What can you do about felony disfranchisement?  A lot depends on your interests and the situation in your state. In Rhode Island, for example, you could support a November 2006 ballot initiative to end felon disfranchisement for people living in the community. With elections coming up this November, you could get involved in voter registration campaigns, and make sure that people know about their voting rights. Most importantly, vote if you can, because many have lost that right and they need your voice.

Whatever you do, there are people and resources that can help you. Go to the map page and click on your state for further information. In many states, you will find contact information for organizations that are working against felony disfranchisement. They will help you to learn more, to become an advocate and an activist, and to speak out about the right to vote, whether it be in your family, your school, your church, or other community groups. Use the film, this website, and the ACLU’s Activist Toolkit to support you.

Getting out there and doing something is what democracy is all about. And it works. Grassroots campaigns have been at the heart of successes in changing legislation and restoring voting rights in many states. Take Connecticut, for example, where advocacy succeeded in having the right to vote restored to over 36,000 Connecticut residents with a felony conviction and on probation. If you read the report on how they did it, you will find that it involved a multiracial and multiethnic coalition of over 40 grassroots, community-based, social justice and faith-based organizations, as well as agencies working in the criminal justice system.

Other volunteers are supporting the large community of people in jails, where, unlike prisons, most people are pretrial detainees and do not lose the right to vote. Jails differ from prisons, generally incarcerating people who await trial or have been convicted of minor crimes. The ACLU developed the Voting While Incarcerated toolkit for the Right to Vote coalition to support voter registration campaigns and ensure eligible people vote from jail. The kit contains profiles of jail-based voter registration and get-out-the vote efforts and has a wealth of information that is useful to anyone working on voting from jails.

So find out. Get involved. As Congressman John Lewis puts it “Find a way to get in the way.”