Laws banning people with felony convictions from voting block more than 4.6 million Americans from midterms

Roughly one quarter of all disenfranchised Americans convicted of felonies are in Florida alone

More than 4.6 million Americans, including more than 1.1 million people in Florida alone, will not be able to cast a ballot in midterm elections this fall because of state laws banning people with felony convictions from voting.

A report from the Sentencing Project “makes it clear that millions of our citizens will remain voiceless in the upcoming midterms,” according to a statement from the group’s executive director Amy Fettig.

“Felony disenfranchisement is just the latest in a long line of attempts to restrict ballot access, just like poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements were used in the past,” she said.

All but two states and Washington DC place restrictions on voting rights for people with felony convictions. Such bans are particularly acute in Florida, which has the highest number of disenfranchised residents – most of whom, according to analysts, are ineligible to vote solely because they cannot afford to pay court-ordered fines and fees.

Roughly eight per cent of the populations of Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee – about one of every 13 adults in those states – is disenfranchised, according to the report.

More than one in 10 African American adults are disenfranchised in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia, according to the report.

Eleven states deny voting rights to people after they finish their full sentences, including parole and probation. Other states automatically enfranchise voters after they complete a prison sentence, or after they are released and complete parole and probation requirements.

Residents of Maine, Vermont and Washington DC do not lose their right to vote.

In 2018, Florida voters approved a measure that restores voting rights to people with felony convictions who completed their sentences, with exceptions for people convicted of murder and sex offenses.

The state’s Republican-dominated legislature passed a bill requiring those formerly incarcerated people to also pay remaining fines and fees to restore their voting rights.

According to the Sentencing Project, roughly 934,500 people in Florida remain disenfranchised under that law.

In August, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that 20 people with felony convictions for murder and sex offenses were arrested and charged with illegally voting in 2020 elections.

But court records and interviews suggest that the defendants had no idea they did anything wrong, and were told by election officials and other government agencies that they were eligible to vote following the 2018 measure. They were even issued voter identification cards.

At least one of those cases was dismissed, and voting rights advocates have argued that arrests exposed gaps in a system that should have prevented “illegal” votes in the first place.

Overall, the number of Americans disenfranchised due to a felony conviction has declined by 24 per cent since 2016, as more states enact policies to restore voting rights and reduce prison populations.

That year, 6.1 million people with felony convictions were disenfranchised.

Still, that figure marks a dramatic increase from previous decades; 1.2 million people were disenfranchised in 1976, and 3.3 million were disenfranchised 20 years later.

Felony disenfranchisement also disproportionately impacts African Americans of voting age, whose voting rights are denied at a rate 3.5 times that of non-African Americans, or roughly one of 19 African Americans, according to the report.