Since 2018, Coachella Valley resident Becki Robinson and a group of volunteers from Courageous Resistance of the Desert have registered more than 1,500 voters via drives held at the Mary Pickford Is D’Place Theater, the Cathedral City Library and Palm Springs VillageFest. The nonpartisan drives help people register to vote, update their information or change their party affiliation. For Robinson, getting just one person signed up at these events makes them worth the effort.
But this year, Robinson has a focus on one specific group: People who have been convicted of felonies. More than once, someone has told the volunteers they can’t vote because they have a felony conviction, or are on parole after serving prison time. But under California law, they are probably eligible to register to vote.
“Many would like to register, but the lack of clear information and fear of being arrested again keeps them from doing so,” Robinson said. “They deserve to know that they, like everyone else, have the right to vote once they’ve served their time.”
California voters in November 2020 passed Proposition 17, which restored the right to vote to people with felony convictions; after they finish serving their prison term, they can re-register. An estimated 50,000 people have regained voting rights thanks to the law. In 2022, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 504 to require the Secretary of State to provide county elections officials with information on who would be eligible to re-register going forward.
Despite these laws, Robinson believes many people remain unaware—and disenfranchised.
“I haven’t met a single person who has received the notice they were supposed to get from the state saying their voting rights were restored,” she said.
Here’s how the process is supposed to work: The California Secretary of State (SOS) receives weekly reports from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) of people who have been released from prison, and who is on parole. The Secretary of State cross-references the names with voter-registration records to find matches. It sends that information to counties, which are supposed to send a notice to individuals explaining how to re-register.
But there’s another group of names sent to the counties: a list of people released from prison who do not come up as a match in voter-registration records. SOS spokesperson Jordan Reilly said counties are encouraged to send notices to these individuals, too, but they’re not required to do so. The SOS does not receive any confirmation from counties that notices have been sent. All county clerks and registrars of voters received a letter about this process in March 2023.
Riverside County, according to state records, has received information about 286 “matched voters” since April 2023. It has also received 2,767 names of people who do not match voter records.
The Sentencing Project, an advocacy organization working to create a more humane and equitable criminal-justice system, said the U.S. restricts more than 4.4 million people from voting because of a felony conviction.
The Independent asked Riverside County for further information on how many letters it has sent. Public information officer Elizabeth Florer declined to provide a copy of those reports, citing personal information, but confirmed that the registrar receives the aforementioned reports from the state. “Our process is we send a letter to those persons,” Florer said in an email.
Florer also said the county’s outreach team runs voter-registration and education drives, where it includes information about the felony-related registration rules.
Robinson has doubts that anyone is receiving such letters, and she wonders why more attention hasn’t been paid to this issue, given the stakes of modern elections. The last presidential election in 2020 saw nearly 81% participation among registered voters in California—but just less than 71% of the eligible population voted. Robinson wants to see that at 100%, or as close to it as possible.
“All of us have a right to vote, and we also have a responsibility to vote,” she said
Disenfranchising voters with felonies—and confusion around the registration process—is certainly not unique to California. The Sentencing Project, an advocacy organization working to create a more humane and equitable criminal-justice system, recently published a report called “Out of Step: U.S. Policy on Voting Rights in Global Perspective.” It said the U.S. restricts more than 4.4 million people from voting because of a felony conviction. That puts our country in the minority of other large nations: 73 out of 136 countries with populations of 1.5 million or more never or rarely deny a person’s right to vote because of a conviction. In the U.S., only Maine, Vermont, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico allow everyone—including people in prison—to vote.
Though states are increasingly allowing people to re-register when they are no longer in prison, The Sentencing Project said there’s still confusion, as well as a lot of obstacles. People may not know what laws have changed, or ongoing legal challenges can muddy the waters. More practically, corrections officers may not tell the citizen returning to society about the voting-rights restoration, or the paperwork can be a burden.
“Due to this legal instability, and the fact that different states have vastly different laws for voting-rights restoration, even election officials tend to be confused as to eligibility rules, which itself can exacerbate voter confusion,” the report said.
As of January 2024, about 93,900 people were incarcerated in the state. The CDCR has a budget of about $14.3 billion, or roughly 6.2% of the overall state budget. If the very same people who are living in that system are unable to re-access the election system, our democracy is failing to incorporate the perspectives of those who have lived under the rule of government in ways many of us have not.
The issue is even more critical when considering the ongoing marginalization, racial disparities and discrimination that exist in the justice system.
“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 out of and perpetuates structures of discrimination,” The Sentencing Project report said.
In lieu of a system that does not revokes someone’s right to vote in the first place, advocates need to inform the community as part of broader get-out-the-vote efforts.
In the coming weeks, Robinson’s group will be in the lobby of the Pickford theater every weekend, Tuesday and Wednesday. Their table includes information from the Secretary of State’s office about the felony-related registration rules, as well as other election-related materials, like where to find ballot-drop boxes.
“Our goal is to ensure that anyone eligible to vote knows that they can come to our events, and register to exercise their rights,” Robinson said.
The Courageous Resistance voting-registration drive will take place from 1 to 7 p.m., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays through Wednesday, Oct. 16, at Mary Pickford Is D’Place Theater, 36850 Pickfair St., in Cathedral City. To register, pre-register or check your voter status, visit registertovote.ca.gov.
Comments are closed.