Getting Out the Vote, On the Inside

by Matt Kelley · 2009-09-30 20:43:00 UTC
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NAACP President Benjamin Jealous (above) spent Tuesday at Maine State Prison, registering voters in what is believed to be the first system-wide voter registration drive in the history of America’s prisons.

This is a great project, and I’m excited to see a few hundred new voters in Maine and an increase in the attention paid to prisoner voting rights. Maine and Vermont are the only two states that allow incarcerated people to vote.

While voting rights for prisoners are important, even more pressing (and more feasible) is suffrage for millions of Americans with felony records. I wrote about this in the months leading up to last year's presidential election, and again this summer when Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Russ Feingold introduced new legislation to extend this critical right to our fellow citizens.

More than five million people in over 35 states are denied voting rights because they're on probation or have a felony on their record. If we don't invite someone to vote, how can we claim we're offering a path back to their standing in society?

Take action today to urge your Senators and Representatives to support felon voting rights.

And if you know of a specific voting issue in your state for people with criminal records that you’d like to see me cover, shoot me an email - matt [at] change.org.

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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