Get to know Restore the Vote stats, courtesy of Dr. Chris Uggen, Regents Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and the paper he co-authored “Locked Out 2022: Estimates of People Denied Voting Rights.”

NATIONAL PICTURE

Laws in 48 states ban people with felony convictions from voting, an estimated 4.6 million Americans in 2022. Two percent of the voting-age population is ineligible to vote.

There’s a national trend toward reenfranchising people who are no longer incarcerated: Eight states have restored the vote to all non-incarcerated people in just the past six years.

• An estimated 4.6 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. That’s down 24 percent since 2016 as more states enacted policies to curtail this practice and state prison populations declined modestly. 

• Three out of four people disenfranchised live in their communities, having completed their sentences or remaining supervised on probation or parole. 

• One in 19 Black Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, which is 5.3% of adult Black Americans. That rate is 3.5 times the rate for non-Black Americans.

• Conservatively, at least 506,000 Latinx Americans – 1.7 percent of the voting-eligible population – are disenfranchised. 

NOTE: The data in the report is based on estimates, not headcounts, which were unstable during the pandemic. 

MINNESOTA

Disenfranchisement among Black adults is about 4.4X higher than disenfranchisement among the total adult population and about 5.3X higher than among non-Black adults.