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Recovery Community Civic Engagement Campaign update
We’ve heard from recovery advocates who are doing voter registration activities as part of Faces & Voices’ nonpartisan Civic Engagement campaign who want more information about the voting rights of people who have served their sentences. Across the country each state has its own laws and regulations regarding restoration of voting rights. Relief From The Collateral Consequences Of A Criminal Conviction: A State-By-State Resource Guide by Margaret Colgate Love is a new publication available from the Sentencing Project. It describes each state’s laws and practices and illustrates the extraordinary variety and complexity of state and federal laws that impose a continuing burden on convicted persons long after their court-imposed sentence has been fully discharged. Click here for a chart that describes the laws in each state. There are state-by-state reports in the Resource Guide with information about how individuals can go about restoring their voting rights.
This information is important as a recent article in the Oklahoman showed. “Prison guards, fellow inmates and even agency workers told Rick Foreman that he would not be able to vote after serving two years for driving while under the influence. After doing his own homework and contacting the ACLU, he realized Oklahoma law does, in fact, restore the right to vote once a sentence is completed. As a result, he set up booths to educate and register others like him. ‘People were coming to me after being out of prison 20 or 30 years and said they didn’t think they could vote, and I was able to register almost all of them... It showed you that the men and women coming out of prison just didn’t know their rights, and I guarantee you that’s going on today,’ Foreman said. The Oklahoman reported that once an individual is convicted of a felony, the State Election Board is notified and one’s voting rights are suspended. However, when an individual is released, no one is responsible for notifying the board – nor the individual.