(FiveThirtyEight)
Last month, during a CNN town hall featuring several Democratic candidates, Sen. Bernie Sanders helped reignite a national conversation when he said people in prison should have the right to vote. It’s a controversial question, even within the Democratic Party. At the same town hall, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said that he does not support extending voting rights to the incarcerated, drawing applause from the largely Democratic audience.
From ABC News:
Despite the issue’s recent rise to prominence, the question of whether and when felons should be allowed to vote has been percolating at the state level for a while now, as it overlaps with a broader progressive voting-rights agenda, criminal justice reform efforts, and pushes for racial equality (felon disenfranchisement disproportionately affects black Americans). A handful of states have recently restored certain felons’ right to vote, most notably Florida, where the passage of Amendment 4 in the 2018 midterm elections restored voting rights to an estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million people.1 But how big an impact would restoring the vote to felons really have, and how much support is there for it? Read more