Steven Witzel and Amanda Giglio
The fundamental nature of the right to vote was under scrutiny during the 2018 midterm elections, involving ongoing allegations in several states of voter suppression, eligibility and fraud. Another aspect of the right to vote was on the ballot in Florida, where voters approved a referendum that lifted the lifelong voting ban imposed on otherwise eligible voters who had been convicted of a felony. This column addresses yet another facet of the right to vote: its relative strength, as it is affected by a practice colloquially known as “prison gerrymandering” through which incarcerated people are counted as residents of the towns where they are imprisoned (rather than where they lived before they were incarcerated) for purposes of drawing parameters for legislative districts.
New York and Maryland are the only states that expressly outlaw the practice of prison gerrymandering. Instead, they require that incarcerated persons be counted as residents of their pre-incarceration addresses for representation purposes. The New York and Maryland “anti-prison gerrymandering” laws recognize that inmates are not functionally residents of the towns where their prisons are located, that they do not freely live in those towns, and if they were at liberty, they would reside where they did before they were imprisoned.
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