When Republicans get control of government, they typically push through electoral reforms that make it easier for them to remain in power. They pass voter identification laws, limit early voting and reduce the number of polling places. In all cases, these moves are meant to reshape an area’s voting population so that it is more likely to deliver Republican election victories.

You might think Democrats do the same kinds of things, but strangely they don’t. Democratic election reform politics tends to focus either on mostly failed defensive campaigns against Republican encroachments or harsh rhetoric against the corrupting influence of money in politics. These Democratic efforts are fine, but also woefully insufficient. To really maximize their potential for success, Democrats need to take affirmative steps to expand the vote to as many favorable constituencies as they can.

Voting rights for incarcerated people can serve as a jumping off point for these anti-carceral goals

One way Democrats could do this is by adopting the principled position that no adult citizen should ever be disenfranchised, not even those who have committed crimes and are currently incarcerated. Rather than fighting a somewhat arbitrary battle over when exactly ex-offenders should have their voting rights restored, the Democratic position should be that those voting rights should never go away in the first place.

On first glance, this might seem like a radical proposal, but it is in fact the norm across most of Europe. In a report released by People’s Policy Project on Tuesday, Emmett Sanders explains that “26 European nations at least partially protect their incarcerated citizens’ right to vote, while 18 countries grant prisoners the vote regardless of the offense”. Indeed, the European Court of Human Rights has even declared that blanket bans on prisoner voting rights constitute a human rights violation.

Of course, it is not just Europe that allows prisoners to vote. Although 48 US states and the District of Columbia currently restrict the voting rights of incarcerated people, Maine and Vermont do not. Thus, it is not as if incarcerated voting is without precedent in the country or totally alien to American culture.

Enfranchising the 1.5 million people sitting in our jails and prisons will not, by itself, deliver progressive change in the country. But, given who makes up our prison population – mostly young, lower-class men and especially non-white men – expanding voting rights would move the dial in that direction. As we saw in 2000 and 2016, elections are often won by the slimmest of margins, meaning even slight changes in the composition of the electorate could pay massive dividends.

Up to 100 prisoners on short sentences to be given right to vote Read more

Beyond the narrow electoral benefits, voting rights for prisoners also serves a number of other emerging left-of-center priorities. Movements like Black Lives Matter have forced the country to reckon with the brutal and biased nature of the US criminal justice system while organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America have gone as far as to demand the abolition of prisons themselves. Both are tapping into a desire on the left to lock up fewer people and treat offenders more humanely than we currently do.

Voting rights for incarcerated people can serve as a jumping off point for these anti-carceral goals, just as drives for voting rights did during the civil rights movement. As Sanders argues in his report, extending the franchise to prisoners is a way of declaring that they are full human beings, especially in a democratic society where the ability to vote establishes the civic equality of all people.

To be sure, a proposal to enfranchise all citizens, including those who have committed heinous crimes, is likely to be unpopular at the moment and probably will be for some time. But campaigns for fundamental social change are always unpopular at first and must start somewhere.



In the near term, politicians interested in such an idea would not need to make it a central plank of their platform any more than Republicans’ campaign on voter ID laws. It would be sufficient to run an ordinary campaign on bread and butter issues and then push for the reforms once in office, leaving the responsibility of cultural transformation in the hands of activists and other social influencers.