Though millions of formerly incarcerated persons have regained their right to vote, in at least four states, they largely failed to register and go to the polls.
Reasons for self-disenfranchisement range from simple unawareness — no one told them that they now have the right to vote — to disbelief, because of the long-standing tradition that felons may not vote. Some feared that voting might compromise their parole. Other formerly incarcerated persons thought themselves no longer part of society.
The Marshall Project, a New York City-based anti-incarceration activism organization, compared data patterns of correctional releases with voting eligibility in Kentucky, Iowa, Nevada, and New Jersey from 2016 to 2020. The analysis found that re-enfranchisement resulted in few voters.
“We are non-voters,” said Devyn Roberts, 44, a woman from Kentucky who has not voted for most of her adult life. “They should have told us. There should have been a commercial about this.” The report said that she said had not known about Kentucky’s felony re-enfranchisement and had first heard about it while responding to the Marshall Project’s survey.
The article provided statistics of the four states its survey tracked. On average, the four states achieved a felony re-enfranchise rate of 13.5%.
Only about 31,000 of the 177,000 released persons in Kentucky registered to go to the polls, a rate of 17.5%. Iowa, a state that only recently reversed lifetime felony disenfranchisement, had about 5,000 of its 45,000 formerly incarcerated persons return to the voter rolls, a rate of 11%.
The 8,633 formerly incarcerated Nevadan voters amount to 23% of the 37,000 persons released from prisons from 2009 to 2019, but only to 11% if one includes the 77,000 returning citizens eligible since 2019.
New Jersey has the fewest registrations by reinfranchised persons. Since 2019, only 83 of about 2,000 eligible released persons decided to make their political voice heard, a rate of a mere 4%.
Such fractional involvements by formerly incarcerated persons “reflect more than apathy and political alienation,” the article said. None of the releasing carceral institutions needed to follow any directives to inform their returning citizens of their right to vote. The article said that political organizers “had to dispel the widely-held fear that voting could mean going back to prison.”
Self-disenfranchisement often takes another form. Research showed that the returning citizens who did register to vote did not make the effort go to the polls. The article said that states that had informed released persons about restoration of their voting privileges have a greater turnout, the researchers found. Formerly incarcerated persons have taken leadership roles in registering returning citizens in every state covered by the survey.
Not feeling part of society contributes to a sense of political alienation among formerly incarcerated persons, and such feelings seem among the hardest barriers to overcome, the article said. Robert Pate, a formerly incarcerated Iowan who works with voter registration efforts, said that prison “made them feel like they didn’t have any rights, and it kept a lot of them from wanting or even having the desire to see things change in the community.”
The Marshall Project article said that at least 13 states extended voting rights for convicted felons, but some states make eligibility unclear. To register in Kentucky and Iowa, returning citizens must wait for the end of probation and parole, and despite the new laws, some felony convictions still disqualify released persons from voting.
Roberts, the woman from Kentucky, said that she did not know whether the new criteria applied to her, and more uncertainty arose because one of her convictions happened in neighboring Missouri. “I don’t know if one is OK,” she said. “And if you had more than one? Or if you had it in a different state? I read the description, but that’s why I was like, ‘wait a minute.’”
A website set up by the Kentucky Department of Corrections does not help: some queries about eligibility end with inconclusive results, requiring further investigation.
Post-incarceration voting has wide-reaching potential effects. Political activists count on the post-incarcerated vote to unseat the Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, an opponent of felony re-enfranchising. Organizers in Nevada want returning citizen to vote in elections for sheriffs and district attorneys.
According to the article, Republicans often oppose felony re-enfranchisement and require payment of any outstanding fines and fees before making possible registration (the article did not say whether individual politicians champion that policy or whether it belongs to a party platform). Many such charges remain beyond the ability of returning citizens to pay. Cumulatively, they range in the billions of dollars — courts in Florida alone have imposed fines of over a $1 billion in the five years leading up to the period covered in the report.
Whether post-incarcerated voting falls in line with the goals of political organizers remains uncertain. Returning citizens do not necessarily vote for the parties or candidates that organizers expect. Many formerly incarcerated voters show extensive sympathy for Donald Trump and even views on criminal justice concerns do not necessarily align with efforts to reduce incarceration, the article says.
Campaigns pay attention to likely voters, said David Damore, the chair of the political science department at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The article said that campaign strategists typically neglect areas that have high incarceration rates and so avoid the issue of disenfranchisement. Theoretically, felony re-enfranchisement could mean that formerly incarcerated persons could alter political campaigns. “These voters are up for grabs,” said Damore. “But someone has to think it’s worth the time and effort to track these voters down and get them in the pool.”
