Voting should be an accessible privilege for all Americans. In reality, voters face confounding rules that change from one state to the next.
Things get confusing for the 450,000 people locked up in local jails who haven't been convicted of a crime and still have the right to vote, NPR reports.
In many cases, even people who have been convicted and are serving time for a misdemeanor or felony, or who have a criminal past, are still eligible to vote. Just because they have the right to vote doesn’t mean it’s easy or accessible.
“Pretrial detainees are still unconstitutionally being denied access to the ballot simply due to a lot of procedural failures and administrative failures,” said Christina Das of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “On paper, they have the right to vote, but it is not being actualized.”
The U.S. is a patchwork system of state laws where it is up to voters, lawmakers, election administration and funding to allow incarcerated individuals to vote, Das said.
There are just a few locations in the U.S., like Cook County, Ill., Los Angeles County and the state of Colorado, where jailed individuals take part in in-person voting.
In many more jails where there is no in-person voting, someone who is newly detained — for example, a day before the Nov. 5 election — would have missed the deadline to request an absentee or mail-in ballot, so “there is no remedy,” Das said.
This person is effectively disenfranchised despite potentially being detained for a crime they did not commit, she said. “And that is the case happening day in and day out in this country, and, of course, disproportionately to Black and brown Americans due to the systemic biases in our policing system,” she continued.
A few states and territories, including Alabama, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, explicitly mandate that a person who is incarcerated can vote with a regular absentee ballot, says Wendy Underhill of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
They may have the right, but making it happen is a different matter.
Das recommends people released from prison visit RestoreYourVote.org to determine what the rules are where they live. It’s important for people to get the information first-hand, she says, as even election and state officials have given misleading information to former convicts.
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