“Out of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective”
The title of this post is the title of this new report from The Sentencing Project, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union which focuses on the significant numbers of US citizens denied the right to vote in the US based on criminal convictions. Here is the start of the report’s executive summary:
The United States is an outlier nation in that it strips voting rights from millions of citizens solely on the basis of a criminal conviction. As of 2022, over 4.4 million people in the United States were disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. This is due in part to over 50 years of U.S. mass incarceration, wherein the U.S. incarcerated population increased from about 360,000 people in the early 1970s to nearly 2 million in 2022. While many U.S. states have scaled back their disenfranchisement provisions, a trend that has accelerated since 2017, the United States still lags behind most of the world in protecting the right to vote for people with criminal convictions.
The right to vote is a cornerstone of democratic, representative government that reflects the will of the people. The international consensus on the importance of this right is demonstrated in part by the fact that it is protected in international human rights law. A majority of the world’s nations either do not deny people the right to vote due to criminal convictions or deny the right only in relatively narrow and rare circumstances.
This report highlights key findings since 2006:
The United States remains out of step with the rest of the world in disenfranchising large numbers of people based on criminal convictions. In part, this is due to a punitive criminal legal system resulting in one of the world’s highest incarceration rates. As noted above, the country has disenfranchised, due to a felony conviction, over 4.4 million people who would otherwise be legally eligible to vote. This is also due to the laws in many US states that provide for broad disenfranchisement based on convictions. For this report we examined the laws of the 136 countries around the world with populations of 1.5 million and above, and found the majority — 73 of the 136—never or rarely deny a person’s right to vote because of a conviction. We also found that, even when it comes to the other 63 countries, where laws deny the right in broader sets of circumstances, the US is toward the restrictive end of the spectrum and disenfranchises, largely through US state law, a wider swath of people on the whole.
The United States continues to disenfranchise a wider swath of its citizens based on a felony conviction than most other countries, many U.S. jurisdictions have worked to expand voting rights to persons with criminal convictions since 2006. Reforms in some jurisdictions within the United States and other countries have limited the loss of voting rights due to a criminal conviction. Among other types of reforms, most U.S. states no longer disenfranchise individuals permanently for life and many no longer disenfranchise individuals upon release from incarceration. These reforms have occurred through a combination of legislative change, amendments to state constitutions, court victories, and executive action. In some cases, however, as in Florida, expansion of rights restoration has been met with subsequent retrenchment.