Robert Rose III was released from Sing Sing Prison on October 2, 2019. Three days later, he registered to vote at the DMV. The next week, he got his voting card in the mail.
When election day arrived, Rose, now 51, was one of the first 20 people at the polling station on 140th Street and Riverside Drive in Harlem.
Rose, originally from Brooklyn Heights, remembers the moment vividly.
“You walk in, and you look for your district,” he said. “They have the placards up, and they look you up on the tablet. They find your name on the roll, then hand you the ballot. Then you fill it out and put it in the machine.”
After more than 24 years of incarceration for a homicide-related offense, Rose couldn’t wait to share the experience.
“We’d show the picture of the ‘I voted’ sticker in social media groups,” he said. “We’d put it on and wear it all day.”
For Rose, who has since been conditionally pardoned, voting symbolized redemption.
“I was just in prison, and now I’m part of the community,” Rose recalled. “I’m part of the civic process. I’m back.”
Rose’s experience resonates with many at a time of increased cultural relevance for the formerly incarcerated community. The 2024 election pits ex-prosecutor and current Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Donald Trump, who was convicted in May of 34 felonies in a hush-money case.
In 2021, New York State passed a law restoring the right to vote for those convicted of felonies upon their release. The law mandates that former felons have the right to vote immediately, even if they are on parole or have a term of post-release supervision.
“There’s this notion that once you get entangled in the criminal legal system, you don’t have the ability to vote,” said Mike Wessler of the Prison Policy Initiative, a mass incarceration research organization. “That’s just not true.”
Felony disenfranchisement—the suspension or withdrawal of voting rights for a felony conviction—still impacts millions in the United States. According to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group, an estimated 4 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. While no state retains blanket bans on felony voting rights, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, Arizona, and Tennessee have some of the most prohibitive felony voting restrictions, while Florida has the largest number of disenfranchised voters who have been convicted of felonies, according to data from the Sentencing Project.
Trump is still eligible to vote in Florida, where he is registered, for two reasons. First, since Trump was convicted in New York, the laws in that state take precedence. A person only loses the right to vote in New York while incarcerated. In addition, the judge has not yet adjudicated his conviction, so, despite being convicted, Trump has not technically been labeled a felon by the state yet.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 19 million people in the United States are currently convicted of a felony. Nicole D. Porter of The Sentencing Project said disenfranchisement is a “collateral consequence” of conviction. Porter said one of the biggest barriers to changing perceptions about convicts’ right to vote is misinformation.
“Laws have changed over the last 27 years,” Porter said. “Even election officials in some states are misinformed.”
Porter called for a concerted effort by government officials to communicate who is eligible.
“They don’t make it known,” she said. “From state offices to election officials to members of the community.”
A sleeping giant?
Formerly incarcerated people can still have a political impact, especially in local elections, which are often decided by hundreds of votes.
Neil Volz of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition said the formerly incarcerated vote could influence the national election.
“The formerly convicted population in battleground states is bigger than what the spread has been in any of the polling or margins we have seen in previous years,” he said.
People with felony convictions can now vote in Florida after the passage of Amendment 4 in 2018, which ended the lifetime ban on voting for nearly 1.5 million people. However, fines and fees related to their release may hold up full restoration of their rights.
Despite the progress in ending felony voting bans, political campaigns, advocates say, usually overlook the formerly incarcerated community.
“It is not particularly a demographic we’ve been looking at,” said Jose Peo, the campaign manager for Gregg Sadwick, a Republican running for New York’s 25th Congressional District seat in the Rochesteer area. The district has the second-highest incarceration rate in the state.
“I’m not sure how we could even target that market,” Peo said.
Volz said the coalition has conducted surveys with over 10,000 formerly incarcerated voters on its top policy priorities.
“Access to employment and housing are one and one-A,” he said.
Kenyatta Hughes, 50, who was released from Sing Sing in 2019 after a murder conviction, says formerly incarcerated voters want to see that people running for government are committed to dismantling systems of oppression.
“These communities are acutely aware of the disproportionate way in which the agencies that support them and the agencies that police them are funded,” Hughes said.
“It’s a machine,” Hughes said. “They should acknowledge it and say the way in which we can change that machine so our kids aren’t caught up in it,”
Charles Moore, a formerly incarcerated staff member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, said campaigns should keep their messages simple.
“You have to tell people what you’re going to do for them,” Moore said. “Making it easier to find a job if you have a felony conviction, making background checks illegal, something to that effect.”
A split decision
When asked who she planned on voting for, Tara Diaz, 43, sighed.
“I’m so confused right now,” Diaz said, citing disappointment in how Biden and Harris have addressed immigration.
Diaz, who was released in March of 2022 after serving five years in prison for felony robbery, said she is leaning toward Trump.
“He’s so raw with how he feels and how he expresses himself—a lot of people want to speak like that,” said Diaz, who is from Coney Island, Brooklyn. “He’s doing it for us.”
Hughes, who lives near Newburgh, NY, said he plans to vote for Kamala Harris.
“You can’t achieve what she has, as a black woman, without being brilliant” Hughes said. “And I’m excited to vote against a bunch of things that Donald Trump represents,” he said.
Still, Hughes isn’t surprised that some formerly incarcerated people are considering Trump.
“Trump represents a certain type of grifter and counter-culture behavior that resonates with a lot of people,” he said.
“To see someone like Trump, who seems to be pimping the system,” Hughes said. “There’s a set of folks who are like, ‘yo, that’s gangsta.’”
Some in the formerly incarcerated community don’t want to participate in the system at all.
Tim Griffin, 41, of Bridgeport, CT, spent more than 22 years in Connecticut prisons for felony murder and robbery. Despite being out for three years, he has never voted. He doesn’t plan to.
“History really does repeat itself,” said Griffin, who studied social issues during his incarceration. “Even though people like to say we’ve come a long way, we’re still complaining about the things we were complaining about back then.”
“I don’t want to vote for the lesser of evils,” Griffin said. “Someone said that they wanted to vote for Kamala…Man, it’s still evil! There is no lesser.”
Rose said he’s leaning toward Harris, but he isn’t thrilled about it.
“I’ve considered voting for a third party, like Jill Stein or Cornel West,” he said. “But would that protest vote give Trump the edge to win?”
Most people interviewed for this story agree that, regardless of who formerly incarcerated people are voting for, the most important thing to them is that they can.
“At the end of the day,” Charles Moore said, “I’m happy that you’re voting, regardless of who you’re voting for.”
(Photo courtesy of Robert Rose III)
About the author(s)
Andrew Mercein
Andrew Mercein is a magazine columnist, Substack author, TV producer and master's degree candidate at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.