I believe that everyone, and I mean everyone, deserves their right to vote.1 Antonio Lancaster, voting for the first time in the November 2020 election, has been incarcerated since 2003 following an armed robbery conviction. At age nineteen, he lost his right to vote before he was ever able to use it. Then, Lancaster became one of the first Washington D.C. residents to cast an absentee ballot while incarcerated following the July 2020 passage of emergency criminal justice reform legislation. 4 This legislation ended the practice of felony disenfranchisement—the practice of barring an individual who has been convicted of a felony from casting a vote in political elections 5—in the District of Columbia.6 Because D.C. has no federal prison, residents convicted of felonies are sent to federal prisons across the country. 7 Lancaster, currently serving his sentence in a Kansas prison, noted that fellow inmates are jealous of his reinstated right to vote: “When we talk about [voting], they’re like, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’” Lancaster, and other D.C. residents who are currently incarcerated, should indeed feel lucky to have their right to vote restored. “While a growing number of states have restored rights to people who have completed their sentences or who are currently on parole, currently incarcerated people have largely been left behind.” Only two states, Maine and Vermont, and the District of Columbia, have extended the right to vote to every citizen, regardless of any prior criminal convictions. The United States, however, bars nearly 5.3 million Americans from voting on the grounds that they have a criminal conviction.
The United States is uniquely restrictive in its usage of disenfranchisement laws. “No other democratic country in the world denies as many people—in absolute or proportional terms—the right to vote because of felony convictions.” This is in large part attributed to the “direct connection between racial politics and felon disenfranchisement.” In a country where Black and brown Americans make up the majority of people who are currently, or will be, incarcerated, and more Black men are in prison currently than during slavery, felony disenfranchisement laws silence the voices of those who are most affected by the criminal justice system, leaving the disenfranchised without a say in choosing the representatives of the system and the very conditions in which they live.
Although states like Florida and California have made some change to their felony disenfranchisement laws in recent years, only one jurisdiction, Washington D.C., has restored the right to vote to everyone. Unfortunately, incremental change continues to leave room for disenfranchisement. There is no evidence that disenfranchising formerly and presently incarcerated citizens aids in rehabilitation or deterrence. Felony disenfranchisement policies have served as a means of retribution, used to stigmatize and alienate people who have been incarcerated. The remaining forty-eight states that still employ felony disenfranchisement must adopt legislation that guarantees the right to vote to all citizens, regardless of their criminal record. Only then can America ensure that it is living up to its founding democratic principles.
Repository Citation
Sue Guan, Finfluencers and the Reasonable Retail Investor, 172 U. Pa. L. Rev. Online (2024).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/penn_law_review_online/vol172/iss1/4
- Kira Lerner, What It’s Like to Vote from Prison, Slate (Oct. 28, 2020, 2:08 PM), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/dc-prisoners-voting-first-time-felony-disenfranchisement.html ↩︎