As voter and Restore Your Vote advocate Latoya Slater said, “Voting is very vital.” Today, up to 18 million Americans with past convictions may be eligible to vote but don’t realize it. On National Voter Registration Day, CLC is highlighting our Restore Your Vote project and the opportunities CLC’s team is creating to empower these voters as they confirm or seek to restore their freedom to vote. Our work comes at a crucial time, as the state of Florida adopts a strategy to criminalize people with felony convictions for voting. Making it difficult for these voters to confirm their voting status will have the chilling effect of dissuading most if not all voters with felony convictions who have a legal right to vote from even attempting to cast a ballot. Across the United States, Black Americans of voting age are more than 4 times likely to lose their voting rights due to the impact of mass incarceration.
Our vote is our voice, and no one deserves to have their voice silenced by a past conviction. That’s why CLC created the RestoreYourVote.org web tool, to help these 18 million Americans confirm if they are eligible to vote right now and what they need to do to become eligible. Our web tool, which is also available in Spanish, was referenced in a toolkit released earlier this summer by the Department of Justice (DOJ), and it was also the topic of a study published in the Vanderbilt Law Review revealing that Restore Your Vote-related outreach did lead to increased voter participation.
National Voter Registration Day is a starting point. CLC’s Restore Your Vote project is here throughout the year to help bring 18 million eligible voters closer to becoming full, participating members of our democracy. You can help – share Restore Your Vote on social media and with your community.
Learn more about CLC’s Restore Your Vote project.
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Legislation We're Watching This Fall
As Congress returns from recess, we’re following multiple pieces of legislation aimed at safeguarding American elections and creating greater transparency in our democracy, including:
Note: The DISCLOSE Act is quickly moving toward a vote in the Senate, and a new House bill to update the Electoral Count Act has been introduced by Reps. Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren. We thank Reps. Cheney and Lofgren for developing this proposal, and we commend the House for such swift action on this issue. For the most up-to-date information and analysis on these pieces of legislation and more, visit the CLC website.
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Earlier this summer, CLC democracy advocates Aseem Mulji and Paul Smith sounded the alarm on the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts and what its troubling decisions mean for democracy. On September 28, on the eve of the start of a new Supreme Court term, Aseem and Paul are at it again. Hear from them about the upcoming cases that could dramatically alter the course of our democracy and the immediate and long-term impact of these decisions.
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To reduce political corruption, America needs a stronger Federal Election Commission to enforce campaign finance laws and hold political candidates and their donors accountable.
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Related:
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Our laws should protect and expand the freedom to vote, not punish democracy advocates and make it more challenging for Missourians to register to vote or vote-by-mail.
Read more.
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During this lively discussion, Gilda Daniels, CLC’s voting rights consultant and former deputy chief in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, discussed the tactics being deployed in the 21st century to prevent Americans from exercising their freedom to vote and how we can fight for comprehensive solutions that would protect the right of voters to participate in our democracy.
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The court should block the gerrymandered map for the 2024 elections and reinstate the anti-gerrymandering reforms Utahns voted to enact in 2018.
Read more.
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Replacing voting machines with hand counts, as some partisan actors have pushed for, would weaken the electoral system by introducing a greater degree of human error into the process.
Read more.
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CLC On Social
What Our Staff Talked About On Twitter This Month
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Click on the image to engage with the content and follow our legal and communications experts online.
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Campaign Legal Center is advancing democracy through law.
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