“I never once saw a piece of paper, or a sign,” Pickens told Bolts. Sometimes he’d talk about the election with others detained alongside him, he said, but though adults held in Oregon jails are technically eligible to vote, “nobody else had any idea of how to get it done.”

Pickens was later convicted and transferred to the state prison system. His two-decade term there coincided with yet another major reform to election administration in Oregon: In 2015, the state kickstarted what would become a nationwide shift to automatic voter registration. But this move to make elections more inclusive again did not touch Pickens; like other Oregonians in prison over a felony, he’d lost his right to vote. 

Pickens regained that right when he was released but he was dismayed to find that formerly incarcerated people he encountered rarely knew that they also could vote. In 2022, his first full year out of prison, Oregon led the country in voter turnout. It didn’t feel that way in his circles.

“The lack of education is extensive,” Pickens said. “The people who have the knowledge and the power about voting really aren’t making it as available as they could.”

Pickens’ friend Sterling Cunio, who was detained at the same prison and also let out in 2021, echoed that sentiment, telling Bolts, “When we were inside, the only way we knew that we had our rights restored once we got out is because the prisoner population was educating each other.” Young adults, people living in poverty, and Native Americans, among other groups, also experience lower turnout and less access. “Oregon can say, ‘Hey, yeah, everything is great,’ but I want to see effort to engage, to educate all underserved populations in voting,” Cunio said. 

Even a state with a reputation for generally excellent voter services always has room to improve, their testimonials stressed. 

That is not lost on the leading Democratic candidates to be Oregon’s next chief elections official. 

James Manning, a state senator, and Tobias Read, Oregon’s treasurer and a 2022 candidate for governor, each told Bolts that they believe the state can do more to encourage participation and broaden voter access.

But they also offered different priorities and visions for what needs fixing. In his interview with Bolts, Manning emphasized the urgency of reversing the restrictions and structural neglect that keep some at the margins, including by ending the ban on people voting from prison. He talks of lingering exclusions as stains on democracy, stemming from a history of racism that Oregon should immediately confront.

Read feels the state should focus on fine-tuning the mechanics of Oregon’s existing systems before considering an idea, like voting from prison, that may be more divisive. His priorities, he said, include ironing out Oregon’s universal mail voting and automatic registration laws to address ways in which they may be tripping up the people that they’re meant to help.

Read, who has a fundraising lead and more endorsements from the state’s Democratic establishment, will face Manning in the May 21 Democratic primary. Also in the running are James Crary, Paul Damian Wells, and Dave Stauffer, candidates who have never held state-level office and have raised almost no money. 

The Democratic nominee will move on to face the winner of a three-way Republican contest in November. Oregon rarely elects Republicans in statewide races, though general elections are often competitive. The victor will replace LaVonne Griffin-Valade, who came into the role last summer after Democrat Shemia Fagan resigned in scandal. Griffin-Valade is not seeking a full term.

The next secretary of state will inherit a vast bureaucracy with which to tackle stubborn participation gaps. They’ll have a significant bully pulpit from which to push for change. 

They’ll also be first in line to replace the governor in the event of a vacancy. That’s how Kate Brown, who served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2015, entered the governor’s mansion in 2015; her predecessor there, John Kitzhaber, resigned—also in scandal—just a month into his fourth term. 

Recalling her own work laying the foundation for automatic voter registration, a program she backed as secretary of state and then signed into law as governor, Brown told Bolts via email, “the next Secretary is going to have to be willing to take risks, innovative, and strategic.”

“What actions can the Secretary take that will create the greatest amount of good (in this case access) for the most number of folks?” added Brown, who has not endorsed in this race.

Manning says the work of strengthening democracy is something he takes “personally.” The lawmaker, who is Black, told Bolts, “Let’s go back over history. We know during Jim Crow and even before that, people that look like me had to fight for the right to vote.”

Since joining the Senate in 2016, Manning has sponsored a bevy of legislation to grow the state’s voter rolls, often tailoring bills to groups that are less likely to be registered—if not explicitly barred. 

Last year, he sponsored a bill to expand the scope of the state’s automatic voter registration program. As adopted in 2015, the program applies to people who are getting or renewing a driver’s license; it left out people who don’t interact with the state’s DMV. The reform he carried, which became law last year but cannot be implemented without the federal government’s approval, would automatically register people when they interact with Medicaid offices. 

State data indicate that 85 percent of eligible residents who are unregistered to vote are Medicaid recipients, meaning that they are necessarily among the poorest people in Oregon. 

Manning this year unsuccessfully pushed separate legislation to implement automatic voter registration on college campuses. In 2019, he sponsored a successful effort to have Oregon cover the cost of postage on mail ballots. 

He is also a rare politician who has made it a cause to give the right to vote to any citizens regardless of a criminal conviction, including while they’re incarcerated. He’s a lead sponsor of legislation to enfranchise state prisoners. In the U.S., only Maine, Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., allow everyone to vote from prison, though this is more common in other countries. 

“I think that every American, regardless of if they have been rehabilitated or if they are serving time, still are American citizens,” he said. “Democracy is something we should all engage in, and we have to allow people to participate.”

It’s a change Manning says can’t come soon enough: “At some point we are going to deal with the inhumanity of all of these years of what incarceration has cost us,” he said.

But the legislation on voting from prison has repeatedly fizzled at the committee stage. Some fellow Democrats have sided with Republicans to say that it goes too far, too quickly, and could cost too much money to implement. 

Read, Manning’s opponent in May, is among those Democrats who believe Oregon should not at this time consider restoring voting rights to people in prison. He told Bolts that he isn’t convinced that people convicted of certain crimes deserve to vote. “Does someone who’s convicted of identity theft get treated the same as another crime? Someone who is convicted of murder? I think the nature of the crime might be part of the conversation,” he said.

In any event, Read continued, now is not the right time to have that conversation. Instead, he said, the state should focus on activating people whose rights are already restored, pointing to persistently low outreach and participation among people with past convictions; this is a widespread problem around the country, as Bolts has reported in Kentucky and Michigan.

“I think there is still quite a lot of work to do to make sure that people who are coming back into society know about their rights and are using them,” Read said. “If you’ve had your voting rights restored but didn’t know it, what difference does it make?”

Manning rejects the idea that Oregon can’t do both things at once. “I am honored to be able to bring those ideas that others may be afraid to, even though they know it’s right,” he told Bolts. “Somebody has to stand up, somebody has to be up front, and I accept that challenge.”

Manning often speaks highly of his own ability to shepherd such big changes. “I’m a visionary,” he said during a candidate debate earlier this month. “I think ahead. I see things that could be and then I implement those. I am result-oriented. There is no one like me.”

Several civil rights advocates in Oregon who support letting people vote from prison say they’ve been frustrated that the state is not prioritizing the reform. 

“Constantly being told this is ‘not the right time’ is only furthering the racist undertones of how we got to this position,” said Zach Winston, who used to be incarcerated and now works at the Oregon Justice Research Center. In Oregon, as elsewhere, felony disenfranchisement is a relic of 19th-century schemes to deprive people of color of all kinds of civil rights.

Added Winston, “Oregon has never shied away from leading on voting rights, which begs the question: Why not, on this? Do they actually value people who are in prison?” 

While Manning speaks in maximalist terms—he says he wants to get Oregon to at least 98 percent turnout—Read speaks the language of incremental change: “Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” he said. His rhetoric may be less lofty but he says he’ll pay proper attention to the weeds of a system that’s often anything but flashy.  

“That grinding, diligent implementation approach really matters,” he told Bolts, “to make sure it’s done well.”

In fleshing out his priorities, Read proposed a statewide program that would send people notifications when their ballots have been accepted and again when they’ve been counted. He described this move, which some other states have already made, as a way to bolster Oregon’s existing mail voting program, ensuring that those who are using the system can trust that their votes are being counted, and take action if something seems amiss. 

“The payoff may well be worth it, just because of the increased confidence people will feel,” he said.

Read also wants to advocate for a bill to give voters more time before elections to declare a party affiliation, as a way to close what he sees as a loophole in the state’s automatic voter registration system. When Oregon automatically registers people to vote, it does not assign them to any party, and so, Read worries, some voters find themselves locked out of the state’s closed party primaries by the time they want to participate. 

His proposals would require action by the legislature, but Read says he’d use his standing as secretary of state to promote them. 

Manning’s priorities would also demand changes in the law; matters like voting from prison cannot be unilaterally reformed by the secretary of state. He told Bolts that he has built strong relationships in the legislature that will enable him to pass his agenda. When asked about input he’s received from colleagues who oppose prison voting, though, he said, “I don’t know. I’ve not asked them. But I think it would be a good conversation.”

Neither candidate offered many specifics as to how they’d run the secretary of state’s office, and what new initiatives they want to put in place in areas that fall under its direct supervision. 

Read signaled more comfort with the status quo in the office. Three former secretaries of state have endorsed him.

When asked how he would shape the office budget, and how he would distribute resources to match his priorities, Read often deferred offering details. And when asked how his office would improve communications with various groups—including formerly incarcerated Oregonians, whose engagement he said he wanted to improve before debating voting from prison—he did not mention a particular program. He repeatedly said he’d want to first consult and partner with community leaders before proposing any fixes.

Manning, too, told Bolts that he could not offer specifics on some of his plans since he is not yet the secretary of state.

While he generally expressed discontent at the pace at which the state implements voting rights measures, he didn’t identify any instances of frustration when asked to elaborate. “Until I’ve been actually in and have the opportunity to conduct sessions with the staff of the secretary of state’s office and also all of our county elections officers, only then will I be able to make a clear assessment of what it is we can fix and how fast we can get it done,” he said.

The secretary of state has discretion to innovate with programs that can reach voters in new ways and make elections smoother, stressed Brown, the former secretary of state and governor. 

Brown said maximizing the position’s potential may come down to realpolitik skills. “Where do you have the votes? What are the costs and available resources?” She said she supports voting rights from prison, though she isn’t convinced that can pass. The next secretary, she said, will need to get creative and “to literally throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks in terms of reaching out to these important and diverse populations.” 

Others experienced in Oregon’s elections system also hope that the state can keep improving, whether with ambitious projects or administrative fixes. 

“There’s a general sense that Oregon has proudly been a leader in so many ways, but it is a laggard in others,” said Phil Keisling, the former Oregon secretary of state who championed vote-by-mail in the 1990s. 

He fired off a slew of improvements he’d like to see. For one, he said, the state should allocate funds to cover elections costs so that local offices don’t have to scrap with their county commissions for funding. And he wants counties to set up more physical voting centers, so people don’t have to travel long distances if they want to access in-person services. 

Keisling, who today advocates for mail voting nationwide as chair of the National Vote At Home Institute, has endorsed Read in this race, though he told Bolts he’ll make this case to whomever wins this year.  “Oregon has often pointed to where the future needs to go, and is often a testing bed for new ideas and new approaches to enfranchise people,” he said. “I’ll be pushing whoever gets the nomination to continue that tradition.”

Others much more removed from the halls of power in Oregon say they have trouble seeing how their state can purport to lead on voting rights so long as it continues to block from voting the roughly 12,000 people held in its prisons at any one time. Black and Native American Oregonians are most disproportionately affected by that practice, a situation fueled today by the large racial disparities in the state’s criminal legal system.

“Oregon has led the way with our democratic values, but continued disenfranchisement undermines the very legitimacy of our democracy in the state,” said Mariana Garcia Medina, a policy advocate at the ACLU of Oregon. She wants Oregon to move past its “history of anti-Blackness and white supremacy,” referencing an 1857 constitutional convention that set up felony disenfranchisement and a suite of other explicitly racist restrictions on civil rights. 

Pickens expects that advancing a reform as significant as prison voting rights will be difficult regardless of who wins. He says he has observed firsthand that Oregon’s reputation as an elections trendsetter belies frequent general indifference, and occasional hostility, toward the concept that every Oregonian should have a voice in democracy. 

“For the working-class white American that’s been voting their entire lives, I’d point exactly that out: you’ve been doing it your entire lives. For entire generations,” Pickens said. “We were set up to be excluded.”

The post In Oregon Primary, A Study In Contrasts on How to Strengthen Democracy appeared first on Bolts.

Enrique Rivera turned eighteen inside Oregon’s MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility during the 2000 presidential election. Rivera had never been very interested in politics, but his father had taught him to care about the planet, so he was interested in Al Gore’s candidacy from an environmentalist perspective. But when he asked the facility’s officials about the election, he said they told him that prisoners couldn’t vote. 

In prison, Rivera started to connect the dots between voting and the criminal legal policies that had determined his fate. He had been charged as an adult under Measure 11, a harsh mandatory minimum ballot initiative approved by voters just a few years earlier, in 1994. “I realized that I was now in this situation as a juvenile, being charged as an adult, because folks decided that that’s what they wanted to happen,” he recalled. “I wasn’t just born into these laws that existed since time immemorial—people decided these things. I wanted to be a person that could decide things.” 

Rivera got out in 2004, and he’s been voting ever since. Recently, he submitted a letter to the state legislature affirming his support for Senate Bill 579, a bill that would allow incarcerated Oregonians to vote. The bill, which is sponsored by Democratic Senator Floyd Prozanski and a broad coalition of voting rights and social justice organizations, is now on its third try after failing to even make it out of committee in the previous two legislative sessions. Last week, it advanced past its first committee this session.

If it passes, Oregon would join Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., in extending the right to vote to all voting-age citizens, including those who are incarcerated. Technically, this would make Oregon the first state to restore voting rights for people incarcerated with felonies after taking them away—Maine and Vermont never stripped people of the right to vote in the first place, and D.C., which adopted this reform in 2020, still isn’t a state—and proponents hope this propels a national movement forward.

The bill would extend the franchise to those with felony convictions among the nearly 15,000 people in the Oregon prison system, which incarcerates Black people at a rate significantly higher than their share of the state’s population. Oregon currently disenfranchises people who are incarcerated over a felony conviction, though people detained pretrial and with misdemeanors can vote, and it restores their voting rights upon their release. This bill would require ballots and other voting material to be sent to all registered voters at carceral facilities in Oregon, and people in prison would be considered registered at their last known address, meaning they would be able to weigh in on elections where they have family and community ties, rather than wherever their prison is situated. 

Oregon is known for being a leader on voting protections: the state has automatic voter registration and a universal vote-by-mail system, and has long allowed people with felony convictions who have finished serving their time to vote. This legislation represents perhaps the highest test of those commitments, and the public debate on the issue reveals a deep philosophical divide between those who believe voting is a fundamental right, and those who believe it is a privilege that can and should be taken away. 

The US constitution mentions the phrase “right to vote” a number of times, but that right has often been restricted and contingent on which populations were seen as deserving at any given time. Long after voting rights were extended to formerly enslaved men and women of all classes, the most durable example of disenfranchisement remains people in prison or with felony convictions. 

“Anything that infringes on a fundamental right like voting should draw strict scrutiny from the courts,” said Christopher Uggen, a sociologist and expert on felony disenfranchisement who teaches at the University of Minnesota. “That means we should look very skeptically at any attempts to restrict the franchise—but we have this big carve-out for people convicted of crimes, at least as interpreted by the Supreme Court in what’s been a durable precedent. It’s sort of saying, you know, it’s not quite a fundamental right—and especially not for these folks.”

Many states enacted felony disenfranchisement in response to the expansion of voting rights to Black people after the Civil War. “It is clear in the United States, it is tied to the threat of racial power relations being overturned or undermined or subverted in some way,” said Uggen. “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal,” Michelle Alexander writes in her seminal book The New Jim Crow. 

Oregon’s felony disenfranchisement law dates to 1857 and can be traced back to the state’s attempts to exclude non-white people from settling there. Many laws that originated in racism “to this day haven’t been changed and continue to be shadows in our lives,” said Anthony Pickens. Like Rivera, Pickens got interested in politics while incarcerated. “I did a lot of reading at that time on the history of the United States, the history of movements and a lot of stuff from the Panther era,” he told Bolts. Today, he works as a paralegal for Oregon Justice Resource Center, one of the main organizations sponsoring the legislation. 

Pickens said he often shares the history of Oregon’s felony disenfranchisement law with skeptical interlocutors. “A lot of people honestly don’t have an understanding of that background and are shocked and surprised…somehow,” he told Bolts. 

To Pickens, allowing prisoners to vote would force politicians to see them as a constituent group and hopefully do more to prevent abuse and mistreatment behind bars. As it stands currently, incarcerated Americans have little recourse to address prison conditions short of strikes. “The majority of individuals that are incarcerated in our prisons and jails, they don’t end up having a voice and a lot of misconduct is able to be covered up or never even heard of because of that,” he said. 

In recent years, states around the country have enacted laws that expand voter eligibility and restore ballot access to millions of people. The most recent example is Minnesota, which adopted a law earlier this month to allow people on parole or probation to vote.

Given this momentum, Jessica Maravilla, policy director at the ACLU of Oregon, said she’s optimistic about Senate Bill 579 passing this time around. “Legislators are a lot more educated because there has been several years of this legislation,” she told Bolts. “We’re seeing a lot of movement in this area, there’s more than 20 states that are working to re-enfranchise incarcerated people. And so it really puts Oregon in a position to lead the way.”

 But there is still a sharp divide between the political success of measures advocating for the rights of formerly incarcerated people versus those for currently incarcerated people. Proposals to extend the franchise into prisons have indeed multiplied —especially since a national prison strike named this as a core demand in 2018. Since then, bills have been filed in California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and other states—but they have largely stalled, other than a landmark win in D.C. three years ago. 

The Oregon legislation’s supporters will also have to work to overcome the increasingly partisan associations of felony re-enfranchisement, which is likely connected to heightened polarization around both criminal justice reform and voting rights. “There was a time 15-20 years ago where it was the Republican governors who had political cover to do slightly bolder reintegration and reentry programs,” said Uggen, referencing then-Texas Governor George W. Bush’s signing of a 1997 bill restoring voting rights to Texans with felony convictions who had completed their sentences. “In recent years, it’s become a much more partisan story.” 

The bill could pass without bipartisan support, given that Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature.After passing the Senate Judiciary Committee last week by a 3-2 vote, the bill will move on to the senate’s appropriations committee before a full floor vote. In recent years, the bill has been hampered by fiscal estimates that would require more full-time staff to implement the bill. Oregon Justice Resource Center believes its chances are better than when it was introduced last year, during Oregon’s short biannual 35-day legislative session, but OJRC policy director Zach Winston said at a recent briefing that the sponsors are open to pushing out the start date in order to lessen concerns about implementation. 

The Oregon GOP has been consistent in its opposition to the legislation. A Republican senator from Portland told the Senate that the bill would “allow the worst evil––the ability to vote while incarcerated for child rape and other horrific crimes.” Republicans also argue that people in prison will vote for politicians they perceive as softer on crime. In 2021, the communications director for the Oregon Republican Party said that if the right to vote is extended to prisoners, “they might be electing your county commission and city council pretty soon.” 

The deep-seated beliefs about crime, punishment, democracy, and redemption that the subject of prison voting tends to bring up were on full display at a late-January Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on SB579. Rivera’s letter of support was one of an unusually high number of written testimonies submitted on both sides of the issue. 

“The fact that felons are felons means they are losing their liberty/right to vote,” wrote one woman. “After all, we don’t want them voting for someone who would pardon or commute their sentence for votes, now would we.” Another person wrote: “Let people experience the consequences of their poor choices. Stop protecting the criminals and start protecting the victims and the truly innocent people!” 

This level of emotion around prison voting is somewhat unique to the United States, according to Uggen. Many democracies around the world have either restored the right to vote to incarcerated people, or never took it away to begin with. Nearly every European country allows some or all incarcerated people to vote. France has in recent years worked on reforms to increase voter turnout from prisons after restoring the right back in 1994. “US crime policy is heavily driven by emotion and stigma,” Uggen said. “I was asked once at a talk radio show whether I believe that Charles Manson should decide who the President of the United States should be.” 

By contrast, Uggen said, “I attended a conference in Barcelona not long ago, where the fulcrum of debate was whether you can hold office from prison. I get a little whiplash going from there to Florida.”

One sign of this increased polarization is the talking point that Democrats only support prison voting because they want to pad their voter rolls. Supporters of the bill, by contrast, argue that felon re-enfranchisement is a civil rights imperative that promotes civic engagement and keeps people connected to their communities.   

This idea of re-enfranchisement as partisan political play didn’t jibe with Rivera’s experience in prison. “A lot of folks came from very rural communities, so their upbringing was a bit more conservative,” he said. “I don’t think that these folks would have voted for somebody that they saw as like a liberal or whatnot, regardless of their stance [on criminal justice policy].”

Maravilla also stressed that ACLU Oregon does not see prison voting as a partisan issue. “We’re looking at this as an equal rights bill on access to democracy, so we have reached out to Republicans as well,” she said. “We have had conversations with constituents of Republican legislators who are very much in support of this legislation. We’ve also spoken to a lot of incarcerated individuals who consider themselves Republicans who support this bill.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing received a number of letters from currently incarcerated people. One was from John Landis, who submitted testimony from the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Oregon. 

“I am a registered Republican and I believe all American citizens have a right (even a duty) to vote,” he wrote. “I served my country in the US army to protect citizens’ rights.” 

Phillip Bates, who is incarcerated at the same facility, also wrote in. Bates noted that while incarcerated, he went out of his way to place his name on the non-active voter registry. “To switch to becoming an active voter would mean the world to me,” he wrote. “Allowing me to vote would tell me that I am worth something.”

The post Oregon Tries Again to Restore Voting Rights in Prisons appeared first on Bolts.

But voters by and large rejected election denier candidates while embracing measures that expanded access to the ballot in places like Michigan and Connecticut. Outside of elections, states and municipalities saw big policy shifts around democracy and voting procedures—some of it expanding voting access, like North Carolina restoring the voting rights to tens of thousands people on probation and parole, and a lot of it threatening to curtail and criminalize voting, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s new elections police force. 

In the coming year, expect these fundamental conflicts around democracy to remain at the forefront, so we here at Bolts have identified ten key questions that will shape these issues in 2023. They range from the continued threat of election denialism in state governments to the power of state supreme courts over the gerrymandering of congressional maps—and Bolts will be watching it all for you. 

1. How will the election deniers who won secretary of state act once in office?

Election deniers largely failed in their efforts to take over election administration offices during the midterms, with the exception of four candidates in deeply red states—Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. As they now prepare to enter office as the elections chief of their respective states, these incoming officials will have the clout to push for significant changes to election procedures.

The stakes are clear in: Alabama

Wes Allen, who won the secretary of state race in Alabama, already seems to be making good on his promise to remove the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national organization that assists states in maintaining accurate voter rolls and has become a target of right-wing conspiracies. Shortly after he was elected, he released a statement saying that he informed the organization that he would end Alabama’s membership as soon as he is inaugurated in January. 

Member states—including Alabama—have relied on the ERIC program to detect voter fraud. Outgoing secretary of state John Merril defended the system, saying that the program helped Alabama detect 12 instances of voter fraud in 2020. Despite this, Allen has said that the state will be able to maintain its own voter rolls using drivers license records, death records, and change-of-address information from the US Postal Service. 

Also keep an eye on: In South Dakota, Monae Johnson has expressed her distrust of vote tabulation machines and has already said she would encourage county election officials to do a hand-count audit of election results. In Wyoming, Chuck Gray has maintained that he wants to ban ballot drop boxes. 

2. Where will conservatives ramp up policing of elections and expand criminal statutes around voting? 

Trump’s lies about fraud fueled a raft of GOP-crafted state laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing criminal penalties around voting. As Bolts has reported, those laws are part of a larger effort in red states to police elections and criminalize voting under the pretense of cracking down on fraud. That includes an entire new state agency designed to investigate elections in Florida. Heading into 2023, conservatives are already gearing up to set up new tripwires that could ensnare more people in the criminal legal system.

The stakes are clear in: Texas 

The last time the Texas legislature gaveled into session in January 2021, it was less than a week after a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had been fanned by many top GOP officials in the state—including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and even rallied Trump supporters in Washington D.C. hours before they rioted on Jan. 6. Conservative leaders then used Big Lie rhetoric to make ‘election integrity’ a top priority, ultimately ushering in the passage of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping elections law that raised new threats of criminal penalties around assisting voters and election workers. 

Now Texas Republicans are once again pointing to the most recent elections to justify more policing of elections. GOP lawmakers say problems voters experienced at the polls around Houston on election day—polling places that opened late and shortages of ballot paper—inspired them to file a bill that would direct the secretary of state to appoint state police officers as “election marshals” to investigate voting. Republicans have also proposed legislation ahead of the session that would impose harsher penalties for election crimes and expand Paxton’s ability to initiate prosecutions for voter fraud. 

Also keep an eye on: The administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis this summer arrested people for allegedly voting when they were barred from doing so, despite evidence that state officials told them they were eligible. Judges have since tossed out some of those cases, but many remain to be adjudicated in 2023—and Florida’s new election police force has the authority to launch new prosecutions. Other cases involving people prosecuted for voting are ongoing elsewhere in the country, such as Crystal Mason‘s in Texas.

3. Will more states curtail felony disenfranchisement or enable voting from prison? 

In 2022, 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting due to a felony conviction—a number that’s high but also considerably down from just four years ago, before a wave of reforms ended or curtailed felony disenfranchisement in more than ten states. Will more states join the efforts to restore people’s voting rights in the coming year?

The stakes are clear in: Oregon

Since 2018, the states that have expanded the franchise have largely acted to restore the rights of citizens who are already out of prison. In states that had already done that, activists have focused on also enabling people to vote from prison, though so far those bills have mostly stalled. (After a milestone 2020 reform, D.C. joined Maine and Vermont as the only places that strip no one’s rights.) Such a push failed in Oregon earlier this year. But a new legislative effort on the issue is coming in 2023, a state advocate confirmed to Bolts. 

The stakes are also clear in: New Mexico 

New Mexico is a rare blue state that bars people on parole and probation from voting, and a bill to enfranchise anyone who is not incarcerated failed last year in chaotic circumstances and mutual recrimination among Democrats. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that they would try again; they have a short window in early 2023 given the state’s brief legislative session.

Also keep an eye on: Other states where bills to end or curtail felony disenfranchisement have been considered in recent years or may be introduced this year include Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Inversely, in Kentucky, the fate of an executive order announced by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear in 2019 that has restored the voting rights of most people who have completed their sentence may hinge on the results of the governor’s race in November.

4. Which states will further ease ballot access and voting procedures?

From automatic voter registration to universal vote-by-mail, specific policies meant to ease ballot access have snowballed in recent years, largely in Democratic-run states. In 2023, which states play catch-up and what new proposals emerge that push existing boundaries further?

The stakes are clear in: Connecticut

Connecticut is close to shaking off the distinction of being the bluest state in the nation with no in-person early voting. In November, residents approved a ballot measure that amends the state constitution to authorize in-person early voting, but the state legislature must adopt legislation to set up such a system before it can go into effect and change anything about how elections are actually run. In advance of the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers and advocates are now debating how long the early voting period should be, with disagreements already emerging between some officials and the state ACLU, which is pushing for a longer window.

The stakes are also clear in: Washington, D.C.

The city council of Washington, D.C., held a hearing in 2022 on a proposal that could, should it move forward next year, redefine common assumptions about the need for voter registration. The bill, as Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported in September, would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered. “Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” the bill’s chief sponsor told Bolts.

Also keep an eye on: Voting rights advocates in New York are pushing many reforms to ease registration and strengthen local administration. As Democrats take power in Michigan, they are eying possible legislation on election procedures and they will be in charge of implementing a voting rights package that Michiganders adopted in November. And Delaware lawmakers are back to square one after the state supreme court struck down their voting reforms this fall. 

5. Will more states pass voting laws restricting ballot access?

This year’s was Georgia’s first federal election since the passage of Senate Bill 202, a sweeping voting law passed by Republicans that introduced new restrictions to voting such as stricter ID requirements for absentee voting, restricting the availability of ballot drop boxes, and making it illegal to offer people standing in long voting lines food or water. The law, as Anoa Changa reported for Bolts, also created a critically short four-week runoff election period. But Georgia is not alone: SB 202 implemented a slew of measures that Republicans nationwide have used as a template for legislative changes, and more may come in 2023.

The stakes are clear in: Ohio

Republicans in the Ohio legislature pushed through a new bill this month tightening voter ID requirements for in-person voting, shortening the period for absentee voting, and limiting the number of ballot drop boxes per county to just one. The bill, which was originally intended to get rid of certain election days, was expanded to include these other provisions just before it was passed in both houses. The bill is now on Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s desk; Democrats have signaled they will bring a lawsuit next year if he signs it.

Also keep an eye on: Pennsylvania Republicans are eying stricter voter ID laws as a priority in the upcoming session. Since they lost control of the state House in November, they may be hard pressed to find the votes to succeed; but Republicans are looking to take advantage of multiple vacancies in the chamber to keep control until the spring, a chaotic situation that may give them a legislative window. In Texas, lawmakers have already pre-filled 66 bills having to do with election administration, some of which would shorten early voting and purge voter rolls. 

6. Will states change their rules around ballot initiatives? 

Facing popular referendums to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions or expand healthcare access, Republicans in many red states have tried to change the goalposts to make ballot measures harder to pass, including this year in South Dakota and Arkansas. Expect more states to try to raise the threshold for passing voter-initiated reforms next year. 

The stakes are clear in: Ohio 

Republicans in the Ohio legislature have been rushing to change the rules for constitutional amendments since activists began discussing a potential ballot measure to solidify legal protections for abortion in light of the state’s criminal ban. While abortion activists used the ballot initiative process to protect abortion rights in neighboring Michigan, the vote didn’t clear 60 percent, the new threshold Ohio Republicans now want to set for such changes in the future. 

The stakes are also clear in: Missouri

In Missouri, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly a dozen bills to increase requirements for ballot initiatives in the state—from raising the signature requirements to get a proposal on the ballot to increasing the threshold for approval from a majority to 60 percent. Those proposed changes come on the heels of voters legalizing recreational marijuana via the ballot initiative process in November and discussions among abortion rights advocates about pursuing a ballot measure to challenge the state’s criminal abortion ban. 

7. How will the politics of state supreme courts affect mid-decade redistricting?

While redistricting typically takes place at the start of the decade, new majorities in state courts can shift the balance of power and trigger new rounds of map drawing.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin is extremely gerrymandered, making it very unlikely that Democrats could win the legislature this decade under present maps. Could they get state courts to force fairer maps, as their peers in Pennsylvania did last decade? At the moment, conservatives enjoy a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, which ruled on those ideological lines last year to effectively preserve the skewed maps in effect during the 2010s. But a supreme court race looms in April that could transform state politics: Should a liberal candidate gain the seat, it would flip control of the court and likely change its outlook on the Republican gerrymanders.

Also keep an eye on: The GOP swept state supreme court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November, wins that are likely to deliver newly-robust conservative majorities and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering in each state. For different reasons, both states are required to redraw congressional maps by the 2024 or 2026 cycles, and now the Republicans who control the redistricting process will get to do so under friendlier judges than over the past two years. 

8. Will Harper vs. Moore throw a wrench in redistricting and other democracy debates?

If you are reading this, odds are you’ve heard of the “independent state legislature” theory, a largely obscure legal doctrine just twelve months ago that is now on the brink of receiving the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority. If not, Cristian Farias’s primer in Bolts has you covered: this is the “feverish idea is that state legislatures should have complete and unfettered control over how federal elections are run and regulated, shielded from the oversight of state courts,” Farias wrote in March. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court took a case, known as Moore v. Harper, that tests this doctrine, and heard it on Dec. 7.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court could rule in the case anytime between January and June, falling anywhere between a repudiation of the theory to an embrace of its strongest form, which would unleash state legislatures to regulate federal elections as they please. During the Dec. 7 hearing, court watchers observed that some conservative justices did not seem to support the theory’s strongest iteration but may be willing to fashion a weaker version. 

Also keep an eye on: Depending on how the justices rule, the outcome could unleash GOP lawmakers to ramp up voter ID rules, restrict voting procedures, or draw new maps without worrying about intervention from their state courts in places like North Carolina or Ohio where state judges have been a thorn on their side has been an issue for them. The conservative justices could also make it tougher for a new majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, should liberals flip it in April (see above), to have any effect on the congressional map. But if the justices is affirm some version of the independent state legislature theory, the consequences could also be felt in blue states where judges have constrained Democratic legislatures: Just over the past year, for instance, New York’s highest court struck down Democrats’ gerrymander of the state in 2021, and Delaware’s highest court threw out new laws enabling same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail voting—all moves that may be called into question by Moore v. Harper.

9. Will other cities move on democracy vouchers?

In 2022, Oakland, California, followed in the footsteps of Seattle in offering residents a novel way to more actively participate in local elections. Voters in November approved a ballot measure for a Democracy Dollars program, giving every Oakland voter four $25 vouchers to donate to a candidate of their choice in future city and school board elections. 

As Spenser Mestel reported for Bolts in July, the idea behind the program is to engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

The stakes are clear in: California municipalities

Advocates elsewhere in California are looking to Oakland as an example. Los Angeles and San Diego have each had their respective campaigns for democracy dollars in place for some time, and in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the editorial board offered up these vouchers as one of several tools that could be used to restore LA voters’ confidence in local government shaken by the racist comments made city council leaders on a leaked tape. 

Also keep an eye on: At a recent city council meeting in Evanston, Illinois, officials discussed democracy vouchers as one of two new proposals for using government dollars to fund campaigns. The discussion was tabled until February, when the proposals will go up for a committee vote. 

10. What is next for local initiatives to expand voter eligibility? 

Cities around the country are experimenting with ways to broaden their electorate. In recent years, some have passed reforms allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, and others have tried extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds. Watch for more of those efforts next year as well as pushback from conservative groups. 

The stakes are clear in: Massachusetts 

Several Massachusetts cities have in recent years passed ordinances allowing both 16-and 17-year olds and noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections. But to implement those reforms, the cities must get approval from the governor and the Democratic-run legislature, which have so far ignored their requests. As Bolts reported this year, proponents of expanding the franchise have hoped that a breakthrough in Boston would help push state leaders to finally act. Last month, Boston’s city council overwhelmingly passed an ordinance giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections, and GBH News reports that council members who also support noncitizen voting are pressing for the city to take up that issue next.

The stakes are also clear in: California

Conservative activists in California have sued to block expanding the franchise in the state since San Francisco voters in 2016 approved letting noncitizen residents vote in local school board elections. This past summer a judge struck down the ordinance, ruling that it violated the state constitution. While the courts allowed noncitizens to vote in the November election as the city appealed, it could be the last time depending on how the legal challenge shakes out. Meanwhile, Oakland seems willing to join the fight, with voters overwhelmingly approving a resolution last month that also seeks to allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. 

Also keep an eye on: Other legal fights over expanding the franchise include Washington DC’s attempt to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, which the DC council passed in October but Republicans in Congress have already vowed to block. New York City is also currently appealing a trial court ruling this summer that struck down the city’s attempt to authorize close to 900,000 noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. In Vermont, two cities implemented noncitizen voting in local elections, and where the incoming secretary of state says she supports expanding voting eligibility. 

The post Ten Questions that Will Shape Democracy and Voting Rights in 2023 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.

Earlier this month, about ten men detained in the Young Men Emerging unit in the Washington, D.C., jail sat around a TV to watch the Democratic candidates for mayor debate issues including affordable housing and gun violence. 

“It was on a communal TV, and it was loud,” said Gregory Barnhart, 25, who is incarcerated in the unit. Barnhart said the men were split in their support for the two Black men challenging current Mayor Muriel Bowser, but all agreed that it was time for a fresh face in the mayor’s office. “Everybody who was there was super interested.” 

For Kortez Trasvant, who is 24 and has been detained in the jail since August, it was the first political debate he’d ever watched. Barnhart, who has been in the jail for more than three years, said he also watched a presidential debate in 2020.

Trasvant, Barnhart, and the other men in their unit were particularly interested in the mayoral debate because all of them can vote, even though they are serving time for felonies. 

In July 2020, the District became the third place in the nation to grant the right to vote to people who are incarcerated. Just Maine, Vermont, and the District allow anyone to vote while in prison for a felony. 

Neither Trasvant nor Barnhart had ever been registered to vote before their time in the District jail, but both say they now understand the importance of having their voices heard. 

“People who are incarcerated, we make up a big part of the population and a lot of people who have a lot of strong views that are happening in our society are incarcerated,” Trasvant said. “So if we want to change what’s going on and change the narrative, it’s important for us to take the initiative to vote.” 

The Tuesday primary is just the second election in which incarcerated people in D.C. can cast ballots. 

It is the first in which the D.C. Board of Elections is legally obligated to provide every D.C. resident in the custody of the D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) a voter registration application and educational information about their right to vote. Anyone who has registered to vote will receive an absentee ballot.

In November 2020, out of about 4,000 incarcerated D.C. residents, only 562 registered to vote and 264 of them cast ballots. 

But voting advocates in the District and at the Board of Elections say they’re hopeful that number will increase this year. Currently, 650 incarcerated D.C. residents are registered to vote. 355 of them in BOP custody and 295 in DOC custody, according to the Board of Elections. 

“There’s just a simplicity here,” said D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who was an early supporter of the Restore the Vote Amendment Act of 2020 and who chairs the council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety.

“You’re not going to lose your right to vote. You may have made a really bad decision, and you may have created harm, and so you’re going to lose your freedom, you’re going to be incarcerated, but you haven’t lost that right to vote.”

Still, the District’s fragmented correctional bureaucracy is a challenge. As of May, 1,390 D.C. residents are held in the D.C. jail, under DOC custody, and 2,615 are in federal prisons all over the country. The voter registration rate is higher among people detained in the jail, where outreach has been more frequent and consistent.

Outreach to federal prisons

Trasvant and Barnhart explained in a joint Zoom interview that they’re confident that all the detainees in the D.C. jail know they’re eligible to vote. The hallways are lined with posters informing them of their eligibility and the Board of Elections has worked with jail staff, giving them pamphlets and information and registration applications to hand out in the jail.

Jail staff has also been trained on how to help people register to vote, something they’ve been doing for a long time given that people serving time for misdemeanors have always been eligible, said Nick Jacobs, a public information officer with the Board of Elections. 

But informing D.C.’s federal prisoners, who serve their time in roughly 100 different federal prisons outside the District because D.C. has no federal prison of its own, has proven to be more difficult. 

Federal detainees from the District are often housed far from home and the District has to rely on the staff at each facility to help get the word out to D.C. residents about their eligibility. 

“We’re talking about the entire federal prison system,” Jacobs said. 

To reach everyone, the Board of Elections was allocated a larger budget this year, which allowed it to hire two staff members dedicated to the effort. 

One of the new hires, Scott Sussman, joined in February from the Bureau of Prisons, where he worked for 26 years. It was important to bring on someone who knows the agency and the best way to work with it, Jacobs said. 

According to Sussman, the Board of Elections has mailed BOP facilities registration applications, ballot instructions, and postage paid envelopes and has asked staff at each facility to distribute them to those who are eligible.

“There were some packages that got returned as undeliverable, and we had to send them to a different address, but nobody outright said they wouldn’t do this for us,” he said.  

The Board of Elections has also worked with the federal prisons agency to post voter registration applications electronically on an internal prison messaging system to all incarcerated people from the District.

“They allow us to post material specifically targeted to D.C. residents,” Sussman said. “We also supplied them with an electronic version, a PDF, of the voter registration form and some helpful hints on how to fill out that registration form, which they can print and send back.”

The Board of Elections is also trying to work with BOP staff members who help with new prison admissions and orientation, as well as staff members who assist people preparing for release, so everyone is informed of their right to vote.

Sussman said that he feels confident the Board of Elections has been able to make contact with every D.C. resident in federal prison custody, whether it’s through electronic or physical mail.  

But “part of the challenge,” Jacobs said, is that prison officials often transfer D.C. residents from one prison to another, and it’s hard to track where people may be at any given point. 

When a D.C. resident is moved, the burden is on them to update their voter registration so they can receive a ballot at their new prison address, as the BOP does not share transfer information with the Board of Elections to update the rolls. 

It’s also difficult to know who in BOP custody is a D.C. resident because BOP “is unable to provide a comprehensive list due to privacy laws,” Sussman said. “However, they have provided us the number of D.C. residents that are out there. We just have to depend on their staff to distribute material to them.”

Despite some hurdles, Sussman said he believes that “the Bureau of Prisons is going to great lengths to help us, within their rules and regulations.”

In addition to outreach by the D.C. government, the Restore the Vote Coalition—which formed to push towards voting rights restoration in D.C.—has pivoted to voter outreach since the effort succeeded in 2020. 

The non-profit organizations involved in the coalition, including the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and the D.C. chapter of the League of Women Voters, have also helped to distribute voter guides and registration forms. 

Voting in other states

Allen said he’s proud that restoration of voting rights in D.C. passed the council unanimously and was never controversial. 

“There weren’t any games being played,” he said. “Everyone just realized it was the right thing to do.”

A few other states have also tried in recent years to restore voting rights to people in prison, but the efforts have all failed. 

A legislative attempt in Oregon stalled earlier this year despite strong support among Democratic lawmakers. And legislation was proposed in Illinois but hasn’t made it out of a House committee. Similar unsuccessful bills have also been introduced in Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

In some cities, including Houston, Los Angeles, and Chicago, people detained in jail for misdemeanors can vote at a polling place inside the jail, but Texas, California, and Illinois all prohibit people convicted of felonies from casting ballots while incarcerated. 

Across the country, roughly 5.2 million people were disenfranchised as of 2020 because of a felony conviction, according to the Sentencing Project. The population shut out from elections is disproportionately Black, with 1 in 16 Black adults disenfranchised nationally. 

Rights restoration laws vary from state to state, with 20 states allowing people to vote as soon as they leave prison and 16 others requiring people to complete periods of probation to get their rights back. In 11 states, certain people with felony convictions lose their right to vote for life.  

A stronger connection

Despite being incarcerated and not knowing when they will be released, Trasvant and Barnhart both said being able to vote makes them feel more connected to their D.C. community. They said they see no reason why other states shouldn’t follow the District’s lead. 

“I feel like it’s something everybody should do across the whole United States because it’s imperative that our voices get heard too,” Trasvant said. 

“It should spread across the nation because over 2 million people are incarcerated at the moment and those are a lot of voices that need to be heard,” Barnhart added. “I do believe that Washington, D.C., taking the initiative with Vermont and Maine to allow those incarcerated to vote, they’re taking a big step to lay the groundwork for the rest of the nation to follow.”

The post D.C. Residents Are Voting from Prison This Week 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.

Oregon would technically be the first state to abolish felony disenfranchisement, since Maine and Vermont never practiced it in the first place, and D.C. is not a state.

Advocates say this milestone is long overdue given the racist roots of felony disenfranchisement rules and its connection to punitive norms. They hope that by making history in Oregon they can pave the way for other states to expand voting rights as well.

“Prison is about the loss of liberty, not the loss of citizenship,” Anthony Richardson, who is incarcerated at the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, told The Appeal: Political Report in an email. Richardson, who gave a presentation to lawmakers on disenfranchisement in 2019, said not having the right to vote makes him feel like less of a citizen. He has been incarcerated since he was a minor, so he has never voted.

Representative Andrea Salinas, a Democrat who is sponsoring the legislation in the Oregon House, told the Political Report that the issue is personal because her cousin was incarcerated multiple times and ultimately died by suicide. 

“When the advocates came to me with this bill, I was like, ‘This is what my cousin Andrew would have needed—a piece of what he would have needed to stay connected to the community,” she said.

Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, who is advocating for the bill, agrees that enabling incarcerated people in Oregon to vote would help them transition back into their communities upon release. “This type of punishment … doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “It has no correlation to public safety.”

Oregon is one of 19 states that enables at least anyone who is not incarcerated to vote, even if they are on probation or parole; other states have more restrictive rules. But very few states allow all people with felony convictions to vote throughout their incarceration. 

The bill’s proponents point out that stripping people of their rights in prison has major implications for racial justice given the vast disparities in the state’s criminal legal system.The proposed bill would restore the voting rights of people incarcerated over felony convictions in Oregon—a population of at least 13,000 as of the 2020 election that is roughly 9 percent Black in a state whose Black population is just 2.5 percent.

Singh says that ending felony disenfranchisement would be a significant step toward eliminating laws created in the Jim Crow era that are rooted in white supremacy.

Richardson echoed that assessment, noting that Oregon first disenfranchised people in prison “over 160 years ago, during a time of forced labor, exclusion laws, lashings, lynching, and policies designed solely to benefit white men and oppress people of color,“ and “continues to forbid Oregonians in prison from being valued as human beings in this state.”

The bill already has 15 co-sponsors between the state Senate and House. One of them is Floyd Prozanski, the Democratic senator who leads the Judiciary Committee, where the legislation now sits. Prozanski, a former assistant district attorney who now works as a municipal prosecutor when the legislature is not in session, said he supports the legislation because he’s a firm believer in making  the criminal legal system more restorative, and not punitive.

“Individuals who commit crimes need to be held accountable, but they should not be stripped of their rights as a citizen,” he said. “As a citizen, they should have the continued right to vote and have a say in their government, even if they are incarcerated.”

The bill also may have prominent supporters outside of the legislature. Mike Schmidt, the new DA of Multnomah County (Portland), told the Political Report during his campaign last year that he was supportive of abolishing felony disenfranchisement. “If that’s something that we can be doing to get people enthusiastic about participation in society, it just seems like such a no-brainer to me,” he said.

Shemia Fagan, Oregon’s secretary of state, told the Political Report that she is open to considering it as a way to expand upon the work her office has done in recent years to increase ballot access in Oregon.

“There is more work to be done here and across the country though—including for adults in custody,” she said in an email. “I look forward to learning more about the bill introduced in the Oregon Legislature while building on our work to ensure everyone has fair access to the ballot.” Governor Kate Brown’s office would not comment on pending legislation.  

Singh and Samantha Gladu, executive director of the Oregon civil rights organization Next Up, said their groups decided in recent years to prioritize voting rights for incarcerated people because it was one of the policy ideas most discussed when they met with a group of young people in prison. 

Efforts against felony disenfranchisement have gained traction in recent years, with six states and Washington, D.C., expanding their electorates since 2019. Among them are California, where voters passed a ballot initiative in November that extends voting rights to people on parole, and Kentucky and Iowa, where the governors signed executive orders restoring the right to vote to some people upon completion of their sentences. 

But Washington, D.C.’s success last year was the first proposal to altogether abolish felony disenfranchisement that succeeded. Legislatures in 2019 in Hawaii and New Mexico moved bills past one committee, but were not successful in getting it passed. Lawmakers also filed bills allowing all incarcerated citizens to vote in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and other states.

The idea also gained steam during the Democratic presidential primary in 2019 when U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders committed his support to ending felony disenfranchisement, forcing the other candidates to go on the record about the issue as well. The For the People Act, passed by the U.S. House in March 2019 and unveiled in the Senate this week, would restore the voting rights of people with felony convictions who are not incarcerated.

At the state level, advocates are planning more efforts to enable incarcerated people to vote this year. The ACLU of Virginia launched an effort this month urging the governor to support that position. A group of Democratic lawmakers in Georgia recently introduced a bill to end felony disenfranchisement, although it’s highly unlikely to move forward in a state where the GOP controls the state government. 

With Democrats in control of all chambers of government in Oregon, voting advocates say the proposal is unlikely to face intense opposition, and Singh said he is “very optimistic” that it will pass this year. 

Advocates also say Oregon is well-suited for this move since its vote-by-mail system will ease voting from prison, which typically involves absentee ballots. The Oregon legislation would enable people to register to vote at their last address, as is the case in other states.

Oregon became the first state to vote by mail in a federal election in 1996, and in 2019, it passed legislation mandating that the state pay return postage for every voter’s ballot. As a result, advocates say the implementation of prison voting would be straight-forward and that election officials could easily put ballot drop boxes in each of the state’s prisons. 

“Mechanically and logistically, this is actually a very easy lift for Oregon,” he said. 

Salinas, the lawmaker, also thinks that Oregon is ready. “I don’t see a downside to this, quite honestly,” she said. “Oregon is so committed to expanding voting rights and expanding democracy, and that principle is so ingrained in Oregonians on both sides of the aisle.”

If Oregon were to pass the legislation, advocates say it could inspire other Democrat-controlled states to make it a priority. 

“I hope we’re on the front edge of a humongous wave over the next two to five years,” Singh said. “I’m hoping that by passing this, we can not only demonstrate to Oregonians but to the rest of the country that when we say we cherish the right to vote and political participation, we mean that.”

The post Oregon Bill Would Enable People to Vote from Prison appeared first on Bolts.

Update (July 23): Mayor Muriel Bowser has signed the emergency bill.

The burgeoning national movement to abolish criminal disenfranchisement reached a major milestone on Tuesday, when the D.C. Council approved an emergency bill that would end the practice of stripping people convicted of a felony of their voting rights.

If the mayor signs the bill, Washington, D.C., will join Maine and Vermont as the only jurisdictions to allow all incarcerated citizens to vote.

“Expanding voting rights to persons in prison is a historic step for American democracy,” Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, said in a statement Wednesday. 

The emergency bill would immediately restore voting rights to more than 4,000 people. But it would only remain in effect for 90 days without an extension from the council. Councilmember Charles Allen, who wrote the emergency bill, told The Appeal the council will vote later in July on whether to adopt a measure making the change permanent as part of its budgetary process.

The legislation also contains police reforms, including a ban on the use of chokeholds, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. But many of the provisions are weaker than those included in an earlier version of the bill that the City Council adopted in June, and which Mayor Muriel Bowser resisted. 

The provision ending felony disenfranchisement, the Restore the Vote Amendment Act of 2019, originated as a standalone bill introduced by Councilmember Robert C. White in June 2019. 

Under the terms of the new bill, the D.C. government will also be required to provide voter registration materials and absentee ballots to D.C. residents who are in Department of Corrections or Bureau of Prisons custody beginning in January, although prisoners can request and cast ballots for the November election.

D.C. disenfranchises an outsize number of people because it has a higher incarceration rate than any state in the country. As of the end of 2019, 4,049 D.C. residents were incarcerated in BOP prisons, according to the District’s Corrections Information Council, and over 90 percent of them were Black.

Maine and Vermont are the nation’s two whitest states. Washington D.C., by contrast, is the jurisdiction with the highest share of Black residents. White told The Appeal last year that “it’s no coincidence” that states with large African American populations often have strict disenfranchisement policies.

“The majority of states and most Southern states,” he said, prohibited incarcerated residents from voting “right around the time that African Americans were getting the right to vote.” 

In 1955, before D.C. had home rule and the ability to pass its own laws, the federal government enacted a law to disenfranchise incarcerated residents. White called that bill “an active effort to disenfranchise African Americans.”

Efforts against felony disenfranchisement have gained tremendous steam in recent years, with six states expanding their electorates since the 2018 midterm election. Among them are three Democratic-controlled states that restored the right to vote to anyone who is not presently incarcerated, enfranchising tens of thousands of voters and bringing the total number of states that allow all people on probation and parole to vote to 18. 

But up until now, proposals to altogether abolish felony disenfranchisement have not succeeded, despite some preliminary legislative movement last year in Hawaii and New Mexico and unprecedented debate of the idea in the Democratic primary.

If Washington, D.C., takes the extra step and abolishes felony disenfranchisement altogether, advocates are hopeful it could inspire the pursuit of bolder change around the country. 

White emphasized that D.C. politicians would be forced to consider policies that are important to incarcerated people—like prison conditions and the use of solitary confinement—if the right to vote is universal.  

“People who don’t have the right to vote generally have their needs ignored, and that’s something we see in our prison systems,” he said.

Many public officials in Maine and Vermont, where incarcerated people already are able to vote, have told the Appeal they share that perspective. “They’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens, and I think this is a process that should belong to every American citizen,” Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said last year. “And in no small way it helps keep them connected to the real world.”

The post D.C. Is Poised To Abolish Felony Disenfranchisement appeared first on Bolts.

A New York bill introduced by Democratic state Senator Kevin Parker in October would guarantee the right to vote of all voting-age citizens, including if they are in prison. “All New Yorkers should be able to exercise their foundational American right of voting,” it states. 

Lawmakers have filed similar legislation this year in at least seven other states, as well as in Washington D.C.. Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts also introduced a federal bill last week to enable incarcerated people to vote, as is already the case in Maine and Vermont.

These bills would end felony disenfranchisement schemes. New York law, for instance, currently strips people convicted of felonies of their voting rights while they are incarcerated or on parole, though Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order in 2018 to let people on parole vote. Parker’s bill would enable people in prison to vote absentee in their last county of residence.

Ending felony disenfranchisement would also mean that law enforcement professionals are no longer the arbiters of who gets to exercise democratic rights.

New York Assemblymember Steve Hawley, a Republican, took issue with this proposal. He called the notion “insulting” to “members of law enforcement and the criminal justice system who worked diligently to get these dangerous predators off the street.” 

Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, tweeted in answer to Hawley, “The right to the franchise must not be subject to the whims of the personal feelings of police officers—or any other group for that matter.”

It’s questionable why any group should enjoy such a special say in whether their fellow citizens can vote. Yet we routinely accept that it is. Choices made by prosecutors or police chiefs constantly shape who loses the franchise. In deciding whether or not to charge someone at the felony level, or in disproportionately patrolling some communities over others, they are among a cadre of public employees with discretionary authority over who will be disenfranchised. 

Hawley’s reaction reflects a system that has set them up as gatekeepers of voting rights, with the punitive expectation that effective law enforcement means cutting people off from the world. 

But in Maine and Vermont, law enforcement’s decisions do not affect people’s voting rights, and that promotes a different dynamic. When I talked to the prosecutor of Vermont’s largest county in August about the fact that the state enables people to vote from prison, she expressed a very different sentiment than Hawley.

“I am very proud of Vermont for doing that, and I think every state should allow [incarcerated people] to vote,” Sarah Fair George, the state’s attorney of Chittenden County (Burlington), told me. She added that she wanted it to be easier still for incarcerated people to obtain ballots. “They are still a community member, and they should still have a say in the way their community is run, whether they’re in jail or not,” she said. 

—

This week, after reading Hawley’s statement, I reached out to all the prosecutors in Maine and Vermont to ask for their reaction. I also contacted officials in each state’s Department of Corrections (DOC), the agencies that run state prisons.

Those who answered either defended prison voting as a boon to the criminal legal system, or shrugged it off as a non-issue. None expressed a sense of being disrespected.

“[F]elon voting in Vermont has been a rather uncontroversial topic and is not something that we as prosecutors and law enforcement regularly discuss,” said David Cahill, the state’s attorney of Windsor County, Vermont. An executive at Vermont’s DOC echoed that sentiment. Todd Collins, the district attorney of Maine’s Aroostook County since 2010, replied that he had not given this “any serious consideration before.” 

George was direct when asked about Hawley’s view that Parker’s bill is “insulting.” “That quote is appalling,” she told me via email. “It’s a good reflection of how inhumane our system has become, that we can use language that likens human beings to animals, and imply that once we ‘get them off the street,’ they no longer deserve to be treated with dignity.”

She added that voting from prison “does not negate their incarceration or any work done by law enforcement to put them there” but that it could “force elected officials who played a part [to] think twice about likening them to animals. If more district attorneys, mayors, governors or attorney generals, knew that every inmate could vote in their elections, they may start seeing them in a different light…maybe even treat them with some respect.”

That gets to the crux of the matter. Protecting voting rights is just one piece of how the criminal legal system can make room for every person’s  humanity and political agency. But it is a critical one. 

Depriving people of this right invites public officials to think they can ignore other rights, too. But in states whose public officials have to contend with all citizens having some political voice, they have more of an incentive to not use them as easy scapegoats. 

As Pressley told The Appeal last week: “Perhaps we would be further along in transforming the criminal legal system if people were held more accountable to those that are behind the walls.” 

—

“All voices count,” the organizers of the 2018 prison strike wrote on their list of demands that summer. The fight for voting rights has since grown. Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, and Nevada implemented new laws this year that considerably cut disenfranchisement, restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands. In addition, bills to abolish disenfranchisement moved one legislative step in Hawaii and New Mexico, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont injected the issue into the presidential election.

Still, Maine and Vermont remain the only states that give all people the right to vote regardless of their criminal record. Incarcerated individuals can vote in Puerto Rico as well. One thing this means in practice is that, in most states, prosecutorial discretion impacts who can vote. 

Each time prosecutors decide whether to charge someone with a felony or a misdemeanor, or whether to offer someone a deal that avoids incarceration, or how long a prison sentence to seek, they are shifting the voting public. 

Such decisions systematically skew against people of color. One study of New York City shows that African Americans were likelier to be offered deals that included incarceration, even when controlling for factors like the seriousness of the alleged offense; another showed that Black New Yorkers on probation were likelier to have their probation revoked and be incarcerated. Studies elsewhere have shown that African Americans are likelier to be charged at the disenfranchising felony level.

This is reflected in the population prevented from voting in New York. While African Americans make up 15 percent of the state’s voting-age population, 47 percent of the state’s disenfranchised population was Black as of 2016, according to the Sentencing Project. Black New Yorkers were an outright majority of those who could not vote specifically because they were incarcerated.

Felony disenfranchisement laws empower some public officials to exercise this vast control over the boundaries of the electorate.

This power validates the outlook of people like Hawley, who describe incarcerated people as though they were vanquished adversaries and who fight criminal justice reforms with a more rehabilitative outlook.

Laws in Maine and Vermont, by contrast, do not give public officials discretion to police who should vote. That sets a different tone, that citizenship doesn’t just stop at a prison’s doors.

Multiple officials in both states told me that voting rights are an important link between incarcerated individuals and the world beyond the prison. 

“Our perspective is one of actively maintaining this important connection to society,” Derek Miodownik, the community and restorative justice executive at Vermont’s DOC. “We want them to become more constructive civic participants than some of their past behaviors have indicated, and we believe they can.” He added that the ability to vote helps incarcerated people not “opt out” of social institutions. Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state, similarly told me in April that voting is a “sliver of light”: “They’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens, and… in no small way it helps keep them connected to the real world.”  

Their perspective stands against practices that foster civil death and cut off incarcerated people from civil and political communities. It complements the nationwide work of activists, many of whom are disenfranchised or incarcerated, to give people inside prisons a say in elections.

Parker, the New York senator, has mentioned the benefits of such links in justifying his proposed reform. Voting from prison can “facilitate an easier transition back into society,” his bill states. 

George agreed that voting can facilitate people’s re-entry. “We have to do everything we can to connect each of those individuals to their respective communities while they are incarcerated, so they are better adjusted when released,” she said. “Voting is one of the most important ways that someone can connect to their community. It allows them to have a voice, have a part in electing officials who reign over things that matter to them, that impact them and their families.”

The post When People in Prison Can Vote, Officials “Treat Them With Some Respect” appeared first on Bolts.

While presidential candidates and some state legislatures debate whether people should vote from prison, that is already a reality in two states. Neither Maine nor Vermont disenfranchise people based on a criminal conviction. “I think in Vermont, honestly, it is a non-issue,” Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents the state, told me. “I suspect the same is true in Maine.”

I talked to Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who runs Maine’s elections, about how prison voting works there.

While incarcerated, voting-age U.S. citizens can register at the last address at which they resided (if that address is in Maine) and then they can vote with absentee absentee. Dunlap, who is a Democrat, explained how Maine ensures that prisoners have access to voting, and he also answered questions on whether it could do more, for instance by providing postage. During the interview, Dunlap described suffrage as a way to keep incarcerated people “connected to the real world,” and to remember that “they’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens.” He called such connections a “sliver of light.”

The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Do you support the fact that Maine has no criminal disenfranchisement system, and if so what do you think is the value of this?

I do support not having a disenfranchisement system. I fundamentally believe that we have constitutional rights, and either you have rights or you do not. And one of those rights is the right to vote.

It’s easier for me because Maine has never had a disenfranchisement system for inmates or felons.

They vote by absentee: They don’t vote in the prison, they vote in their hometowns. They would have to have established residency in Maine prior to their incarceration in order to participate, so it’s for Maine residents only, which is a little bit of a wrinkle but that’s how the law is constructed.

There have been national debates this month on whether losing the right to vote should be part of punishment or the criminal legal system. How do you think about this issue?

It does come up every few years where someone puts a bill in that a certain class of felons would be stripped of their right to vote. A recent one was, if people convicted of killing children would lose their right to vote. Frankly, I think that that’s just trying to find a way to open the door to keep all felons from voting. Then it becomes a pragmatic issue: If you’re the warden of a prison, who gets to vote and who doesn’t get to vote, which class of inmates retain the franchise and which ones do not? After a while, it becomes easiest to do one or the other, either allow them to all vote, or allow none of them to vote. I think people who push disenfranchisement often go for the latter. They don’t want any of them to be voting, for whatever reason – it’s largely a philosophical reason or a political reason. But I keep going right back to where you start.

You have unimpeachable rights a citizen. There’s nothing that I read in either our state constitution or the federal constitution that makes your constitutional rights somehow conditional. It always boils down to, do you have a right, or don’t you? I think Maine has handled it pretty steadfastly, that people retain their rights regardless of their legal condition.

How does Maine implement its policy of allowing people in prison to vote?

In most circumstances, you have folks who are very engaged in election volunteer work, the NAACP is a prime example, they make an effort to reach out to the prisons and make sure that people know they have the right to vote and that they are executing the process.

Typically, what I will do with my deputy Secretary of State for elections is that we’ll go to the Maine State Prison, the biggest facility, once a year, and we’ll update voter registrations because the populations change, people get transferred from facility to facility, and you have the newer inmates.

We update their voter registrations, we give them the forms to fill out to request an absentee ballot, and we help them get it all prepared to send to the town clerks of the towns where they previously resided. What happens there is that the clerk will send them an absentee ballot, and they can vote, put it in a return envelope, and send it back.

So people are registered to vote at their address prior to their incarceration, rather than at the place where they’re incarcerated. Why do you think this is important for Maine to do?

What it prevents is having an unnatural bubble of population emerge at the site where the correctional facility is. You can’t really lobby the prison vote, if you will, if you’re a candidate because they will be voting in their own hometowns. That’s important for a couple of different reasons. When we are doing redistricting, the people in the prison are counted as a part of the population of their hometown, not the population of where the jail is located. If you, say, lived in the town of Bangor and were never registered to vote, we have a process for getting you registered. If that was your last known bona fide address, we will register you to vote.

It’s actually a little sad. Somebody may not have participated in elections in quite a while, and they decide they want to participate. You pull them up in the system, and it’ll say something like 425 Wagon Wheel Lane, and they’ll say they lived at 675, and I say I don’t have that, this is what I have in the system, and they shrug and say I’ve been here so long I don’t remember where I used to live. It could very well be that nobody in the family is still there, the house itself may be gone, but that was their last address and they still use it.

If you think about that, what was your childhood telephone number? Some of those people are in here for decades upon decades, and they forget the little details about their street address and things like that. We can look it up, we can get their registration updated or start a new registration if they’re Maine residents, and we can get them involved in the process.

When you talk about getting the registration process started, how much of that is an automatic process? I ask because Maine has a proposal on the table to implement automatic voter registration. Do you support automatic voter registration, and would you support applying it to the prison system as well?

The way we’re envisioning automatic voter registration working is using the motor vehicle databases primarily, sort of an automation of motor voter. It still hinges on people going to a motor vehicle office to renew, or obtain a new credential for the first time and have their name entered into the rolls. That’s trickier with people who are incarcerated because for most of them their driver’s licenses have long expired.

We do get requests from time to time from inmates to allow them to renew their credentials. Some of that is psychological. Remember, those are people. Some of them have done some really bad bad things, some of them have made some stupid decisions that get them in deep trouble, and often times they find themselves incarcerated for the rest of their lives, certainly for most of their lives. When I talked with one of the social workers at the prison about the driver’s license, they said that it’s like that sliver of light that comes in through the ceiling. For some of them, it’s their last connection to the outside world, having a driver’s license.

There’s a little bit of humanity involved here as well. Much of the way we handle corrections is very vengeful, you lock somebody away forever. I’m not judging whether or not that’s appropriate, but you cannot deny that you are still working with human beings, people who have a psychological structure that is greatly impacted by their incarceration. I was talking with one of the social workers, and this guy was going to get out, he had moved from the main prison to a minimum security correctional facility. Psychologically, he could barely handle the fact that his door was unlocked for a good part of the day, and that he could look out the window and see cars go up and down the road. He had been in there for 30 years. We have to bear this sort of thing in mind when we are looking at how we treat people. I’m not excusing the actions of anyone who winds up in prison. But they’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens, and I think this is a process that should belong to every American citizen. And in no small way it helps keep them connected to the real world.

Are you talking about voting as well there, or driver’s licenses? Do you think that voting is also the “sliver of light” that you were just describing?

Absolutely. It keeps them engaged in the world, as if they have some importance to them. I go to the prisons. These are some pretty tough people who’ve done some very violent things, and when I talk to them and am updating their paperwork I find nothing but humility. They are glad that anybody cares about them at all, enough to take an afternoon and drive down to the prison with a laptop and some paperwork and voter registration cards and get taken care of them so they can continue to participate in society even at that very remote level.

To return to the issue of automatic voter registration, why not have an automatic registration process for people who are in prison or who interact with the correctional system? Could you have a similar process as you have the motor vehicle interactions?

We could, depending on what type of contact they’ve had previously with us. If you have somebody who’s never had a driver’s license, that would be hard to do automatically because you have nothing on them, so you’re doing everything fresh from scratch. If they were already in our motor vehicle database or our election database, that would be relatively easy to move through electronically, if you have the right information from the voter. So yes you can do it, but it’s the same situation you face with anybody who’s not in prison if they have never participated in any of these bureaucratic processes. Automatic voter registration would work for anybody regardless of their legal situation if we had information on them, from them.

U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign said that she is opposed to people having the right to vote while in prison or on parole because they may be “unduly influenced” by law enforcement authorities. What do you think of this objection based on your experience in Maine?

I haven’t seen anything that would back that up. I have not seen or heard any case where a prison official would try to influence how somebody would vote. We have a secret ballot provision, and the prison officials I’ve worked with are pretty assiduous about staying out of that part of the process. These guys have their ballots, they go in their recreation room or their cells, and they mark their ballots and they seal the envelopes. I have not seen or heard anything to indicate that somebody who is an inmate has been forced to vote some way they didn’t agree with. Also they have to pay for the postage, so they don’t have to mail it, they don’t have to send the ballot back in if they feel like they are not getting their votes fairly represented. So I don’t see that as an issue, and we have not seen that as an issue in our experience.

Have there been discussions about providing people postage for voting? Some states have made absentee ballots postage-free. Is that something that you would support?

We haven’t discussed it. We do absorb the cost of absentee ballots for some groups of people, like victims of domestic violence who are in the address confidentiality program for instance. It has not been discussed in this context. I would certainly welcome the analysis. 

This is one of the things. We try to be careful about felon voting. When I went down to the prisons a couple of years back, one of the folks from the NAACP was wondering out loud why we hadn’t done a press release and why we didn’t have the media there. I said you don’t want that because this gets on the news, there’ll be six legislators putting in bills to prohibit felon voting. We don’t necessarily try to draw a lot of attention to it, because really it’s not an exception. We’re not doing anything exceptional here. These are American citizens exercising their right to vote. This is a bureaucratic process, we go down there to make sure that it’s done right, more than anything. I do support the right to vote, and I try to live that expression of patriotism as best as I can, without making a lot of extra work for myself.

Does the state have estimates of the turnout rate or participation level in prisons?

We don’t have any numerical way to track the number of absentee ballots that are requested via the prisons and returned because that’s all done at the town level. Even the towns don’t track specifically where they come from and where they are returned to. I will tell you that when we go down there, there’s usually a pretty big line of inmates looking to participate. I wouldn’t say we get a huge percentage of them, maybe a third, but it’s still a pretty significant number. And frankly, if one American wants to vote that’s significant enough for me.

The post “A Sliver of Light”: Maine’s Top Election Official on Voting From Prison appeared first on Bolts.