Despite the chaos around them — loud voices, clanging metal doors, carts being rolled here and there across cement floors, a line of seven voters stood patiently waiting their turn to cast their ballot in Washington, D.C.’s primary. “John” was first in line to vote and after receiving his ballot he studied it carefully and began to fill it out. Before he had even completed the process, he wanted to know about getting his “I Voted” sticker. Could he have two? After he completed his ballot and put it in the secrecy envelope, “John” carefully peeled the sticker off the paper backing and proudly slapped it on his chest. The red, white and blue “I Voted” “Yo vote” sticker was in stark contrast to the orange prison jumpsuit “John” and his fellow voters were wearing. This week, two teams from the D.C. Board of Elections (DCBOE) headed to the D.C. Jail and to the Correctional Treatment Facility to allow eligible inmates to cast an absentee ballot for D.C.’s June 14 primary.
While not unique to the District of Columbia, D.C. is one of only a small handful of jurisdictions that allows inmates awaiting trial to vote by absentee.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project has been working for reform of disenfranchisement policies at the national level for more than 15 years and noted that while we’ve seen a good deal of progress in states scaling back restrictive policies on voting by people with felony convictions, access to voting in jails remains a largely unaddressed issue.
“The vast majority of the 700,000 people in local jails are eligible to vote since they are either awaiting trial or serving time on a misdemeanor conviction, but not a felony,” Mauer said. “But there are only a handful of jails in the country where there’s any ongoing effort to make the voting process accessible to this group of people, so the District of Columbia is a leader in this regard.”
Full Article: electionlineWeekly.