’s hard to make deadlines for forms and ballots, saying, “Unless election officials make every jail a polling place that would be a problem.” 

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, who is seeking re-election this year, declined to be interviewed for this story, but his office told Bolts that it hasn’t received any complaints about voting access from people in the jail. 

Hodgson, who was first elected in 1998, has faced other criticism over poor conditions at the jail he runs, including spate of detainee suicides on his watch and a hunger strike by immigrant detainees. In 2021, federal immigration authorities ended their contract to house detainees in Bristol County after a scathing report by the state’s attorney general finding that Hodgson and his staff violated the civil rights of detainees during a violent confrontation the year before. 

Hodgson, a Republican, has run unopposed in every election since 2010, but three Democrats are running to replace him this year. 

Elizabeth Matos, the executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Service of Massachusetts, says confusion and misinformation among jail staff prevents eligible voters from casting a ballot. Matos said that when looking into voting policies and procedures at the Middlesex County jail, “We interviewed people who worked there about what they do and there was definitely some misinformation and confusion about who has access or should have access to the ballot and who is entitled to vote.”

While the VOTES Act didn’t require Massachusetts officials to create polling places behind bars, advocates for expanding voting access to incarcerated people say the legislation ultimately included much of what they wanted. The African American Coalition Committee at MCI-Norfolk, an organization that Patterson joined in 2018, drafted jail-based voting legislation and eventually found an ally in state Representative Russell Holmes, a Democrat who represents parts of Boston, and who in 2021 helped introduce multiple bills to expand voting access jails.

This year, the jail voting bills were folded into the larger VOTES Act, which also contains measures to promote public awareness of Election Day voter registration, permanent voting by mail, and increased early voting access. The law also requires Massachusetts to join the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national organization that helps states maintain accurate voter rolls and is now the target of right-wing conspiracies. 

Pastor Franklin Hobbs, the founder and CEO of Healing Our Land Inc. Ministry, says advocates plan to build on the jail-related provisions of the VOTES Act, such as pushing for a ballot box initiative, which was to provide timely receipt and return of mail-in ballots and secure drop boxes in the jail. “I think this legislation would bring awareness to the rights that people in jail have when it comes to voting as well as providing forms and reporting who would be eligible to vote,” he said. 

Mensik said that while not everything that advocates wanted was in the final draft of the bill, it had “most of what we had asked for and lobbied for.” For instance, the Democracy Behind Bars Coalition wanted language clearly stating that unhoused people in jail can use their jail address on absentee ballots, which could impact a significant number of eligible voters in county lockup. According to a 2020 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, homelessness is 7.5 to 11.3 times more common among people in jail than on the outside. Advocates also wanted the bill to require that sheriffs track information on jail voting related to race and ethnicity, which didn’t make it into the final draft.

Chris Robarge, an organizer with the Massachusetts Bail Fund, pointed to other barriers to voting in jail that he says won’t be resolved when the VOTES Act takes effect. He cited language in the state’s absentee ballot application warning of potential criminal penalties for people who submit one but are not eligible to vote—which might especially frighten someone who is incarcerated and has little access to outside information. 

And perhaps most importantly, the law won’t go into effect until January 1, 2023, two months after the midterm elections. 

“We had wanted them to be implemented as emergency provisions so they would be in place in time for fall primaries,” Mensik said. “So we will just do our jail-based voting organizing and call on everyone to do the things the bill required so we could ensure access this fall.”

Carol Doherty, a member of the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Election Laws, said the law wasn’t set to take effect in time for this year’s primaries because local election officials “need time to gear up that implementation, and in my opinion the state needs to provide resources and training to local election officials in terms of implementation.”

Advocates say they’ll be closely watching whether sheriffs and election administrators comply with the law’s new safeguards for incarcerated voters in future elections. “Passing a bill is one thing but implementation is really where the rubber meets the road,” Mensik said. 

The post New Massachusetts Law Requires Jails to Expand Ballot Access appeared first on Bolts.

Ultimately, 70-year-old François Korber was less interested in how they voted than in how many cast a ballot. After spending fifteen years in prison himself and nearly a decade pushing to expand voting rights for incarcerated people, he celebrated the election as an “incredible success.” 

Barely 1,000 incarcerated people voted in the first round of the presidential election five years ago, but this month turnout among people in prison soared north of 12,500.

This extraordinary surge reflects years of successful advocacy to enable incarcerated people to exercise their voting rights in France. And while it falls short of Korber’s aspirations (most of the prison population of roughly 70,000 didn’t participate), it also offers a stark contrast with the United States. More than one million Americans are outright banned from voting while they are incarcerated—only Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. allow all incarcerated people to vote —and millions more have not regained this right even after leaving prison. Even Americans who retain their voting rights while detained are routinely denied ballots.

Korber is one of the central players involved in the French push. A founding member of Robin des Lois, a small non-profit organization focused on the rights of incarcerated people in France, he has devoted himself to the cause of voting rights since 2014. It’s around that time that he met Jean-Christophe Ménard, a lawyer who convinced him much could be done to expand voting within the country’s existing law.

“You don’t need to change the law, you just need to apply it,” he recalls Ménard telling him. “And that’s been the guiding principle up until today.” 

On paper, incarcerated French nationals have been able to vote since 1994, the year authorities adopted a new penal code and tossed out a set of Napoleonic-era rules that had barred most people convicted of crimes from exercising civic rights. Today, only a small minority of the country’s prisoners are stripped of their voting rights—political officials who have misused their power and convicted terrorists. 

And yet, in practice, voting rights have remained difficult to exercise from prison, even for those who are eligible. Until a few years ago, incarcerated people could not vote in person at the prison or cast a ballot by mail. They had to either file a formal request for temporary furlough to leave the prison and head to the polls, or authorize someone else to vote in their place. While voting by proxy is a common electoral process in France, the procedure can be a headache to organize from prison, requiring paperwork and the collaboration of someone who votes in the same town as the person making the request. A tiny share of incarcerated people were able to overcome those barriers to vote in past elections. 

It was against this backdrop that Korber’s group went on the offensive. In 2016, they filed a formal request with the nation’s police prefects, asking them to install full-fledged voting booths in prisons, treating them like any other precinct. When—as expected—the prefects rejected their demand, the group filed an appeal and held a press conference at the National Assembly, enlisting the support of Sergio Coronado, then a national representative with Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), one of the country’s leading center-left parties.

The cause garnered increased attention and eventually caught the eye of France’s newly-elected president. In March 2018, Emmanuel Macron addressed a crowd at the national academy for officials in the penitentiary system, and endorsed the push to improve ballot access for incarcerated people. 

“I’ll be very honest with you,” Macron said in a speech that quickly attracted the ire of far-right commentators. “[People] have tried to explain why people in prison can’t vote. I don’t understand it.” 

The following year, French legislators approved measures that allowed prison authorities to organize in-person voting procedures. On election days, people can now vote in polling locations set up within prisons. 

This upheaval took effect just in time for the 2019 elections for European Parliament. Turnout from prison quadrupled compared to the presidential election two years earlier, with roughly  4,400 incarcerated people taking part using the new procedure. “I had tears in my eyes,” says Korber, who witnessed the vote count in person at the Justice Ministry. “We saw all these ballots coming in—maybe this person screwed up, maybe they didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. It was extremely moving.” Turnout surged even further in the presidential race this month.

Despite this recent progress, there are still serious obstacles to participating in elections from prison. 

According to the French section of the International Prison Observatory (OIP), an organization that advocates for improved prison conditions and the rights of incarcerated people, 489 ballots cast in the first round of the presidential election were not tallied. That’s about 4 percent of all votes. The OIP pinned much of the blame on officials in certain prisons who failed to send documentation to ballot counters verifying the identities of incarcerated voters; the organization also alleged one envelope containing votes was lost in transit.

To reduce the risk of such bureaucratic mishaps, the OIP wants French prisons to set up fully-fledged voting stations with on-the-spot ballot counting, as exists in Denmark and Poland, and make a prison into a regular election precinct. Instead, under the new election procedures, ballots are pooled together, sent to one centralized location outside the prison as if they were mail-in ballots, and counted there. (For the presidential election, they were all sent to Paris; in last year’s regional elections, they were pooled in the administrative capital of each département where a prison was located.) 

Moreover, under the most recent law, authorities aren’t explicitly required to organize in-person voting for every election. The national government must issue an executive decree that provides for the law’s implementation—and it did not do so for the 2020 municipal elections. 

This decision once again barred incarcerated people from voting any other way than by proxy or furlough. Prison officials claimed it would be too complicated to use this expanded system for local elections, due to the technical difficulties of linking up each voter to their previous town of residence. Korber denounced that cancellation. “You need to be a democrat to the end,” he says. “If you recognize the full exercise of this right to vote, then you need to acknowledge, yes, it can impact votes for city council… This is democracy.”

Korber and his NGO are still pressing their legal case to solidify voting protections, so that the right to vote is not subject to the whims of the French bureaucracy. Their case is now pending in the State Council, the country’s highest court on disputes over administrative law. 

If the State Council rules against them, Korber says, they could appeal further to the European Court of Human Rights or demand new changes from the Parliament. According to case law at the European Court of Human Rights, voting rights are presumed to extend to most incarcerated people, though certain countries like Estonia, Bulgaria, and the UK have been particularly resistant to applying decisions on the topic over the years. Overseeing the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR has broad jurisdiction over 46 member states, though it lacks enforcement powers and certain national courts are considered to be more compliant with its rulings than others. 

Still, in the end, Korber is happy about what they’ve achieved in France. 

“Imagine what it means for someone who is in prison to leave their cell and drop their ballot in the ballot box, it’s priceless,” he told Bolts. “It’s a drop of water in the bucket of what needs to be done to improve our prisons, but it’s important.”

The post In French Presidential Election, Thousands More Vote from Prison appeared first on Bolts.

But that victory proved short-lived. Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the named defendant in the lawsuit, appealed to overturn the ruling. A federal appeals court agreed in 2020, saying that voters in jail are “no more burdened than any other elector” facing unforeseen complications—similar, the court said, to someone who leaves town unexpectedly to attend a funeral.

Danielle Lang, an attorney with Campaign Legal Center who helped bring the lawsuit, says she was dismayed by LaRose’s decision to appeal. “These are folks that we know are eligible voters that the state is physically restraining from going to the polling place and voting, and they’re also not providing any alternative,” she told Bolts. “I find that appalling.” 

Today, LaRose is running for a second term as secretary of state, but his profile in this campaign has been markedly different. Facing a far-right challenger who peddles conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, LaRose is getting cast as a bulwark of democracy.

John Adams, a former state lawmaker running against LaRose in the Republican primary scheduled for May, avidly repeats the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump. “Everybody knows after the last election last year that we got robbed,” Adams says in a video on his campaign website. “We got robbed and the Republican Party did little if anything to fight back… That’s why I’ve decided to run.” Adams has also taken to calling LaRose a “never Trumper.”

LaRose pushed back against efforts by Trump’s closest allies to discredit voting machines and decertify election results after the 2020 presidential election, as reported by The Washington Post. So far the script writes itself: Trump’s forces are coming for yet another Republican who dared stand up to the former president. 

But LaRose has himself repeatedly clashed with voting rights groups. In 2020, he imitated other Republicans like Texas Governor Greg Abbott in limiting the availability of dropboxes across Ohio, making mail-in voting tougher during the pandemic.

Since then, LaRose has gone further in embracing the premises of the Big Lie. “President Trump is right to say voter fraud is a serious problem,” he wrote last month in a Twitter thread that also attacked the “mainstream media” for “trying to minimize voter fraud.” LaRose’s office declined to comment for this story. 

As the politics of the Big Lie continue to capture a large swath of the GOP and threaten the health of American democracy, the record of establishment Republicans like LaRose may get overlooked by comparison. But voting rights advocates caution that state officials were already weakening democracy in Ohio before Trump and his followers’ efforts exacerbated that trend. And they have continued to further anti-voter policies on their own. 

On Tuesday, Governor Mike DeWine, a longtime fixture in Ohio’s GOP politics, appointed a former lawmaker who has amplified false claims about a stolen election to the state’s elections board. And given LaRose’s past policies and his slide into Trumpish rhetoric on voter fraud, barriers to expanding ballot access will persist regardless of who wins the May 3 secretary of state primary. Ohioans in jail who are eligible to vote will still have difficulty voting.

Ohio’s secretary of state is a powerful office. It oversees broad election administration decisions across the state’s 88 counties, responds to lawsuits, and serves as a tiebreaker in the rare case when bipartisan county election boards deadlock.  LaRose also sits on Ohio’s redistricting commission, which this year has failed to advance new maps after the Ohio Supreme Court struck down previous Republican gerrymanders as unconstitutional.

LaRose is now favored to win re-election and keep those powers for the next four years. He had about $1.8 million campaign cash on hand as of January, according to his most recent campaign finance report, and he secured the endorsement of the Ohio Republican Party. Adams, on the other hand, had about $41,000 to spend. In an age of anti-incumbent fervor, no primary candidate should be counted out, especially if Adams draws more support from conservative groups, but he has yet to catch fire or land Trump’s endorsement. 

The sole Democratic candidate, Chelsea Clark, is a Forest Park city councilmember who is running on strengthening access to the ballot with measures like automatic voter registration. Democrats last won the secretary of state’s office in 2006, and the party faces a tough cycle across the country in a historically difficult mid-term year. In the 2018 general election, LaRose prevailed by four percentage points against Democrat Kathleen Clyde, who ran on a similar platform.

When LaRose began his term in 2019, then-Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper hoped to build a constructive relationship with him. So he invited LaRose to a forum to speak with Democrats about election administration issues. But Pepper told Bolts the relationship soon began to sour as LaRose backpedaled on early promises. 

“He wants to brand himself as ‘aw shucks I’m good for the voters’ but at every turn he does what the far right of the [Republican] party wants him to do,” said Pepper, who has since left his role as head of the state party. “He is, in many ways, more dangerous than the wide-eyed conspiracy theorists, because he’ll do what they want him to do, but he’ll dress it up like it’s more legitimate.”

Pepper’s distrust of LaRose stems in particular from the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, when LaRose sided with Trump’s crusade against voting by mail. With voters likely to rely on mail-in ballots in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, voting and civil rights groups wanted more dropboxes placed around the state to help them, especially given the fears about the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to handle the influx. 

But LaRose limited each county to no more than one dropbox location. A county of more than 1.3 million residents would have as many dropbox sites as one of  13,000 people.

Initially, LaRose said that state law gave him no other option, but that he could order more dropboxes if a court blessed his authority to do so. “We’ll follow what the court says,” LaRose’s attorney told a federal judge, according to a Talking Points Memo story. “If it’s legal to add extra dropboxes, then I’m certainly open to the idea,” LaRose had previously said, according to the Statehouse News Bureau.

So when a state court said that LaRose could not prevent counties from adding more dropboxes, calling restrictions “arbitrary and unreasonable,” voting rights groups celebrated. “We were expecting he would champion [dropboxes] after the court said he had the opportunity to champion it,” Kayla Griffin, the Ohio State Director of All Voting is Local, told Bolts. “Instead, he took a hard-nosed stand to oppose it.”

LaRose appealed the ruling. Even after an appeals court confirmed that he had the authority to expand access to dropboxes, but was not required to, LaRose doubled down. He directed counties to set up dropboxes at the sole location of the county board, and fought in court to shield his decision.

Voting rights advocates say that LaRose’s policy was disproportionately harmful in Ohio’s most populous counties, which have a higher share of Black residents. In the fall of 2020, LaRose blocked a plan by the board of elections of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) to establish seven dropbox locations—a plan that had even earned the unanimous support of the board’s Republican members, in a county of more than one million people. 

Expanding access to the ballot would also benefit voters in the state’s more rural areas. “I was hearing from people who were in predominantly red communities that said it would be so much more beneficial if they could put a dropbox on the outer lines of their counties,” Griffin said. 

ProPublica reported that, during the controversy, LaRose’s office was coordinating with Hans von Spakovsky, the Heritage Foundation fellow whose claims about widespread illegal voting have been debunked in court and by experts. Von Spakovsky and other conservatives serve as consultants on election administration policy in many red states.

Catherine Turcer, a longtime voting rights advocate and the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, praises the state’s model for administering elections, which she calls “Noah’s Ark.” Each county’s board of elections has two Republicans and two Democrats, who are nominated by local political parties and are affirmed or rejected by the secretary of state. They work side by side to adjudicate ballots, decide on voter outreach, allocate dollars toward voter machines and other shared decisions. There is also always at least one Democrat and one Republican at polls or tabulating ballots.

Turcer said LaRose earned plaudits when he asked elections officials to get verified on social media so voters could trust what they post. 

Allegations of voter fraud are “vanishingly rare,” she said.

But for years now, Ohio Republicans have trumpeted claims of voter fraud like von Spakovsky’s to change election laws and to restrict options for both voters and election administrators.

In 2011, the GOP-led General Assembly passed a strict voter ID law. In 2014, they made it likelier a mail-in or provisional ballot would be rejected over minor errors, like a spelling mistake or a missing digit on a social security number. In 2016, they reduced the early voting period by a week and eliminated the so-called “Golden Week,” when voters could register and vote at the same time. And last year, they adopted a law that prohibits elections officials from partnering with outside groups. 

That law is ostensibly meant to block election administrators from accepting outside funding: In 2020, LaRose and strapped local election boards accepted grants from a foundation associated with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to help run elections and secure equipment, angering conservatives. But there is also widespread concern that the law could ban more than outside donations. Election officials may be reticent to help voters or engage with outside groups with the threat of criminal prosecution looming over them. 

Griffin said her organization has worked with county officials in various places in the past to ensure disabled voters have access to the polls or help with education efforts. Those programs are now in doubt. “We’re on high alert,” she said.

When he jumped into the secretary of state race, Adams said that those 2020 grants were one of his main reasons. The far-right group Ohio Value Voters, which has drawn attention for running candidates for school boards in Ohio, also endorsed Adams over LaRose because of them.  

Adams is also running on making Ohio’s voter ID rules even more strict. If he wins, he would have the authority to issue key directives to local election administrators in the run-up to the 2024 elections, giving believers of the Big Lie one of their most powerful positions.

But many in Ohio are also nervously monitoring LaRose’s growing embrace of baseless rhetoric about widespread voter fraud. LaRose has “jumped foursquare on the fraud bandwagon,” the editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote in late February, in reference to his tweets siding with Trump, “despite the very low levels of wrongful voting consistently seen in Ohio.”

“He’s starting to repeat the conspiracy theories we’ve heard throughout the country,” Griffin said of LaRose. “It does make us wonder what the end game is.”

The post Slouching Toward the Big Lie in Ohio appeared first on Bolts.

This article is part of The Badge, a series on the powers of sheriffs.

On any given Election Day, roughly 700,000 people are detained in jails across the country. A disproportionate number are Black. On paper, most of the people held in county jails are eligible to vote because they have not been convicted of a felony—most are being held awaiting trial or are serving sentences for misdemeanor convictions. 

But being detained compounds other forms of voter suppression that target Black voters. And sheriffs, who oversee most of the nation’s jails, have a lot of power in determining whether people in their custody will have access to registration and ballot materials.

Early this year, before the coronavirus forced the jail to close to visitors, the sheriff of DeKalb County, Georgia, partnered with the local chapter of the NAACP to host a voter-registration drive in the county jail. Throughout the day, 38 incarcerated people filled out applications and became registered voters. 

“It is important that every citizen who has the right to vote also has a chance to exercise that right,” DeKalb Sheriff Melody Maddox said in a statement about the drive. “Many incarcerated individuals don’t realize that they can still cast absentee ballots in elections while they are in custody, but they must first be registered voters.”

In neighboring Gwinnett County, though, Sheriff Butch Conway was taking a vastly different approach. The day after the registration drive in DeKalb County, the Gwinnett County Jail administrator reminded the jail staff that all prisoners who have not been convicted of a felony are eligible to vote and are entitled to request applications from jail staff. But in an email obtained by American Oversight and shared with the Political Report, the sheriff’s captain told the office’s staff that “it is the voter’s responsibility to ask for the opportunity to vote in the 2020 election cycle.” 

“We do NOT need to make any special announcements,” Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Captain Jon Spear said in a later email in bolded, underlined text.   

These contrasting policies illustrate the power sheriffs have over voting rights. The decisions of thousands of individual sheriffs across the country will determine how easy it will be for people held in the nation’s jails to cast a ballot in November and beyond.

While those in jail are largely eligible to vote, in practice, incarcerated people are often cut off from information and resources they need in order to register to vote and cast a ballot, a situation advocates call de facto disenfranchisement. These jails are typically run by county sheriffs—or in some places, county-appointed administrators or boards who run the jails—who play a critical role in compounding, or alleviating, these hurdles. 

“Sheriffs are of paramount importance to providing incarcerated, eligible voters access to the ballot,” said Dana Paikowsky, a fellow at the Campaign Legal Center whose work focuses on expanding opportunities for voting in jails. “There’s a spectrum of what the sheriff can do, and it can be making it everything from very accessible to completely impossible.”

And when the sheriffs themselves are running for office, they might have an extra incentive to exert control over the voting rights of people in their custody. “The system is pretty wild when the sheriff, who is on the ballot, is up for re-election, and the people who can re-elect him are people who he has a profound control over whether they can take part of that process,” she said. 

The most straightforward way to protect against disenfranchisement in jails is to reduce jail populations—and sheriffs directly influence this as well. 

They can adopt policies to avoid arresting and booking people in jail—as an earlier edition of The Badge, the Political Report’s series on the roles of sheriffs, explained. They can also advocate for shrinking pretrial detention, as The Badge has also laid out; some even have direct authority to order pretrial releases.

Ultimately, they are given tremendous discretion over what happens to people’s voting rights while they are in jail. This edition of The Badge dives into what they have been doing with this authority.

What happens when a sheriff makes it difficult for incarcerated people to vote?

By requiring that incarcerated people proactively ask for voter registration materials in Gwinnett County, Conway is not formally blocking jailed people from voting. But the effect of his actions is to depress electoral participation. Studies show that voters are more likely to cast ballots if they receive some kind of voter contact, and that’s also true in jails.

Often, outside volunteer groups or election officials come into jails to make that contact with the people detained there. But a sheriff who is unwilling to work with outside groups or who does not proactively seek them out can be an insurmountable obstacle. 

“When you’re in jail, your access to the ballot depends on third parties having the time and willingness and knowledge to provide you with the resources you need to cast a ballot, whether it’s an application form, election information, even things as simple as an envelope and a stamp,” Paikowsky said. “The list of people who can provide you that stuff is finite. It’s the local election official, it’s a volunteer group, it’s a family member.” 

“But all of those people cannot get access to you to provide you that support if the sheriff doesn’t let them,” she added.

Sheriffs commonly prevent voting rights groups from talking to or contacting people detained in their jails. In the run-up to the 2018 midterms, the infamous Orange County sheriff’s department prevented organizers with the ACLU of Southern California’s Unlock the Vote program from entering the jail. 

An analysis of the 2018 election conducted by the ACLU of Ohio and other nonprofits found that in jails with no direct contact between detainees and volunteers, the turnout rate was much lower than in jails where sheriffs authorized such communication. 

In Franklin County (Ohio’s most populous county and home to Columbus), for instance, volunteer outreach was limited to simply dropping off registration and absentee ballot request forms because of opposition from the sheriff to volunteer efforts, according to Mike Brickner, who previously served as Ohio state director of All Voting Is Local. There were only four requests for voter registration forms in that jail, which typically holds over 1,500 people each day. 

By contrast, in Cuyahoga and Lake Counties, the sheriffs allowed volunteer groups inside to talk to detainees. In the Cuyahoga County Jail (Cleveland), hundreds of people requested ballots, and the eventual voter turnout rate was 79 percent. In Lake County, volunteers helped 77 incarcerated people complete voter registration or absentee ballot request forms, and 48 of them successfully cast ballots for a turnout rate of 62 percent.

Some states require sheriffs to at least assist election officials in delivering registration forms and ballots to jails. For example, the Colorado secretary of state in 2019 mandated that the state’s 64 sheriffs coordinate with county clerks. Arizona officials enacted a similar rule in 2019, according to the Sentencing Project.

But often, those requirements aren’t enough. In July, the Arizona Coalition to End Jail-Based Disenfranchisement surveyed the state’s counties on voter access in their jails, and sounded the alarm on sheriff compliance. In Maricopa County (Phoenix), the coalition said it has spent significant time with the county recorder’s office to develop jail voting procedures and educational resources, but the office of Sheriff Paul Penzone has declined to implement the procedures or use the materials. According to The Intercept, Penzone’s office told the coalition that it would not be able to turn around a jail voting plan “on such short notice” before the 2020 presidential primary, but advocates claim they had been in conversations for months. 

Penzone’s office told The Appeal in an email that “MCSO always has and will continue our support of those who wish to exercise their constitutional right to take part in the election process.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has further empowered sheriffs to control people’s voting rights, since many of the outside groups that typically go into jails to help with registration and voting efforts are now prohibited from entering. As a result, voting rights organizations, including the Campaign Legal Center, are sending memos to sheriffs reminding them of their constitutional obligation to ensure that eligible voters can cast ballots. “In the short term,” they write in one of the memos, “your jail staff may have to shoulder more of the responsibility for facilitating voting in jail internally.”

With the pandemic likely to continue through the presidential election, advocates worry that uncooperative sheriffs will end up disenfranchising potential voters—even more so than usual. 

What does it look like when they actively work to make it easier?

First elected in 2016, Harris County (Houston) Sheriff Ed Gonzalez has been supportive of Houston Justice’s Project Orange, which mobilizes volunteers to go into jails to facilitate voter registration, and he has encouraged people in his jail to register to vote and cast ballots. 

“I’ve always fundamentally believed that we need to do more to empower individuals and uplift them while they make their temporary home in our Harris County jail,” he told the Political Report. “Nothing is as fundamental to them as being able to cast their vote.” 

Gonzalez has also denounced the county’s unconstitutional bail system, which has ballooned the jail population. A legal settlement reached in 2019, and which Gonzalez backed, unlike the county’s district attorney, will significantly lower pretrial detention and the number of people in jail during an election in the first place.

Other sheriffs have taken similar steps. In Henrico County, Virginia, the sheriff’s office works with outside volunteer groups to register detainees. BeKura Shabazz, a local criminal justice reform advocate who got involved in those efforts after she spent time in the county jail, told the Political Report that Sheriff Alisa Gregory has been very cooperative.

“If sheriffs are not wanting to participate in this, I think we need to look deeper into their reason why, because that means there could be some type of discrimination,” she said. 

In 2019, a new law adopted by Illinois set a milestone for sheriffs nationwide to emulate. 

It forced Cook County (Chicago) to provide in-person voting options at its local jail. As a result, in the March 2020 primary, the Cook County Jail (the nation’s second largest) became an official polling location. Sheriff Tom Dart, who supported the effort, has also worked with Chicago public television to air short videos inside the jail to inform voters about candidates’ positions. 

Chiraag Bains, director of legal strategies at Demos, said that turning jails into polling places is a good way to ensure that people can vote because it cuts down on the burdensome process of having detained people request and receive absentee ballots. 

“It’s a solution that should spread across the country,” he said. 

Now, other sheriffs are facing questions about whether they, too, will turn their county jails into voting centers.

A proposal in Houston hit a roadblock when the former county clerk raised concerns and delayed implementation, but Gonzalez says he is confident that the proposal will be successful, if not before November, then before the next election cycle. “We expect for it to happen and we hope to become one of the models around the country to do it and to advocate for it,” he said. “We think it’s the right thing to do.” 

In some jurisdictions, sheriffs are also helping to facilitate candidate forums inside their jails. In 2018, the Suffolk County House of Correction held a district attorney forum, hosted by the sheriff’s department and the local chapter of the ACLU. 

Ensuring that fewer people spend any time in jail would make efforts to facilitate voting in these facilities less important. But until that happens, voting advocates want sheriffs to stop withholding voting rights and restricting the electorate. 

“They’re poor people … they’re people of color, they’re people from certain communities,” said Durrel Douglas, executive director of Houston Justice, which runs Project Orange. “If anyone deserves access to the ballot, it’s those who have been impacted the most by society.” 

The post Sheriffs Have A Lot Of Power Over Whether Hundreds Of Thousands Of People Can Vote appeared first on Bolts.