Exactly two weeks before the general election, on October 22nd, a group of volunteers from the Vote in NYC Jails Coalition held a rally in front of City Hall. The Coalition, made of voting rights attorneys, formerly incarcerated people, and advocates from different organizations dedicated to criminal justice, leads the efforts to ensure Rikers Island Prison Complex detainees can exercise their right to vote.
Between chants of “No polling site on Rikers Island is silent violence,” the volunteers advocated for equal voting access for incarcerated people and polling sites with voting machines and election inspectors on Rikers Island, situated on an island in the East River, just above Queens.
“For me, it’s a continuation of slavery, Jim Crow-ism, disenfranchisement, abolition of voices,” Victor Pate (pictured above), a member of the Coalition, told the crowd. “As long as this process is still being worked out the way that it is, people […] do not have full opportunity to be civically engaged.”
In New York, people who are convicted of a felony cannot vote while incarcerated. However, pre-trial detainees are eligible to vote just like other detainees charged with misdemeanors. According to data collected by the New York City Department of Correction (DOC), 83% of the people in Rikers are held pretrial.
But only a fraction of the over 6,000 people currently incarcerated at Rikers have the chance to vote with the current voting system.
At Rikers, detainees can only cast their votes through absentee ballots since they cannot physically go to a polling place like voters outside do. The Coalition has been advocating to improve voting access for detainees since 2020, but progress has been slow, volunteers say, so they periodically hold rallies to ask the Department of Correction and the Board of Elections for greater commitment to tackle this issue.
The voting process for the incarcerated population can vary state by state, but polling sites in jails have been tested in many locations. In 2020, when Cook County Jail in Chicago established on-site polling places, 1,553 detainees casted their vote in comparison to the 434 who voted through absentee ballot the previous year. Colorado just passed a new bill in June to implement an in-person voting program, ensuring people under custody have access to a polling site for at least six hours in the days before Election Day.
In New York State, legislative proposals to implement access to on-site polling places are in the making.
Pate was formerly incarcerated at Rikers and endured the trauma of solitary confinement; he is now the Co-Director of the HALT Solitary Campaign and advocates for a more humane treatment of detainees and the end of solitary confinement.
“Although they are in a different physical situation, they still should be afforded the opportunity to be engaged with our community,” he told the group, adding that civic engagement is an essential part of the rehabilitative process, and voting gives people a chance to contribute to shaping the policies that will affect them.
Senator Zellnor Myrie, sponsored a bill in May 2023 to authorize polling places at correctional facilities. Then Larice Walker, Assemblywoman for the 55th district, introduced it to the Assembly in March 2024, but the legislative process will likely take time.
For the April primary, 296 detainees at Rikers had requested absentee ballots through the Coalition, but the Board of Elections only returned 171 ballots to the Department of Correction to be filled by the detainees, and the BOE didn’t disclose the number of votes that were ultimately counted, according to the Coalition.
One of the main challenges the Coalition faces is access to Rikers.
Claire Stottlemyer, an attorney at The Legal Aid Society who supports the organization of the volunteering trips, says that they are not able to reach the entire population of Rikers Island.
“We’re not the Board of Elections, so we’re not a voting agency that can really ensure people’s voices are heard,” she said.
Stottlemyer added that an on-site polling place would allow them to overcome this lengthy process where the forms have to travel back and forth between the detainees and the Board of Elections with the Department of Correction as an intermediary.
The Vote in NYC Jails Coalition coordinates with the DOC to organize trips to Rikers with a small group of volunteers once or twice a month to register detainees and help them fill in absentee ballot forms. It is the Department of Correction that decides which facility of the jail complex the volunteers are going to visit. On a typical day, the group registers between 50 and 70 people. Then, Selwyn Fergus, senior program liaison, who leads the civic engagement initiative, carries the forms to the board of elections in Queens.
According to several volunteers, a certain number of ballots are often rejected for unclear reasons.
“What we’ve seen, historically, is that ballots get rejected, and the person is never told why or given an opportunity to fix that,” Stottlemyer said. “If you were not incarcerated in a jail, you would have that opportunity.”
Members of the Coalition said access to education is another problem as the people held in Rikers cannot get informed like regular voters who have access to a variety of sources, but only receive information through DOC.
Cesar Ruiz, associate counsel at Latino Justice, one of the organizations in the Coalition, said they sometimes faced delays or had to argue over the type of educational material that could get in.
“These are individuals that have been put into the system in very inhumane ways and that haven’t been educated about civic engagement or engaged in ways that they feel like they’re a part of democracy,” Ruiz said. “For us, it’s not enough to just give someone a ballot and tell them to vote.”
Fergus, with the DOC, said detainees have access to tablets, where they can consult a voter guide in English and Spanish and see information about the candidates, and hard copies of the material. He added that the detainees can also use the tablets to contact him through a form and express their interest in voting.
Jan Combopiano, a member of the Brooklyn Voters Alliance – a grassroots organization dedicated to expanding voting rights in New York State – participated in the last trip to Rikers before the elections, on Wednesday, October 23rd. The DOC led the group to the Rose M. Singer Center, the only women’s facility on Rikers. Combopiano mentioned she did not see any voter guides in that location.
Combopiano said some women were excited when they realized they were eligible to vote, as they didn’t expect that, and a few people recognized Assemblywoman Walker, who was part of the volunteering group, and thanked her for being there.
“It really showed everyone who was there, they still matter,” Combopiano said. “The fact that we were there asking them if they wanted to register to vote meant something to them.”
But, the volunteers also encountered some challenges.
Combopiano, Stottlemyer, and Lily Carattini, another attorney of the Legal Aid Society, said they had to insist on having the forms delivered promptly. According to the group, initially, Fergus did not want to bring the new forms filled by the detainees to the Board of Elections until the following Monday, the day they normally deliver the forms, but the deadline to register for an absentee ballot was coming up before that, on Saturday, October 27th.
Valerie Greisokh, assistant commissioner of Programs and Community Partnerships, who works closely with Fergus, said the DOC tracks all the registration applications and absentee ballot requests before delivering them to the Board of Elections, so Fergus and his team had to carry out that process first, but they were ultimately able to deliver the documents before the deadline.
Language is an ulterior barrier incarcerated people may have to deal with in the voting process.
According to the Population Demographics Report from the Department of Correction, as of June 2024, 88.6% of the people incarcerated at Rikers were African American and Hispanic.
Jordana Maria Suriel, a 26-year-old student at Columbia School of Social Work who was participating in the volunteering as an intern for The Legal Aid Society, said one of the women only spoke Spanish, so she translated the forms and helped her register.
The woman, she says, was relieved that someone spoke Spanish and told Suriel she wouldn’t have registered if it wasn’t for her.
Greisokh said that, since the beginning of the year, the DOC has registered a record of 1,000 detainees. She also pointed out that there are detainees that choose not to vote, and others that might have requested an absentee ballot but then are released or sentenced to state prison, and they are no longer in Rikers when the time to vote comes.
At the end of the volunteering, the Coalition had registered 32 people, less than their typical visit average. They said it was partially due to the fact many women were busy with other programs that day.
Members of the group said they wished they could reach all the incarcerated people on Rikers. Still, many of the volunteers say the experience was overall a good and positive one. “I was pleasantly surprised at how excited the women who did sign up were to vote,” Carattini said.
“They were very motivated, and very interested in the voting process.”
(Photo credit: Alice Finno)
About the author(s)
Alice Finno
Alice Finno is an Italian reporter based in New York City, covering climate and social justice issues. She is an M.S. candidate at Columbia Journalism School.