By Emma Wisniewski
Every election season, the machinery of democracy kicks into gear across America in the form of thousands of get-out-the-vote efforts. Large and small, nonpartisan or campaign-focused, these efforts target college students, rural and urban neighborhoods, swing districts and swing states, but one group of voters is almost uniformly left out: the incarcerated.
If that statement threw you for a loop, you’re not alone. Felony disenfranchisement rules (technically defined as “the denial of voting rights to people with criminal records” 1) have a centuries-long history in the US and have been a fact of life in most states since the Jim Crow era. Forty-eight states disenfranchise voters for felony convictions for at least some length of time, and a few states also disenfranchise for misdemeanors. Only Maine, Vermont, DC, and Puerto Rico allow all incarcerated citizens to vote.
Many Americans don’t realize just how many incarcerated people remain eligible to vote under these laws despite their near-ubiquity. There are over 3,000 local jails in the United States, and the vast majority of people detained in them (roughly 426,000 out of the 546,000 total on any given day) are being held pretrial; because these detainees haven’t been convicted, their voting rights have not been affected by their incarceration. Most of the rest are serving misdemeanor sentences, which, in all but a few states, don’t affect voting rights either. And yet, “de facto disenfranchisement,“ a phenomenon where legally eligible voters are denied access to the franchise in practice, remains the norm in many jails.
For anyone familiar with the bureaucracy of the criminal justice system, it’s easy to understand how this happens. Incarceration presents a minefield of logistical obstacles to casting a ballot. Among the states that still require an “excuse” to vote by mail, several don’t explicitly note incarceration as an acceptable reason, causing confusion about eligibility; Indiana’s rules are one example of this. Some states impose extra requirements on voting by mail which are functionally impossible for incarcerated voters to meet without outside help; Oklahoma, for example, mandates that absentee ballots be notarized. Others require first-time voters to vote in person, placing incarcerated people in a Catch-22.
Beyond state-level laws, the individual policies and procedures of jails pose another set of hurdles. Facility mail systems are notoriously slow, making it uniquely difficult for incarcerated voters to meet election deadlines. Sheriffs, who oversee local jails in most of the US, have broad powers to facilitate or obstruct voting, and officials are often uninformed or misinformed about the voting rights of the detainees they oversee. Even in Maine, which has no disenfranchisement at all, prisons and jails have no formal process or training, leaving staff largely unable to help voters exercise their rights. When a voter succeeds in requesting a ballot, gathering enough information to make informed choices is yet another challenge: most jails don’t allow internet access or restrict it heavily, and print publications like newspapers are not consistently available. Though many facilities allow incarcerated people access to TV and radio, the usefulness of local and national news depends on what broadcasters decide to cover. Because nothing goes in or out without the jail’s permission, even basic materials like pens and forms can be hard to come by.
Given all these hurdles, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that many returning citizens are discouraged from civic engagement after release. Researchers find that even short periods of incarceration make voters, especially Black voters, less likely to participate in the next election – whether or not their rights are ever legally revoked. Given the size and scale of our criminal justice system, which millions of Americans interact with every year, this phenomenon represents an urgent gap in participation that demands solutions.
Though the US currently lacks national requirements or a formal strategy for ensuring ballot access in jails, we know more than ever about what works. Voter advocates have long understood that contacting a voter in advance of an election makes them more likely to turn out, and this is true in jails as well. In Ohio, some county jails allowed volunteers to visit regularly to facilitate voting in the 2018 midterms, allowing incarcerated voters to have their questions answered and get assistance throughout the process. In facilities that allowed this access, turnout was much higher than in other jails, where voter engagement was limited to dropping off forms.
Some states require sheriff’s offices and jail administration to coordinate with local election officials to facilitate voting. These policies have had good results, but oversight is needed to ensure compliance. In Flint, Michigan, the Voting Access for All Coalition has partnered with the Genesee County Sheriff to host at least ten candidate forums inside the local jail since 2021, a unique and empowering way to close the information gap. The King County Elections office in Washington state maintains a hotline and provides materials specifically for incarcerated voters, and crucially, calls are free. In a state where some phone calls from correctional facilities are still subject to fees, that goes a long way.
A few states have gone a step further and brought voting directly into facilities. Rhode Island designates jails as formal voter registration agencies, while the Cook County Jail in Chicago broke new ground in 2020 by becoming the first jail in the nation to serve as an in-person polling place during every election. A few municipalities have followed Chicago’s lead where state law allows. Colorado enacted a first-in-the-nation requirement for all its local jails to provide in-person voting in 2024, setting a new standard for ballot access that has already borne fruit – turnout in jails across the state was roughly ten times higher that year than it was in 2022, and over six times higher than in 2020. (No, that’s not a typo.)
It may be a while before the rest of the nation catches up to Colorado. In the meantime, committed citizens at the state and local level are not standing idly by. Communities are stepping up with creative solutions, tailored specifically to facility regulations and the voters they want to serve. RISE, a reentry organization in Nebraska, makes innovative use of the state’s agent process to facilitate ballot delivery for incarcerated voters, mobilizing volunteers across the state to ensure that ballots are submitted on time. Chicago Votes, a youth-led nonprofit in the Chicago metro area, has maintained a presence in the Cook County Jail since 2017. As the official sponsor of the jail’s election-related activities, the group holds regular voter registration drives and provides educational materials on the city’s judicial elections. Consistent scheduling allows volunteers to build relationships with voters and provide guidance at every stage of the process. Spread the Vote, a program of the National Civic League, has been working to fill in the gaps for incarcerated voters since 2020 through their Vote by Mail in Jail initiative. With a presence in over 150 jails since the program’s inception, they’ve partnered with community organizations, volunteers, sheriffs, jail officials, and other local government offices, adjusting their approach to the requirements of each facility and the needs of voters.
These innovations and community-led efforts clearly demonstrate that the lack of ballot access in jails is not an inevitable outcome of incarceration — it’s a problem we can solve with tools we already have. In this precarious moment for representation, with states locked in power struggles over redistricting and the protective power of the Voting Rights Act severely diminished by successive Supreme Court decisions, the crisis of de facto disenfranchisement begs the question: who counts? In democratic systems, the answer is clear: everyone counts, and that means every vote matters. Democracies thrive and communities are strengthened when everyone participates. To realize this promise, we must meet voters wherever they are.
Emma Wisniewski manages civic and voter education programs at Spread the Vote, a program of the National Civic League.
