Tennessee, where I’ve been incarcerated for the past three decades, is notorious for felony disenfranchisement. Nearly half a million people in Tennessee are denied the right to vote, more than in any other state except Florida. As you might have guessed, Tennessee does not restore voting rights automatically upon release from prison. But what’s not common knowledge is that there are a small number of currently incarcerated people here who are already allowed to vote.
In Tennessee, anyone convicted of a felony on or before May 17, 1981, never lost the right to vote. This is often brought up in the context of helping people figure out their voter eligibility status upon release, but it also means anyone still in the state prison system is eligible to vote if they’ve been in here longer than 44 years. As the number grows smaller and smaller each year, this fact is being forgotten.
This pre-1981 exemption from voter disenfranchisement actually only goes as far back as January 15, 1973. If your conviction was prior to that, then eligibility depends on the details of the conviction itself. But very, very few people, if any, have survived prison that long.
South Central Correctional Facility, where I’ve been incarcerated for the past decade or so, still has an “Inmates Requesting to Vote Protocol.” It appears to have last been updated in March of 1996. Though you could tell that it’s old because it says to contact the election commission by fax.
Back in the 1990s, the Tennessee Department of Correction would actually give the state election commission a list of everyone eligible to vote at each prison, and then election commission officials would come in and hand out ballots to those people. I remember seeing this at facilities I was housed at in the ’90s, since of course back then there were a lot more people who’d been in prison since 1981.
Staff at South Central told Filter that the election commission officials stopped coming in after 2006; there were no longer enough eligible people left for them to consider it worth the trip. Anyone still voting from inside prison is doing it by absentee ballot now.
Tennessee is the only state that bars people from voting if they owe child support.
Felony voter disenfranchisement in the United States goes all the way back to 1792, when Kentucky ratified its state constitution with language that denied suffrage to people with certain convictions. Today, losing the right to vote while in prison remains the norm, and fewer than half the states automatically restore voting rights upon release. Some only do it upon completion of parole; or parole and probation; or parole, probation and payment on all outstanding fines and fees. And in many cases, your ability to restore your voting rights depends on your conviction.
The only US jurisdictions that don’t disenfranchise anyone based on felony convictions are Maine, Vermont, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. This means everyone is eligible to vote while in prison, not just after release. A few other states besides Tennessee have exceptions that let some small number of prisoners vote under specific circumstances.
But Tennessee has a uniquely convoluted voter restoration process for formerly incarcerated people convicted after on or after May 18, 1981. It varies by county, and requires people to file separate forms for each conviction, and to have these forms signed by a laundry list of county and correctional officials. In 2022 the state even attempted to send a Black woman back to prison for six years after she tried to register to vote when she wasn’t eligible.
Tennessee is one of the few states where more than 10 percent of Black people old enough to vote have been declared ineligible due to laws barring people with felony convictions. And, in addition to barring people from voting until they’ve paid any restitution ordered in their case, Tennessee is the only state that bars people from voting if they owe child support. This is how Tennessee has come to bar a higher proportion of people of color from voting than any other state.
The prison voting protocol here states that eligible prisoners can request an absentee ballot provided they do so at least 21 days ahead of an election, but I’d guess that anyone using this protocol is requesting their ballot much farther in advance than that if they hope to get it in time. Today there are so few people who have survived 44-plus years in here that, in my experience, barely any long-term prisoners even know that anyone in Tennessee was ever allowed to vote while incarcerated. So you can imagine the likelihood of a prisoner in their 60s or 70s being taken seriously by a 22-year-old newbie corrections officer when they try to tell them that they’re allowed to vote.
Image via City of Virginia Beach
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