United States: the Democratic debate over letting people in prison vote, explained

Bernie Sanders sparked a debate over prisoners voting rights. But most of the public and most Democrats aren’t on board.

The latest debate in the 2020 presidential race has exposed the limits of how far Democrats are willing to go on voting rights.

It began with a question to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), from a volunteer with the American Civil Liberties Union at an Iowa town hall in April: Should people in prison be allowed to vote?

Sanders said yes, and then doubled down on his answer. At a CNN town hall a couple weeks later, Sanders was asked if the Boston marathon bomber should be allowed to vote and, again, said yes. In a USA Today op-ed, he defended his position, arguing that “the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period.”

Since Sanders was first asked, other Democratic candidates have been questioned about their stances. Most other candidates have yet to say that prisoners should be given the right to vote, instead defending the right to vote only for nonviolent offenders or people who completed their sentences. Some appear undecided.

Only two states Maine and Vermont, where Sanders is from currently let people vote while they’re in prison. Other states apply restrictions based on whether someone is in prison, on probation, on parole, or has completed a sentence. (They don’t typically make a distinction on whether a person’s crime was violent or not.)

As of 2016, 6.1 million people were prevented from voting due to a felony conviction, and about 1.3 million were in state or federal prison, the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, found.

Since black Americans are more likely to go to prison, these laws have a disproportionate impact on black voters, in part reflecting their roots in the Jim Crow era: More than 20 percent of black voters were disenfranchised in Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia in 2016.

There appears to be some support for giving people convicted of felonies their voting rights back. Last fall, Florida voted to let most people with felony records vote once they complete their sentences giving the right to vote back to, potentially, more than 1 million people (although that’s now in question as Republican lawmakers place new restrictions on who can vote).

What Sanders is calling for, though, goes much further, enfranchising literally hundreds of thousands or millions of people across the country in a way that could especially benefit black voters. For some Democrats, who have paid more attention to voting rights in recent years, and for activists with the ACLU who are aiming to get candidates on the record on this topic, it’s a logical next step.

But the discussion has shown there are limits in how far even some Democrats — let alone the public are willing to go in expanding voting rights. The polls so far show that giving people in prison the right to vote is unpopular among the majority of voters and Democrats. And in a Democratic primary where so much of the attention, even beyond policy specifics, is going to finding the candidate who can beat President Donald Trump, that unpopularity is drawing concerns about whether a politically risky issue like this one should be discussed at all.

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