As the U.S. braces for a fiercely competitive election, Checo Yancy has helped register 20,000 fellow formerly incarcerated individuals to vote, just a fraction of the people in his home state of Louisiana who have had their civil right restored.

“It’s taken on a special urgency. Everyone is trying to get every vote they can get,” said Yancy, co-founder of the non-profit Voters Organized to Educate (VOTE).

The number of people VOTE has registered represents a fifth of the formerly incarcerated population in Louisiana who are eligible to cast ballots after state lawmakers in 2018 reinstated the right to people convicted of felonies who had been outside of prison for at least five years.

But across the United States, some 4 million people are barred from voting in the Nov. 5 election because of a felony conviction, according to a new report – a level of disenfranchisement that makes the United States exceptional among peer countries.

That the U.S. presents itself as a model of democracy while disqualifying a broad swath of its citizens because of a criminal conviction is an inherent contradiction, said Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project, which released the report.

“The United States remains an outlier in disenfranchising people with felony convictions even after they’ve completed their sentence (and) people who are completing their sentence in prison and jail,” Porter said.

“That’s just not true in other countries.”

‘UNIQUELY IMPACTED’

Nearly all U.S. states have laws that restrict people with felony convictions from voting, though about half automatically restore the right to vote after people leave prison. The U.S. Constitution permits withdrawing the right to vote from those convicted of crimes.

Given the mass incarceration of African Americans in the U.S., the restrictions functionally act as a way to disproportionately bar Black Americans from the polls, voting rights advocates say. Black American are imprisoned at about five times the rate of whites.

Many of the laws originated in the post-Civil War era just as Black men were allowed to vote for the first time.

Florida leads the country with nearly 1 million people banned from voting, despite a 2018 referendum intended to help restore voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, except for the offenses of murder and sexual violence.

But the Florida law stipulates that people must complete “all terms” of their sentence before they are allowed to vote, which includes probation and parole and paying any associated fines or fees.

Still, the number of Americans unable to vote because of their felony convictions has dropped by almost a third since 2016, when it peaked at 5.9 million people, as more states enact policies to restore rights, The Sentencing Project found.

Desmond Meade, who heads the Florida Restoration Rights Coalition, said the decline is cause for some optimism.

Despite “archaic policies and laws” in some states, formerly incarcerated people are still “uniquely positioned to have an impact on the outcome of this election,” Meade said at an online event this month hosted by The Sentencing Project.

This month, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a state law allowing people with past felony convictions to vote.

Nebraska’s second congressional district, which includes the state’s largest city of Omaha, could end up being consequential in the presidential race, because the winner of that district will secure one Electoral College vote outright. Outcomes in down-ballot races in the state could also help determine which party controls the U.S. Congress come January.

Opponents of the swift restoration of rights have argued that the push is partly a political ploy to bolster Democratic voter rolls.

“There is a very kind of cynical political argument that I think undergirds the general movement towards automatic restoration or even to move towards the standard, like they have in a couple of states, where you never lose your right to vote,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative voting advocacy group.

Yancy, though, rejected that line of thinking.

“By not allowing us to register, it restricts our seat at the table. All we want is a seat at the table – we paid our dues,” he said.

A newly released survey also shows that voters with the restored right wouldn’t necessarily break cleanly along partisan lines this year.

In a poll of incarcerated people conducted by The Marshall Project, most white respondents and a sizable minority of Black respondents said they would support former President Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris got into hot water in 2019 during her first presidential run when she appeared open to a discussion on allowing people to vote while they are in prison, which is only allowed in Maine and Vermont.

Trump, who was convicted in May of 34 felony counts tied to hush money payments to an adult film actress, is still allowed both to run for president and vote in his home state of Florida as the legal process plays out.

Yancy said he is not opposed to people with felony convictions being allowed to run for office and cautioned against referring to Trump as a “felon.” He and other advocates push back on language they see as dehumanizing individuals who are involved in the criminal justice system.

‘OUT OF STEP’

Earlier this year, the Sentencing Project issued another report with Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union that found the United States is “out of step” with the rest of the world when it comes to disenfranchising people with criminal convictions.

Of the 136 countries with populations of 1.5 million people or more that the report examined, 73 “never or rarely” deny a person’s right to vote because of a conviction, the report found.

In U.S. states that have taken steps toward restoring rights, people are frequently unaware of the rules.

Porter recalled a past community town hall event in Denver, Colorado, where a woman who had a felony conviction wasn’t actually aware she was still eligible to vote in the state.

“(She) learned that in the town hall meeting – and thank goodness she was in the meeting,” Porter said.

Yancy said many formerly incarcerated people are either unaware they may be eligible to vote or afraid that they could be criminally prosecuted for registering or attempting to vote when the rules are unclear.

In 2022, Florida police touted the arrest of several men for voter fraud, because they had voted despite being disqualified because of past convictions.

Porter said for people who are concerned about community safety, restoring voting rights is a good way to welcome people back to the community and potentially cut down on recidivism.

“For those driven by rhetoric around crime and reducing crime, this is a crime-fighting approach – to welcome people previously isolated from the community back into it by guaranteeing their ability to participate in the franchise,” she said.

(Reuters)