745,000 people held in local jails can vote, but few do. Advocates say it's voter suppression

[tulipsandroses]

Unlocking The Vote In Jails
The majority of the 745,000 people held in local jails can vote, but few do. Advocates say it’s voter suppression on a national scale.

There’s been a groundswell of support for laws restoring voting rights to people coming out of prison. But the vast majority of the 745,000 people held in local jails never lost the right to vote, since they are awaiting trial or are convicted of misdemeanors. Still, voting from jail is rare. Felony disenfranchisement laws and misinformation lead many people in jail to believe they cannot vote. Most jails don’t actively provide the necessary information to get people registered, voting rights advocates say. Logistical challenges abound. And this year, with some courts closed due to COVID-19, many more people could find themselves sitting in jail on Election Day.

Many of the people working to unlock the vote in jails say the result amounts to voter suppression on a national scale. People in jail also disproportionately come from communities of color that are heavily policed. The overexposure to the criminal justice system weakens these communities’ political power and makes people less likely to vote, now and in the future, research shows.“We do start to think about those neighborhoods losing more voters than others,” said Ariel White, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And that concentration really starts to matter in, for example, local elections,” which can sometimes hinge on a few hundred votes.
[link:https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/10/26/unlocking-the-vote-in-jails|

[mucifer]

1. Here in Chicago Cook County Jail is a voting precinct :

The jail was made an election precinct after Illinois passed legislation last year requiring counties with at least 3 million residents — only Cook County fits that description — to establish a “temporary branch polling place in the county jail.”

More than a third of the 5,300 people incarcerated at the jail voted in the primary, “a significant increase” from past years, according to the Chicago Board of Elections, which along with the sheriff’s and county clerk’s offices, helps run the jail’s polling places.

In previous elections, detainees voted through absentee ballots. That contributed to smaller turnouts — only 967 detainees citywide participated in the 2016 primary and 1,329 in the 2016 general election.

County officials believe the jail may have been the first in the country to operate as a precinct, said Cook County sheriff’s office spokesman Matt Walberg. In the general election, partly as a concession to the pandemic but also due to a smaller population, the jail is set to operate four polling places, three fewer than in the primary.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-cook-county-jail-inmate-election-vote-20200921-mh3yo3z6bnfq5fgdqhxco6weve-story.html

[FM123]

2. Very informative!

K&R