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John,
The Sentencing Project, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) released a new report today, “ Out of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective, [[link removed]] ” revealing that the United States is out of step with the rest of the world in disenfranchising large numbers of citizens based on criminal convictions.
As of 2022, over 4.4 million people in the United States were prohibited from voting due to a felony conviction, and thousands more eligible voters were unable to cast their ballot due to their incarceration status.
The report examines the laws of 136 countries around the world with populations of 1.5 million and above, and finds that the majority — 73 of the 136 — never or rarely deny a person’s right to vote because of a criminal conviction. In the other 63 countries, where some laws deny the right to vote in broader sets of circumstances, the United States sits at the top of the restrictive end of the spectrum, disenfranchising a wider swath of people overall.
In recent years, we’ve seen many U.S. jurisdictions and other countries begin to re-enfranchise people with prior criminal legal system involvement. This progress is promising, but there’s still much work to be done.
In this report, we recommend that the United States end felony disenfranchisement and extend voting rights to all otherwise voting-eligible persons, regardless of their history with the criminal legal system. We also recommend that localities establish polling centers or otherwise effectively facilitate voting in all correctional facilities - something we’ve seen in Cook County (Chicago, Illinois), Harris County (Houston, Texas), and the District of Columbia.
Read Report [[link removed]]
[[link removed]] Nicole D. Porter
Senior Director of Advocacy
Email: [email protected] [[email protected]]
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