Felon Voting Rights Restoration
Prison gerrymandering is the practice of counting people based on where they're confined rather than where they're from. This inflates representation in areas where prisons are built and dilutes the voting power of the people who are incarcerated and their home communities.
Formerly-convicted individuals get counted in the census, hold jobs, raise families, and contribute to their communities -- why shouldn’t they have a voice in their representative government?
A federal judge ruled in an LWV of Florida case that outstanding fines cannot bar formerly incarcerated Floridians from voting.
Opinion piece from Grace Chimene, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, on the League's support of Crystal Mason-Hobbs's case seeking clarity and fairness in laws around returning citizens voting.
Florida judges and prosecutors are working with felons and public defenders to find ways to register former inmates to vote, a process approved by voters last year that Republican legislators have made more difficult.
Op-ed written by Cecile Scoon, vice president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.
The arc of justice bent briefly toward Florida in November, when citizens here restored the right to vote for most people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences. However, the state legislature devised a way to once again deprive the vote of most of the people we had hoped to re-enfranchise.
The League sent a memo to the U.S. Senate urging members to support and co-sponsor a companion bill to HR1, the For the People Act.
The League celebrates 2018 midterms voting rights victories in Florida, Maryland, and Michigan. When it came to issues of elections, voters overwhelmingly selected to expand voting rights.
The League of Women Voters of California is celebrating a historic voting rights victory: the right to vote is being restored to nearly 60,000 people who had previously been incarcerated.