Millions of Felons Are Getting Their Votes Back. Now They're Learning To Cast Them.

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Millions of Felons Are Getting Their Votes Back. Now They're Learning To Cast Them.
America has about as many felons as there are people in Texas. Six million of those felons have been disenfranchised and millions more don’t know they can cast a ballot.
Barrett Holmes Pitner
08.11.18 9:54 PM ET


What may be the biggest political revolution in decades is happening right under our noses.

Enfranchisement (or re-enfranchisement) is on the march in America, as politicians, activists, and non-profits have taken up the mantle of extending voting rights to the disenfranchised and ensuring Americans know their voting rights and how to obtain the necessary documentation to vote.

Roughly 23 million Americans have felony convictions, and over 6 million of them have had their voting rights taken away. That’s twice as many disenfranchised Americans as there were in the 1990s and six times as many as in the 1970s.

Many of the remaining 17 million felons are unaware that they can vote, and many state legislatures have shows no interest in letting them know or have actively resisted efforts to do so.

Still, the tide is turning. Florida’s Amendment 4 ballot initiative, which voters will decide on in November, would restore voting rights to nearly all of the state’s 1.6 million convicted felons—over 10 percent of the state’s potentially eligible voters. And even that is only one piece of America’s rising “democracy wave.”

This week New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio approved an initiative that will help incarcerated New Yorkers cast their ballots this year. During previous elections the ballots of incarcerated New Yorkers would frequently get delayed by the jail’s mail system with its many security checks, resulting in ballots arriving to precincts too late to be counted. De Blasio’s initiative will instead have government officials pick up the ballots directly from the jails.

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