Over four million people won’t be allowed to vote in the upcoming election because of laws in 48 states that restrict your right to vote if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony — including Kentucky. Most of the people affected have already served their sentences.
Nicole Porter is a Senior Advocacy Director for The Sentencing Project. On the latest episode of “Race Unwrapped,” she joins host Michelle Tyrene Johnson to share their research on felony disenfranchisement and its origins in anti-Black racism. Here’s part of their conversation, edited for clarity:
Having this conversation about race and voting, you can't not focus on felony disenfranchisement, because there are so many people who are cut out of voting because of that. I'm sitting in Kentucky right now, which is one of the states that seems to, from my research, have a high number of Black men who are unable to vote.
Kentucky has lifetime disenfranchisement policies. The state has had governors that have expanded voting rights to people with certain felony convictions over the years, but the constitution does need to change. And there's been a, at this point, a long effort, a multi-year effort to try to change the constitution.
It's a tough road in Kentucky to change the constitution. It has to go through the legislature and then it would be placed on the ballot for majority vote to change the constitution, expanding the franchise to residents with felony convictions. But unfortunately, that bill can't even clear the legislative hurdles.
What number are we talking about? Like, as we're speaking now in 2024, how many people can't vote because they have a felony conviction? Either they're in jail or prison, or they're out and still can't vote?
Nationally, it's over 4.4 million people who can't vote. Most of those people are actually in the community or they've completed their sentence, they're either living in the community on felony probation or parole, or they've completed their sentence and they're still disenfranchised from voting.
In Kentucky, it's several hundred thousand people who are disenfranchised from voting, many of whom are living in the community. And again, these are folks who are paying taxes, they're doing a range of other things to be good neighbors and to be good citizens. And yet they are marginalized and excluded from the franchise, because of the lifetime felony disenfranchisement policy in Kentucky.
What is the argument that people make that a felony conviction not only should prevent someone from voting, but should take away their right to vote for a lifetime?
It's a legacy of slavery that dehumanized Black residents as a basis for stripping their citizenship from them using their criminal legal system. And that is so baked into policies — particularly in southern states that readmitted themselves following the Civil War — that people view it as normal. But it is not normal.
The United States is an outlier in that it disenfranchises people with felony conviction, including people in prison. Most modern democracies actually allow people to vote. They never lose their right to vote. Even when sentenced for very serious offenses. We're talking about South Africa. We're talking about modern democracies in Europe. You know, European bodies have upheld that people in prison should be guaranteed the right to vote.
I will say, there are expansions of the franchise and there [are] efforts to bring voting infrastructure into secure facilities, mostly jails. I know there's active work happening in Kentucky to guarantee ballot access for people legally eligible to vote in local jails, so these are people who are held pre-trial in local jails in Kentucky, guaranteeing that they can participate in any absentee ballot practices, so that their votes can count.