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disenfranchisement
Missouri's Racist Gerrymander Is an Attack on Working Voters
As these attacks target communities of color, we’re witnessing the systematic disenfranchisement of people who’ve fought hardest for economic justice and workers’ rights.
Sep 13, 2025
As a Wendy’s worker, mother of two, and leader with Missouri Workers Center and Stand Up KC in Kansas City, I’ve dedicated my life to fighting for working families. I’ve worked in fast food for over 20 years, and I know what it means to struggle to barely make ends meet while corporations make record profits off our backs.
Today, I’m writing as someone who believes deeply in democracy, especially as a group of anti-worker Missouri lawmakers prepare to divide our community so that they can silence our voices, including my own.
States usually redraw electoral district boundaries every 10 years following the US Census to account for population shifts and demographic changes. But for political reasons, Texas lawmakers have gone ahead and redrawn their political map. And now several other states, including Missouri, are trying to do the same thing.
The NAACP is suing the State of Missouri to stop this action, calling it an “unconstitutional redistricting process” and a “blatant effort to silence Black voters and strip them of their fundamental rights.”
In Missouri’s 5th Congressional District, where I live, the clear aim of this gerrymandering is to dilute the voting power of Black and brown communities instead of letting us choose leaders who reflect our values. This isn’t just politics as usual. It’s a calculated assault on democracy and a power grab for an elite few.
As these attacks target communities of color, we’re witnessing the systematic disenfranchisement of people who’ve fought hardest for economic justice and workers’ rights. These same corporate-backed lawmakers recently repealed guaranteed sick days for more than 700,000 workers, including me and my coworkers.
My community deserves a voice in choosing our representation instead of having politicians strip it away—politicians who care more about protecting themselves instead of the people they were elected to represent.
A couple years ago, I got sick with what I thought was the flu. I didn’t have health insurance, so I couldn’t see a doctor. I stayed home from my shift at Taco Bell to protect my coworkers and customers from a potentially contagious illness. I was already falling behind on rent after management cut my hours prior to getting sick, and taking time to recover was the final straw. I missed $450—over half my rent. I came home from work to an eviction notice. My son Rashaad and I lost our home.
As a parent, few things are more heartbreaking than not being able to care for your children properly. Had I been able to take a few days off while still getting paid, we could have stayed housed. I couldn’t help getting sick, but the greedy corporation I worked for chose to abandon me as soon as I stopped making them rich.
If I had paid sick days, that wouldn’t happen. And ironically enough, I previously helped win paid sick days through a ballot initiative. Despite promises to respect the will of the people, Missouri politicians sided with big business over working families and overturned our right to paid leave. By gutting this policy, these corporate-backed politicians didn’t just force workers like me to go to work sick—they stole money from our pockets and food from our cupboards.
This redistricting scheme is clearly part of a two-pronged plan to suppress voter participation and double down on attacking the rights of working people. In fact, they’re using the same special session they’ve called to pass redistricting to also destroy a 115-year old ballot initiative process in our state constitution that won us—across party lines—paid leave, Medicaid expansion, and restored abortion rights.
But working people like me don’t back down when our lives are on the line. We stay committed to the fight for our rights, from the streets, to the strike line, to the statehouse. My community deserves a voice in choosing our representation instead of having politicians strip it away—politicians who care more about protecting themselves instead of the people they were elected to represent.
We were already living in modern-day economic slavery. Now they’re trying to put us in political slavery too. But we won’t let them. Across this country, working people will not be silenced or divided. Our political leaders need to stop trying to rig the rules and let the people decide who represents us.
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Mass Disenfranchisement for Felony Convictions Makes US an 'Outlier Nation'
"The right to vote, and the legitimacy of the democratic system in the United States, should not depend on its criminal legal system, which is built upon and perpetuates discrimination," said an advocate with Human Rights Watch.
Jun 27, 2024
The common U.S. practice of stripping the franchise from people with criminal convictions leaves the country "out of step with the rest of the world," according to a report published Thursday by the Sentencing Project, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU.
Despite recent progress in some states, the groups estimated that more than 4.4 million U.S. residents were disenfranchised because of a felony conviction as of 2022, and "thousands more eligible voters were unable to cast their ballot because they were in prison."
"The states with the most restrictive disenfranchisement laws are those with the highest percentages of Black and Latinx people," the new report notes. "Eleven U.S. states permanently disenfranchise at least some people with felony convictions for the rest of their lives. Fourteen U.S. states disenfranchise people both for the duration of their prison sentence and, upon their return to the community, during the time they are under parole or felony probation supervision. An additional state, Louisiana, restores voting rights to people on felony probation and parole once they have been out of prison for five years or more."
"Twenty-three states restore voting rights to people when they return to the community from prison," the report adds, "although at least four states that otherwise restore voting rights after a felony conviction permanently disenfranchise residents for certain election practices."
The 55-page analysis places U.S. disenfranchisement laws alongside the practices of 136 other countries with populations over 1.5 million people and concludes that the U.S.—with its "punitive criminal legal system" and high incarceration rates—is an "outlier nation."
"Wide access to voting is a cornerstone of rights-respecting, democratic government."
More than half of the countries examined in the report "never or rarely deny a person's right to vote because of a conviction." When placed among the remaining countries "where laws deny the right in broader sets of circumstances," the report states, "the U.S. is toward the restrictive end of the spectrum and disenfranchises, largely through U.S. state law, a wider swath of people on the whole."
"In five countries—the Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Morocco, and Togo—people whose convictions fall in certain categories are disenfranchised permanently," the report observes. "These five countries are in the same category with the 11 U.S. states that permanently disenfranchise at least some people convicted of felonies."
Alison Leal Parker, deputy U.S. director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that "wide access to voting is a cornerstone of rights-respecting, democratic government, which is why the right to vote is protected in international human rights law and why the U.S. should reform its outlier status on voting rights."
"The right to vote, and the legitimacy of the democratic system in the United States, should not depend on its criminal legal system, which is built upon and perpetuates discrimination," said Parker.
While a number of states have moved in recent years to loosen voting restrictions for people with felony convictions and restore the franchise at the time of a person's release from incarceration, just four U.S. jurisdictions—Vermont, Maine, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.—allow people to vote while they are imprisoned.
Late last year, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) introduced legislation that would guarantee voting rights to incarcerated citizens and end felony disenfranchisement in federal elections. The bill has just five cosponsors in the Senate and 25 in the House, even though polling data has shown a majority of Americans support guaranteeing voting rights to all, including incarcerated people.
The new report calls on the United States to "end felony disenfranchisement and extend voting rights to all otherwise voting-eligible persons without regard to their criminal legal system contact or convictions." It also recommends that the country eliminate all requirements that citizens pay court-related fines before being allowed to vote again—a practice the report calls a "modern-day poll tax."
"In the United States, this policy is rooted in historical practices intended to reduce electoral participation of citizens of color who would otherwise be eligible to vote," the human rights groups wrote.
Jonathan Topaz, a staff attorney with the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said Thursday that "even as we've seen more U.S. states make progress in expanding rights restoration, there remain substantial challenges to voter access."
"Convoluted rights restoration laws have resulted in voter confusion about eligibility among returning citizens," said Topaz "Additionally, in many states, returning citizens become eligible to vote only upon payment of various legal financial obligations such as fees, costs, fines, and/or restitution, which essentially institutes a pay-to-vote system. These obstacles must be abolished to ensure full civic participation."
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Advocates Applaud House Push to Restore Voting Rights to Formerly Incarcerated People
"After 50 years of mass incarceration in America—and 50 years of stripping voting rights from justice-impacted individuals—it's time for a better path forward," said one advocate.
Jul 28, 2023
Voting rights and criminal justice reform advocates on Thursday applauded U.S. House Democrats for reintroducing legislation to end the disenfranchisement of 3.5 million people who are barred from voting in federal elections due to their past prison sentences—part of what Rep. Valerie Foushee, a co-sponsor of the bill, called the country's "long history of weaponizing incarceration status."
Foushee (D-N.C.) was one of six Democrats to introduce the Democracy Restoration Act, led by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas.).
The bill would end the denial of federal voting rights to people who have been incarcerated for felony convictions and would provide outreach to people with past convictions about their newly restored right to participate in elections, eliminating what the Sentencing Project called "the complicated patchwork of state laws that creates a lack of uniform standards for voting in federal elections, exacerbates racial disparities in access to the ballot box, and contributes to confusion and misinformation regarding voting rights."
Twenty-four states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico currently allow formerly incarcerated people to vote in state and local elections, but they cannot participate in federal elections. People on felony probation or parole cannot vote in 25 states, and in 11 states a conviction can lead to lifetime disenfranchisement.
"There's no justification for denying people who have paid their dues a voice in our democracy," said co-sponsor Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.), who spoke at a press conference on the bill on Thursday.
Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), and Greg Casar (D-Texas) are also co-sponsors of the House bill, while Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) introduced the legislation in the Senate in May.
"It's in our values to say that a second chance is part of America," said Cardin at the press conference.
Recent polling from Stand Up America, the Sentencing Project, and other groups has shown that a majority of Americans believe the right to vote should be extended to all Americans regardless of past incarceration—a move that Nicole D. Porter of the Sentencing Project noted would end the United States' status as "an international outlier."
"After 50 years of mass incarceration in America—and 50 years of stripping voting rights from justice-impacted individuals—it's time for a better path forward," said Porter, senior director of advocacy for the group. "By empowering justice-impacted people with the right to vote, we strengthen the principles of fairness and equality in our democracy. That's why The Sentencing Project will continue to support legislative efforts that protect and expand the right to vote for all people impacted by the criminal legal system, including those currently in prison."
A policy brief by the Sentencing Project earlier this year explained how enfranchising formerly incarcerated people is a public safety measure, helping to reduce recidivism, as well as a way to advance criminal justice reform.
"Voting is among a range of prosocial behaviors in which justice-impacted persons can partake, like getting a college education, that is associated with reduced criminal conduct," the April report read. "Among Americans with a history of criminal legal system involvement, having the right to vote or the act of voting is related to reduced recidivism. The re-entry process after incarceration improves because restoring voting rights gives citizens the sense that their voice can be heard in the political process, and contributes to building an individual's positive identity as a community member."
Stand Up America founder and president Sean Eldridge said the bill is a step away from "a racist relic of the Jim Crow era."
"By introducing legislation to restore voting rights, Democrats in Congress are taking an important step toward acknowledging the injustice of these laws and building momentum to rectify them," said Eldridge. "Americans returning to their communities should have a say in who represents them in government and the policies that affect their lives—from the quality of their kids' education to access to parks and clean water—just like everyone else."
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SCOTUS to Rule on 'Textbook Example' of Racist Gerrymandering
A federal court ruled earlier this year that the 2011 redistricting did constitute racially-motivated gerrymandering and ordered the lines to be redrawn, though voters challenged the new districts as well.
Jun 27, 2016
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will soon weigh in on whether North Carolina's redistricting relied too heavily on race, deliberately clustering large populations of black voters into two districts in an attempt to diminish their influence and sway election results.
The Hill reports:
North Carolina citizens bringing the case forward argued that the redrawn lines were a "textbook example of racial gerrymandering" that violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
They claimed North Carolina lawmakers packed black voters from "disparate black communities" into the 1st Congressional District and 12th Congressional District.
A federal court ruled earlier this year that the 2011 redistricting did constitute racially motivated gerrymandering and ordered the lines to be redrawn, though voters challenged the new districts as well. According to Politico's Josh Gerstein, "The latest revision of the map is expected to preserve a 10-to-3 Republican-Democratic split in the state's U.S. House delegation."
Nonetheless, North Carolina Republican Gov. Patrick McCrory and the state Board of Elections petitioned the Supreme Court to weigh in on the lower court ruling, claiming that "the trial court's finding of racial gerrymandering was based on erroneous fact-finding," Courthouse News Service reports.
As the Supreme Court will now consider the case when it reconvenes this fall, the maps will unlikely change before November's presidential election.
North Carolina's voter suppression efforts have come under increased scrutiny since the passage in 2013 of House Bill 589, which eliminated same-day registration, required strict forms of voter ID, and shortened the early voting period, among other things. Citing the widespread disenfranchisement caused by these and other new voting restrictions, voting rights advocates across the nation are pressuring federal lawmakers to restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act before the upcoming election.
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Race and the Crime of Felony Disenfranchisement
Mar 03, 2016
Now that Super Tuesday is behind us and the field of presidential candidates is narrowing with the suspension of Dr. Ben Carson's campaign, a potentially paradigm-shattering general election looms ever closer. "The stakes in this election have never been higher," Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said in her speech after she had been declared the victor over Sen. Bernie Sanders in seven of 11 Super Tuesday states. As Donald Trump, piling victory upon victory on top of insult upon insult, edges closer to clinching the Republican nomination, the GOP is in chaos, with some predicting a historic split in the party. The presidential race to date has been well-characterized by a line of closed captioning text from a recent Republican debate: "unintelligible yelling." The circuslike atmosphere masks deeply troubling statements made by several candidates who fan the flames of racism, white supremacy, and xenophobia. It also deflects attention from a critical and worsening deficit in our democracy: the attack on the right to vote, and in particular, the wholesale disenfranchisement of close to 5 million Americans, mostly people of color.
Race has been a defining issue in the 2016 election season. On the Republican side, there are overtly racist statements by front-runner Donald Trump, railing against Mexicans as "rapists" and refusing to denounce the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke after Duke endorsed him. Trump said of an African-American protester who Trump supporters attacked at one of his rallies, "Maybe he should have been roughed up." Trump is also a proud retweeter of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. When asked by NBC's Chuck Todd if he wanted to be associated with a fascist, Trump replied, "I want to be associated with interesting quotes."
Republicans fear that a Donald Trump candidacy will cost their party not only a shot at the White House but also control of the Senate and House of Representatives. That is where the torrent of restrictive voting laws comes in. The American Civil Liberties Union has noted that 10 states will be implementing new restrictive voting laws that will impact up to 80 million voters and could decide the assignment of 129 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win the election. Dale Ho of the ACLU writes, "These laws range from new hurdles to registration to cutbacks on early voting to strict voter identification requirements."
Denial of the right to vote for those who have been convicted of felonies is another way that voter participation is suppressed on a massive scale. With only 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Laws vary from state to state. Maine and Vermont allow prisoners to vote, but as of 2014, according to The Sentencing Project, every other state and the District of Columbia have some form of disenfranchisement as a consequence of a felony. In 12 states, the right to vote is stripped permanently. That means even when people have served their sentence and paid their debt to society, they can never vote again. These states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming.
According to a 2002 study by sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, "If disenfranchised felons in Florida had been permitted to vote, Democrat Gore would certainly have carried the state and the election." The Sentencing Project, in a 2014 report, summarized, "Nationwide, one in every 13 black adults cannot vote as the result of a felony conviction, and in three states--Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia--more than one in five black adults is disenfranchised."
Ari Berman, author of "Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America," said on the "Democracy Now!" news hour: "More than 5 million Americans can't vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws. Voter disenfranchisement is another legacy of Jim Crow that we are still wrestling with today."
This is just one of the many devastating impacts of mass incarceration in the United States. And Republicans aren't the only ones responsible. That is why Black Lives Matter activists have been interrupting Democratic presidential campaign events. During a recent private fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in Charleston, South Carolina, Ashley Williams held up a banner reading "We have to bring them to heel," a reference to controversial statements Hillary Clinton made in 1996 about some youth whom she called "superpredators." Williams confronted Clinton, saying, "I am not a superpredator." She was quickly whisked away. On Super Tuesday, a young Somali-American woman confronted Clinton in Minneapolis about those same comments.
The struggle for racial justice and voting rights are inextricably linked. Race is indeed central to this year's race for the White House.
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A Survey of Felon Voting Rights on Super Tuesday
Laws preventing ex-offenders from voting vary across the country, and disenfranchise millions.
Mar 01, 2016
Millions of Americans will cast ballots on Super Tuesday and in November, but many people will have no choice but to stay away from the polls. State felony disenfranchisement laws in 48 states prevent nearly six million citizens from exercising their voting rights, according to a 2015 Sentencing Project policy brief. More than two million, or nearly 40 percent, of these disenfranchised people are African American.
Felon voting laws vary widely, from allowing convicts to vote while in prison to permanent disenfranchisement. Several Super Tuesday states allow some ex-offenders to vote if they meet certain conditions. Although Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe relaxed some of the rules regarding restoring voting rights to ex-felons, people who served time for violent offenses must wait three years before applying to have their rights restored. They also must not have any outstanding fines, damages owed to victims, or court costs. In the Old Dominion State, the racial disparities are particularly pronounced: 20 percent of black adults in Virginia are disenfranchised.
In Tennessee, people who have committed certain violent and sexual crimes are permanently banned from voting. Notably, the Volunteer State also bars ex-felons from voting if they are not up-to-date on child-support payments. But similar to Virginia, certain Tennessee ex-felons are eligible to vote: Those who are eligible can apply for restoration of their voting rights only after they have completed their entire sentence or fulfilled any parole or probation conditions and have paid any court-ordered restitution damages.
Wyoming, which holds its Republican caucus on Super Tuesday, passed a law in 2015 that required the state's Department of Corrections to issue a certificate of voting rights to first-time, nonviolent offenders after their release from prison. Prior to this change, first-time nonviolent offenders in Wyoming could only apply to have their voting rights restored five years after completing parole and probation. (People convicted of violent or multiple offenses are permanently disenfranchised.)
The movement to end disenfranchisement has a broad base of support from criminal justice reform advocates and voting-rights advocates alike. And getting ex-offenders registered to vote is a successful re-entry strategy. "Over the last few decades, a lot of states have been taking positive steps," says Tomas Lopez, a counsel at the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law. "We want people civically engaged."
Elsewhere, Maryland recently changed its policies on felony disenfranchisement. Democratic state lawmakers introduced a bill that sought to restore voting rights to felons upon their release from prison rather than having people wait until they complete parole and probation.
The bills passed the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support only to be vetoed by Republican Governor Larry Hogan. However, state lawmakers overrode the governor's veto, restoring voting rights to 40,000 Marylanders. "If you're living and working in the community, you're allowed to vote," says Lopez, describing the new law.
In an attempt to alleviate overcrowded prisons, California lawmakers passed a series of bills in 2011 that would have placed low-level felony offenders under community supervision in county jails. They allowed others to be monitored by county agencies instead of state parole boards.
But California's then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen ruled that community supervision was essentially the same as being on parole, so felons being monitored by counties were still ineligible to vote. Three years later, civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of California, sued Bowen, asserting that she had stripped tens of thousands of citizens of their right to vote.
Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo sided with the civil rights groups, but the state appealed the ruling. Last year, current California Secretary of State Alex Padilla finally dropped the appeal, which effectively restored voting rights to 60,000 Golden State ex-offenders.
Kentucky made some strides and then saw a reversal. Former governor Steve Beshear, a Democrat, issued an executive order that restored voting rights to approximately 100,000 citizens with nonviolent felony convictions. However, new Republican Governor Matt Bevin reversed the order during his first days in office last December, saying that the matter must be left to the state lawmakers and the "will of the people." Even though restoring the right to vote in Kentucky had bipartisan support, the Bluegrass State now rejoins Iowa and Florida as the three states that have permanently disenfranchised felons, no matter what type of crime they have committed.
This sort of backtracking is troubling. "Denying the right to vote to an entire class of citizens is deeply problematic to a democratic society and counterproductive to effective reentry," the Sentencing Project concluded in its report.
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