Hundreds of thousands of citizens are barred from voting in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Virginia’s elections this November. And whether they get to participate in future elections will be perversely decided by those who are already allowed to vote.
The electoral process “implicates every single thing about my current state, so to deny people the right to vote perpetuates an intolerable condition on human beings,” Shelton McElroy, a member of the grassroots group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) who is disenfranchised himself, said in reference to Kentucky’s exceptionally harsh criminal disenfranchisement laws. People who are barred from voting are organizing around the country to expand voting rights.