Voting System Project Report Pdf

[Francoise Witsell]

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Laws in 48 states ban people with felony convictions from voting. In 2022, an estimated 4.4 million Americans, representing 2 percent of the voting-age population, will be ineligible to vote due to these laws or policies, many of which date back to the post-Reconstruction era. In this election year, as the United States confronts questions about the stability of its democracy and the fairness of its elections, particularly within marginalized communities, the impact of voting bans on people with felony convictions should be front and center in the debate.

This 2022 report updates and expands upon 20 years of work chronicling the scope and distribution of felony disenfranchisement in the United States (see Uggen, Larson, Shannon, and Pulido-Nava 2020; Uggen, Larson, and Shannon 2016; Uggen, Shannon, and Manza 2012; Manza and Uggen 2006; Uggen and Manza 2002). As in 2020, we present national and state estimates of the number and percentage of people disenfranchised due to felony convictions, as well as the number and percentage of the Black and Latinx populations impacted. Although these and other estimates must be interpreted with caution, the numbers presented here represent our best assessment of the state of felony disenfranchisement as of the November 2022 election.

As shown in Table 1, Maine and Vermont remain the only states that allow persons in prison to vote (as well as the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). Twenty-six U.S. states deny voting rights to people on felony-level probation or parole. In the most extreme cases, 11 states continue to deny voting rights to some or all of the individuals who have successfully fulfilled their prison, parole, or probation sentences.

The disenfranchisement of incarcerated people is one of the biggest obstacles to criminal justice reform that our country faces. When an individual is behind bars, they are effectively voiceless. They do not have the ability to change the system that has harmed them. But by giving people behind the wall an opportunity to cast their ballot, we can give them their voice back. We can give them a say in the system that has led to their own imprisonment.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of the 4.4 million disenfranchised individuals across correctional populations estimated. More than three out of four people disenfranchised are living in their communities, either while supervised on probation or parole or after having fully completed their sentences. The largest proportion of the disenfranchised population, almost half (48%) have fully completed their sentence. People currently in prison and jail now represent about 24 percent of those disenfranchised. The data reported are based on estimates, rather than head counts and population counts in prison, probation, and parole, as such counts have been exceptionally unstable during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Due to differences in state laws and policies and rates of criminal punishment, states vary widely in the practice of disenfranchisement. These maps and tables represent the disenfranchised population as a percentage of the adult voting eligible population in each state. As noted, we estimate that almost 4.4 million Americans are currently barred from voting by state law and policy. As Figure 2 and the statistics in Table 2 show, state-level disenfranchisement rates in 2022 varied from 0.15 percent in Massachusetts (and zero in Maine and Vermont) to more than 8 percent in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

The cartogram in Figure 4 provides another way to visualize the impact of these policies by highlighting the large regional differences in felony disenfranchisement laws and policies. Cartograms distort the land area on the map under an alternative statistic, in this case the total felony disenfranchisement rate. Southeastern states appear bloated because they disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people who have completed their sentences. In contrast, many Northeastern and Midwestern states shrink because they limit disenfranchisement to individuals currently in prison, or not at all. This distorted map thus provides a clear visual representation of the great range of differences and regional variation in the scope and impact of felony disenfranchisement across the 50 states.

Disenfranchisement rates vary widely across racial and ethnic groups, such that felony disenfranchisement provisions have an outsized impact on communities of color. Ethnicity data in particular have not been consistently collected or reported in the data sources used to compile our estimates, so our ability to construct these estimates is limited. This is especially the case for Latinx populations, who now constitute a significant portion of criminal justice populations. Race data on criminal justice populations is more complete, and we have used the most recent data available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics to develop a complete set of state-specific disenfranchisement estimates for the African American voting eligible population (Figures 6 and 7). We first show a map of the African American disenfranchisement rate for 1980, and then show how the picture looks today. By 1980, the African American disenfranchisement rate already exceeded 10 percent of the adult population in states such as Arizona and Iowa, as shown in Figure 6. The figure also indicates that several Southeastern states disenfranchised more than 5 percent of their adult African American populations at that time.

Figure 7 shows the corresponding rates for 2022, again retaining a common scale and shading to keep the map consistent with the 1980 map (Figure 6). African American disenfranchisement rates in Tennessee and Mississippi now exceed 15 percent of the adult voting eligible population. Whereas 9 states disenfranchised at least 5 percent of their African American adult citizens in 1980, 17 states do so today.

Data are limited regarding ethnicity, but more states are now consistently reporting Latinx ethnicity for justice-involved populations. We therefore compiled estimates for these populations but present them with the caveat that these figures likely undercount the true rate of Latinx disenfranchisement in many states. Although data on Latinx ethnicity in correctional populations are still unevenly reported, we can conservatively estimate that at least 506,000 Latinx Americans (1.7 percent of the voting eligible population) are disenfranchised. In Arizona and Tennessee over 6 percent of Latinx voters are disenfranchised due to felony-level convictions. Even with the likely undercounting, 31 states report a higher rate of disenfranchisement in the Latinx population than in the general population. Many of those disenfranchised today were convicted at a time when the Latinx population was significantly smaller than it is today. Because the overall U.S. Latinx population has quadrupled since 1980, we anticipate that Latinx disenfranchisement will comprise an increasing share of those disenfranchised due to felony convictions in coming years.

To estimate the percentage of disenfranchised male and female voters, we compiled national prison, probation, parole and jail statistics, and prepared a national life table to obtain the post-sentence gender distribution. By this method, we estimate that approximately 1.0 million women are disenfranchised in 2022, making up over one-fifth of the total disenfranchised population.

The total disenfranchisement rate in 2022 (1.99 percent) shows a decline relative to the figures our team reported in 2020 (2.27 percent) and 2016 (2.47 percent), due largely to state changes in disenfranchisement laws and policies but also in part due to the decline in state prison and jail populations during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our estimates for African American disenfranchisement in 2022 are also lower than for previous years: 5.28 percent, versus 6.26 percent in 2020, 7.44 percent in 2016, 7.66 percent in 2010, and 8.25 percent in 2004. For the 2022 estimates, we used American Community Survey data to obtain denominators for the African American voting eligible population. Our estimates are based on race-specific recidivism rates that reflect current scholarship on punishment and recidivism. This results in a higher rate of attrition in our life tables, but produces a more conservative and, we believe, more accurate portrait of the number of disenfranchised African Americans. Though lower than in previous years, the 5.3 percent rate of disenfranchisement for African Americans remains 3.5 times that of the non-African American rate of 1.5 percent.

Florida deserves special mention, in light of the size of its disenfranchised population and the scope of recent legal and policy changes in that state. In 2018, Florida voters approved Amendment 4, which restored voting rights to people who had completed their sentences. The following year, however, Senate Bill 7066 was signed into law, conditioning restoration of voting rights on payment of outstanding monetary sanctions. Firm estimates are therefore more difficult to produce for Florida than for other states. Based on our assumptions regarding the share of post-sentence residents with outstanding legal financial obligations (fines, fees, and restitution), we estimate that over 934,500 people who have completed their sentence remain disenfranchised in that state.7

As detailed in the notes to Table 1, there have been numerous other significant changes in state disenfranchisement laws and policies since our last report in 2020. Since January of that year, law and policy changes have been implemented in at least 8 states, restoring the vote to people currently on probation and parole in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Washington; to people on parole in California, Connecticut, and New York; and to many people who had completed their sentences in Virginia and Iowa.

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