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.

Joel Miller, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, has a unique vantage point on the challenges to election administration from his current role as auditor of Linn County, Iowa’s second-largest county by population. He opposed these changes in 2021, and was joined not only by his fellow Democratic county auditors, but also many Republican auditors who argued the GOP was needlessly making voting harder in Iowa.

Conspicuously absent from the crowd of Republican election officials decrying these changes was Paul Pate, the incumbent secretary of state and Miller’s opponent in November. He told The Cedar Rapids Gazette at the time that he would enforce election laws but not weigh in during their crafting. 

Miller told Bolts in an interview this week that the office demands a leader who will disavow voter restrictions.

Bolts also spoke with Miller about voting rights for incarcerated people, intimidation of election officials and whether telling the truth alone is enough to combat those who spread lies about democracy. Worried that election denialism is roiling Iowa, Miller says his office has seen an unusual spike in the number of challenges it receives to people’s voter registrations, much like local election offices in Georgia.

You say you want to “make voting easy again.” Was there a time when you felt it was easier to vote in Iowa than it is today?

When I talk about making voting easy again, I’m talking about the estimated 900,000 Iowans who have not yet voted since 2020, and they are going to find it’s not as easy to vote in 2022 as it was in November of 2020.

It used to be much easier in 2016 for people to vote by mail and also to vote in person. We had 40 days of early voting in 2016 and it moved to 29 days in 2017 and now we’re down to 20 days. I think we went from having the third-longest period of early voting in 2016 to now being somewhere in the middle of the pack. We also can’t mail ballots until the 20th day out from the election, where it used to be 29 days before 2021, and 40 days before 2017.

Another deadline that was moved up is the last day that we (county elections offices) can receive a request for an absentee ballot. That went from three days before the election in 2016 to 10 days, and then to 15 days after the 2021 law. In the June 22 primary in Iowa, in my county, 101 people missed that three day deadline, and 51 of them did not vote. The result of that is people cannot procrastinate anywhere in the process. The timelines are just too short, and that also puts a strain on the auditor’s office.

All these deadlines result in people getting disenfranchised. Another way to put it is that voting was made to be very inconvenient if you tend to vote early or you tend to vote by mail.

Which people, or what interests, stand to benefit from a system with these obstacles?

There’s a stereotype that exists among Iowans, and you can see it in the numbers as well, that Republicans tend to vote on election day. Since 2000, the Democratic Party has pushed the idea of voting by mail and voting early. That advantage, or disadvantage, was wiped out during the pandemic, when over two-thirds of voters, regardless of party, decided to vote early or vote by mail in the November 2020 general election, thus resulting in a record turnout. But with the return to normalcy, I expect that Republicans will once again choose to vote on election day. 

So you’re saying these rules can be used to make voting easier for people, to meet them where they’re at, or weaponized to preserve Republican power.

I believe that’s happening, to preserve Republican power. They don’t like that the demographics of Iowa are changing. They don’t like that people immigrating into the state are going to be more pro-Democratic than pro-Republican. So this is an attempt by them to hold onto power for 10 more years by stacking the deck. 

Keep in mind that 68 auditors (in the Iowa State Association of County Auditors) are Republicans: Our organization was unified in its opposition to the laws passed in 2021 to restrict voting. But the current secretary of state was not there to back us up.

After the November 2020 election, he said it was the best election we’d ever had, the most secure, the highest integrity. He was praising us for a job well done, and national figures were praising Iowa for the job we did. So it was a complete surprise, after coming off all the kudos we received in November 2020, that this election legislation was introduced in the spring of 2021. Not only introduced but debated and basically on the governor’s desk in a 7-10-day timeframe.

As secretary of state, I would have used the bully pulpit to talk every day about what was wrong with that bill, about how it was going to make voting more inconvenient and decrease voter turnout and end up disenfranchising people.

Have you seen any impact of Big Lie politics on the ground in Iowa? How has it affected your job as county auditor?

Let me tell you a factual impact: About ten days ago I received 119 voter registration challenges in Linn County. There’s a news report that a neighboring county received about 570 challenges. To put this in perspective, in my previous 15 years as auditor, I received three. 

County clerks and election administrators all around the country have reported increased threats and intimidation since the 2020 election. What would you do to support people who work in election administration?

Well, for example, the former Scott County auditor resigned because of threats. The 99 county auditors are forced to be the ones responsible for responding to this. We should have a unified message as to what’s going on here, and it starts with disavowing the people that have created this havoc. This isn’t supposed to be about someone keeping a job. It’s about doing what’s right for the public, what’s right for the voters, regardless of the consequences to us as individual elected officials. 

According to The Sentencing Project, there are some 34,000 people in Iowa who are disenfranchised either because they’re in prison, on probation or on parole. Do you believe they should have voting rights in Iowa?

I believe everyone should have voting rights, every eligible US citizen. That includes if you’re in prison. I’ve worked for 15 years trying to get everyone to vote, and it would include those people as well. I want everyone engaged in the voting process, because I think there’s a better chance the supporters of the loser will accept the result if we have a high voter turnout. So, why not have a high voter turnout so that it’s really a democratic result?

Isn’t that wishful thinking, given the demonstrated willingness of so many people in positions of power, up to and including the former president, to say that if they don’t win, an election was rigged?

It takes good people that are being silenced to stand up to the election deniers. Educated people who should know right and wrong are standing on the sidelines and not saying anything. So, is it wishful thinking? Well, a wish is just a goal without a timeline. We need to put a deadline on these things. That’s why I’m running. I cannot stand on the sideline and not say something about what’s happening to our elections in Iowa.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Iowa Secretary of State Candidate Vows to Fight New Barriers to Voting 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.