John,

Four million Americans are currently disenfranchised due to criminal convictions.¹ Seven out of ten of them have fully completed their sentences or are supervised on felony probation or parole. These returning citizens need to resume their community responsibilities, and that includes voting.

Disenfranchisement laws disproportionately impact Black and Latino communities. While Black people make up only 13% of the U.S. population, they make up 37% of the prison populations.² Nationally, 1 in 22 Black people of voting age are disenfranchised―that’s 4.5% of the U.S. Black voting eligible population not able to have their voices heard in our elections, more than triple the rate of non-African Americans (1.3%).³ The state of Tennessee is the leader in Black disenfranchisement: 16% of Black people in Tennessee are barred from voting and over 5% of its Latino community is also barred. Arizona, Florida, Kentucky and South Dakota all exceed 10% of their Black populations barred from voting. In Florida, voters enacted a ballot question in 2018 intended to return the vote to returning citizens, but the state legislature added the requirement that those who have completed their sentences cannot vote until they pay any court-ordered monetary sanctions. That leaves 730,000 Floridians, who have completed their sentences, still disenfranchised because they cannot afford to pay.⁴

These laws are relics from some of the darkest, most shameful moments in our country’s history and must be abolished.

Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) have introduced the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023. This legislation would eliminate disenfranchisement and give power back to historically oppressed communities.⁵

Click here to add your name and urge Congress to pass the Inclusive Democracy Act to end felony disenfranchisement.

The act would:

• Automatically restore voting rights in federal elections to all people who have criminal convictions

• Bar the prosecution of Americans who are incarcerated and who complete an election ballot for an election they are not eligible to vote in

• Get rid of state-level barriers that prevent people with criminal convictions―those currently incarcerated and those who have been released―from exercising their inalienable right to vote in federal elections

Every American deserves to have an equal say in our democracy. Urge your members of Congress to co-sponsor and pass the Inclusive Democracy Act.

After the Civil War, when Black men were enfranchised via the 15th Amendment, many states in the former Confederacy―and some in the North―began punitively criminalizing Black people’s existence. Some of the “crimes” Black men were convicted of include “moral turpitude” and “vagrancy”―which could be interpreted in any way.⁶

At the Alabama state constitutional convention in 1901, the delegates explicitly stated their primary goal was establishing white supremacy and that the best way to do that would be by expanding the state's felony disenfranchisement laws to include more trivial crimes.⁷

Now, more than 120 years later, we will be unable to grow our multicultural, multiracial democracy while still living with the consequences of these vestiges of the past.

Congress needs to fix this broken system and throw these felony disenfranchisement laws into the garbage heap of history where they belong.

Sign now to urge your members of Congress to co-sponsor and pass the Inclusive Democracy Act now.

Thank you for all that you do,

Deborah Weinstein
Executive Director, CHN Action

¹ Locked Out 2024: Four Million Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction
² Prison Policy Institute: Race and Ethnicity
^3,4 Locked Out 2024: Four Million Denied Voting Rights Due to a Felony Conviction
⁵ National Voting in Prison Coalition Praises the Landmark Introduction of Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023
⁶ Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
⁷ Alabama’s 1901 Constitution: Instrument of Power