Push on to expand voting rights in jails
Survey: Inmates not yet convicted should retain their right to vote
CHICAGO – The voting precinct could have been any one of hundreds throughout Chicago, except that these voters in the first round of the mayoral election were all wearing the same beige smocks. And the security at this polling place wasn’t intended to keep disrupters and campaigners out, but the voters in.
When first-time voter Tykarri Skillon finished studying the list of nine candidates, looking for those who shared his priorities on jobs and affordable housing, he marked his ballot and then was escorted with other voters back to their cells in the Cook County Jail.
The 25-year-old, awaiting trial on a weapons charge, is part of a group not always mentioned in discussions about voting disenfranchisement. People serving sentences for felony convictions lose their right to vote. Detainees awaiting trial or serving misdemeanor sentences do retain that right, but face barriers to exercising it in many parts of the United States.
The Cook County Jail, with more than 5,500 inmates and detainees, is one of the largest such facilities in the nation. It is one of several lockups where voting rights advocates have worked with local election and jail officials to offer voting for those held there. The list includes jails in Denver; Harris County, Texas; Los Angeles County; and the District of Columbia.
Expanding jailhouse voting is one of the latest steps to combine voting rights with criminal justice changes.
“It feels good to have a voice,” Skillon said after casting his ballot. The race now goes to an April 4 runoff. “We’re going home someday, so we should have a voice in our community.”
Candidates he chose from included the current mayor, Democrat Lori Lightfoot. Among the issues that damaged her politically was rising crime. She eventually came in third in the election, bumping her from the runoff between the two top vote-getters, also Democrats.
The most recent survey from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, released last December, showed that 451,400 of the 636,300 people held in jails across the country had not been convicted and thus should retain their right to vote.
Voting rights for pretrial detainees and inmates serving sentences for misdemeanors were upheld in a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1974, in a case from New York, O’brien v. Skinner.
Despite that ruling, voting rights advocates say a “de facto disenfranchisement” exists because of mistakes over eligibility and the difficulties that detainees and prisoners face in registering
or voting.
In Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, about 75% of the nearly 10,000 people held in jail are pretrial. The sheriff’s department established a polling place there in 2019, working with the county elections office, and has allowed voting during the past two election cycles. Before that, detainees voted only by mail.
The move started in 2017 with the Houston Justice Coalition and an initiative known as Project Orange that has helped register thousands of detainees and taught them how to navigate the mail ballot process, Nadia Hakim, a spokeswoman for the Harris County Elections Administration, said in an email.
“Previously if detainees wanted to vote, they had to do the legwork,” she said. “They had to know their registration status and make the request for the mail ballot application.”
In California, Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s Department Capt. Roel Garcia said staff members let pretrial detainees know they can register and vote and hold voter registration drives. Garcia, who oversees the inmate reception center, said the department works with groups such as the League of Women Voters to get information to the detainees about candidates and issues on the ballot.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in an interview that giving detainees a sense of empowerment and finding ways to get them to rethink their place in the world and to inspire them to change are constant challenges. He said engaging them as elections approach presents an opportunity to accomplish that.
A 2019 state law required that jails take steps to enable voting by detainees who have not been convicted. Smaller jails aren’t required to have polling stations but must arrange for absentee ballots.
Dart said the jail helps organize classes overseen by university staff and other organizations to instruct inmates and detainees, before they vote, on everything from the electoral process to the rationale behind judicial elections. Detainees also are able to tune into televised debates between candidates.
“Their election IQ is off the charts,” Dart said. “Participation level, turnout – is higher than it is outside.”
The Chicago Board of Elections brought in several voting booths for the primaries this year along with a large ballot-collection machine and put them in a section of the jail called “the chapel,” which is normally used for religious services and small concerts.
With just a few guards looking on, half a dozen board of elections staff managed the jail polling stations, first helping with registration.
First-time voter Skillon said he believed what many jaded voters outside the walls don’t.
“Your vote matters,” he said. “One vote can most definitely make a difference.”