During the meeting, participants worked through next steps to strengthen collaboration across counties and move toward implementation of shared strategies.

This work is focused on ensuring that access to the ballot is not dependent on geography, and that eligible voters in jails have consistent opportunities to register and vote.

VAAC will continue this work at the next Statewide Jail Voting Work Group meeting on April 9. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this effort so far, your dedication is driving this initiative forward.

If you work in or around jails, have relationships with clerks or sheriffs, are engaged in reentry or civic education work, or are committed to ensuring all eligible voters can participate, your participation is needed.

The post VAAC Jail Voting Work Moves Forward with Next Steps appeared first on Voting Access For All.

This work group brings together partners from across Michigan to build coordinated efforts that ensure individuals who are legally eligible to vote while detained in jail have access to the ballot.

In Michigan, people who are detained in jail while awaiting trial or not serving a sentence remain eligible to vote. Yet access to the ballot is not consistent. In many cases, whether someone is able to vote depends on the county where they are detained.

This work focuses on building the infrastructure, relationships, and accountability systems needed to change that and ensure access is not dependent on geography, but consistent across Michigan.

As we move closer to upcoming elections, the urgency of this work continues to grow. Many eligible voters in jails are still falling through the cracks due to barriers in registration, information access, and absentee voting.

During this meeting, VAAC will share updates on the statewide strategy and outline next steps for coordinated implementation, including clear ways for people to plug into the work.

If you work in or around jails, have relationships with clerks or sheriffs, are engaged in reentry or civic education work, or are committed to ensuring all eligible voters can participate, your participation is needed.

The post VAAC Statewide Jail Voting Work Group Meeting – March 26 appeared first on Voting Access For All.

In Michigan, individuals who are in jail or prison awaiting trial or arraignment and not serving a sentence remain eligible to vote. However, many people detained in jails face barriers to receiving voter information, registering, or accessing absentee ballots while incarcerated.

The Jail Voting Work Group focuses on strengthening voter education, voter registration, and absentee ballot access for people detained in county jails across Michigan.

Ensuring access to the ballot for people detained in jails is an important part of building civic power with justice-impacted communities that are too often overlooked in the democratic process. Strengthening jail voting systems helps ensure that all eligible voters can exercise that right, even while navigating incarceration.

Community members, organizations, and volunteers who want to support jail voting efforts across Michigan are encouraged to get involved with the work group.

Individuals who would still like to participate in the Jail Voting Work Group are asked to complete the Jail Voting Work Group scheduling and volunteer engagement form by the end of day Tuesday, March 17. Responses will help determine the best ongoing meeting schedule and identify how people would like to contribute to the work. Based on responses, the next meeting is expected to take place between March 24 and April 3.

If you have additional resources, research, or experiences related to jail voting that you believe would benefit the group, please feel free to share them with us.

VAAC is grateful to be working alongside so many committed partners across Michigan who are helping strengthen access to the ballot for eligible voters detained in jails.

Resources Referenced in the Kickoff Meeting

Reports and Resources

• Ensuring the Right to Vote: How to Expand Voting Access in Michigan Jails — a 2021 in-depth report on voting in Michigan jails from Voting Access for All and Nation Outside.

Additional Resources on Jail Voting and Voting Access

• VAAC website Jail Voting page
• Adopt a Jail program outline
• Clerk Jail Voting talking points and leave-behind document
• 2024 two-page jail voter information resource (used in jails on tablets, as handouts, and as posters)
• Poster used in jails

The post VAAC Statewide Jail Voting Work Group Kicks Off in Michigan appeared first on Voting Access For All.

As advocates for allowing currently incarcerated individuals to vote in Michigan, VAAC is actively look how other states are pushing forward on this important issue.

The article below by Kira Lerner published in The Guardian on Fri 17 Feb 2023 talks about what is happening in the state of California

Could California be the latest state to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions?

Proposal would allow prisoners to vote in what advocates see as a matter of racial justice – but challenges lie ahead

Before having his sentence commuted by Governor Gavin Newsom last year, Thanh Tran served ten and a half years in prisons and jails across California, a time he described as the “most traumatizing and dehumanizing experience of my life”.

Had he been able to vote during that time, he said he would have maintained some hope that his community still cared about him.

“The focus of incarceration right now in California is about punishment, but if I had the ability to vote, it would still create that tie to the community,” said Tran, now a policy associate with the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. It would be like the community saying, “Thanh, we still care about you out here,” he said. “We know your sentence will one day end and we want you to return home and be a good neighbor to us.”

Now Tran is a leading supporter of ACA 4, a constitutional amendment introducedlast week by California assemblymember Isaac Bryan that would restore voting rights to California’s prisoners – a population that is disproportionately non-white.

California is one of at least three states where lawmakers this year have introduced proposals to allow citizens to vote while serving time for felonies in state and federal prison. Democratic lawmakers in Massachusetts and New York have also filed bills and amendments to end felony disenfranchisement.

If any of the proposals succeed, the states would join Maine, Vermont and Washington DC in allowing people to vote while incarcerated. Along with the states restoring rights to people with felony convictions upon release from prison, this marks a time when states are slowly erasing Jim Crow-era laws that have prevented people with felony convictions from ever fully regaining their rights.

But advocates still face steep challenges.

While Washington DC successfully ended felony disenfranchisement in July 2020 when the city council passed a bill unanimously, the efforts this year will face uphill battles, and other states that have attempted to do the same in recent years have run into roadblocks. In Oregon, a legislative attempt stalled in early 2022, despite strong support from Democratic lawmakers. And legislation proposed in Illinois also stalled in committee. Similar unsuccessful bills have also been introduced in Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Virginia.

Across the country, an estimated 4.6 million Americans are barred from voting due to a felony conviction, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group focused on decarceration. The rate at which African Americans are disenfranchised currently is 3.5 times higher than non-African Americans.

When Bryan, who chairs the California assembly’s election committee and has a background in criminal justice advocacy, was elected to represent a portion of Los Angeles in the legislature, he started thinking about how policy could better connect incarcerated people with their communities. He said he realized that cutting people off from society by revoking their right to vote doesn’t benefit anyone. “People touch the criminal legal system because they felt disconnected from society,” he said. “Disconnecting them further doesn’t make any of us safer.”

“Overall democracy thrives when everyone is included, and that includes people who are currently incarcerated,” he added.

Of the more than 95,000 people in the California state prison system, 80% are people of color or people from poor and disadvantaged communities, according to Antoinette Ratcliffe, executive director of California-based non-profit Initiate Justice.

For that reason, Bryan, who represents part of Los Angeles, says ending California’s practice is a matter of racial justice. “We know that our criminal legal system is full of bias and we know that it disproportionately exacerbates the negative conditions of life for Black, brown, poor, indigenous communities.”

Bryan noted that the vast majority of California’s prisoners will return home, and allowing them to maintain a connection to their communities lowers recidivism rates and helps their potential for success.

To become law, the constitutional amendment would need to pass with a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature and then be approved by a majority of voters on the ballot.

If passed, incarcerated people would cast ballots at their last place of residence before being incarcerated. California has eliminated prison gerrymandering, meaning people are counted for purposes of reapportionment where they last resided instead of at their prison location – a practice that can be manipulated to give people living in localities with prisons disproportionate representation.

Bryan also pointed out that California currently allows people serving time in jail for offenses other than felonies to vote inside the jail, so “questions about whether you can facilitate an election in a carceral setting have already been answered through that process”.

Assemblymember Tom Lackey, a Republican who serves as vice-chair of the election committee, shared his opposition to the proposal, tweeting: “Criminal acts should have consequences. Voting is a sacred privilege, not an absolute right of citizenship.”

California’s proposal comes at a time when other states are also considering expanding their electorate to include more people with felony convictions. The number of people disenfranchised due to felony convictions nationally has declined by 24% since 2016, according to the Sentencing Project, as states have changed their policies and state prison populations have declined modestly.

A number of states have taken measures in recent years to extend voting rights to people on probation and parole, including California, where voters approved Proposition 17 in 2020, allowing people on parole to vote. California is now one of 21 states where people lose their right to vote while incarcerated but regain the right upon release.

This year, the Democratic-controlled Minnesota house of representatives passed a bill that would restore voting rights to individuals on parole, probation or community release, and now the bill heads to the state senate, which is also controlled by Democrats. In Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia, lawmakers have also proposed bills to ease restrictions on voting rights for people with felony convictions.

Progress has been stymied in other states, including North Carolina, which restored voting rights to roughly 56,000 people on parole and probation before the 2022 election. But the now Republican-controlled state supreme court heard a challenge to the law in early February and appears poised to roll back that expansion.

Bryan said he hopes his proposed constitutional amendment will get more states thinking about restoring voting rights to everyone.

“As we lead in California, a lot of the rest of the country follows,” Bryan said. “I think that’s a good thing and it’s an opportunity to show what change can look like and what progress can look like.”

The post California Looking to Allow Prison Voting appeared first on Voting Access For All.

Currently Maine, Vermont and Washington DC allow people who are currently incarcerated serving a sentence to vote. Connecticut, Oregon, Illinois, New York and New Jersey are working on legislation  to bring voting to those incarcerated with felony sentences. 

The Sentencing Project works with state and local campaigns to expand voting rights to justice impacted voters and recently provided an update on state legislation and international efforts (Fundacion Proyecto Reinsercion)  to expand voting rights across the Americas.  

See this article from the Sentencing Project to learn more.

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The post Exploring Prisoner Voting Rights Through Art appeared first on Voting Access For All.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/07/25/joel-caston-dc-incarcerated-commissioner/

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