• by Danielle Oster , September 19, 2024

The nation’s largest reentry organization has teamed up with the largest nonprofit, nonpartisan voting registration platform on a “Get Out The Vote” campaign ahead of the 2024 election.

The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) – which provides employment services to people recently released from incarceration – collaborated with Vote.org on the campaign, which kicked off on National Voter Registration Day, September 17.

The campaign aims to provide non-partisan education and other resources to the justice-impacted community to help them register and vote, while also highlighting the systemic voter exclusion laws and policies designed to create barriers to voting among the group, or, in some states, prevent them from voting altogether.

At the heart of the effort is a CEO voter registration hub incorporating Vote.org technology to provide a central location connecting justice-impacted people with resources to help them  exercise their right to vote, including tools for: checking registration status and eligibility; voter registration forms; requesting an absentee ballot; evaluating ballots specific to their district with details on candidates and issues on the ballot; and how to find their local polling site.

The technology also includes updates to the ballot-preview feature, designed to subvert voter intimidation and exclusion, providing voters with concise information about ballots – available in English or Spanish – to help them understand the roles of each office on their ballot, and the impact of those roles on communities.

“Voting is the chance to have your experience, opinions, and beliefs counted,” CEO executive vice president Christopher Watler said in a statement. “Unfortunately the right to vote in our country has a long history of exclusion. Many states continue to deny justice-impacted people the right to vote which disproportionately impacts Black and poor communities.”

“Every voter, regardless of background or identity, should be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote and help shape the future of their communities and our country. Our democracy works better for everyone when it reflects the diversity of the electorate, which means we need to break down every barrier standing between voters and the ballot box,” added Vote.org CEO Andrea Hailey.

To raise awareness about the arbitrary disenfranchisement of justice-impacted individuals, and drive traffic to its resources, the campaign will share stories of real CEO participants voting for the first time, while documenting the barriers they faced.

CEO’s podcast, “Returning Strong” will also highlight such stories in a dedicated miniseries focused on the disenfranchisement of justice-impacted people, which will feature personal experiences.

The disenfranchisement of justice-impacted people is a remnant of Jim Crow laws that emerged as a means of finding or creating legal avenues to evading the equal voting rights afforded by the 15th amendment. According to 2022 data from The Sentencing Project, 4.4 million people are disenfranchised by such laws, which disproportionately target people of color. And per 2020 data from the Vera Institute for Justice, Black Americans face disenfranchisement due to felony conviction histories at over four times the rate of all other races combined – an issue compounded by systemic racism in the criminal legal system more broadly.