IN THE UPCOMING local and European Union elections on 7 June, candidates will seek support from all sections of the community. However, they will not have easy access to all electors, especially those who are registered to vote by postal ballot.
One group who are part of this ‘hard-to-reach’ section of the community are people in prison, who since the Electoral Amendment Act of 2006 are allowed to cast their franchise by postal ballot. Passed by the Oireachtas with all-party support, the 2006 Act allows all people in prison to vote, regardless of conviction or sentence.
In enfranchising people in prison, the Irish government took a very different path from its British counterpart. In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government’s blanket ban on voting by people sentenced to prison breached the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees “free elections… under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature”.
Successive UK governments rejected the European Court’s judgment, with David Cameron as Prime Minister, informing parliament in 2010 that he believed that “when people commit a crime and go to prison, they should lose their rights, including the right to vote”. It was only in 2017, 12 years after the judgment, that UK policy was changed to allow a tiny minority of people in prison to vote (approximately 100 out of 86,000 people in prison) which satisfied the European Court of Human Rights.
Instead of following in the footsteps of our nearest neighbour, Ireland has followed the example of many European countries such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden. The position in Ireland is in stark contrast to the position in the US, which serves as a prime example of how important it is that people with previous convictions or who are currently serving time in prison, have the right to vote.
In the US, millions of people in prison and ex-prisoners are denied the right to vote. Laws in 48 US states ban people with felony convictions (typically involving imprisonment for over a year) from voting. In 2022, an estimated 4.4 million Americans, representing two percent of the voting-age population, were ineligible to vote due to a current or previous felony conviction. While this is down from a high of 6.1 million in 2016, the majority of disenfranchised voters are no longer in prison, with some states having potential lifetime voting bans for a felony conviction.
As with other parts of the US criminal justice system, this punishment is not distributed equally, impacting disproportionately on the African American community. In seven states, more than one in 10 African American adults is disenfranchised.
With such high numbers disenfranchised, this can have a significant outcome on elections. During the 2000 presidential election, 537 votes separated George Bush and Al Gore in Florida when the Supreme Court decided the outcome. Over 600,000 Floridians were disenfranchised because of a prior felony conviction. Research has indicated that this likely tilted the state in favour of George Bush, which changed the course of America, and it could be argued, world history. By 2022, nearly one million Floridians who had completed their sentence were disenfranchised.
Allowing people in prison to vote is an important symbolic indication that they remain citizens and are part of the political community. Virtually every person sentenced to prison in Ireland will be released back into society. To prepare for life after release, people in prison are encouraged to maintain connections with their families and wider communities. Participation in civil society, including voting could be an important part of that process.
People in prison register in their home constituency and vote by postal ballot. This is to avoid what is termed in the US the ‘jailhouse bloc’ (people in prison voting en masse in one constituency for one candidate). Although there is no evidence that this would be the case, voting allows people in prison to maintain connections with their local community, and the place where they hope to reintegrate into when they leave prison. In previous elections, the numbers who have voted varied widely in different institutions, usually depending on the prison and person in prison. People who have voted previously are more likely to do so again in prison and vice versa.
The Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) have written to prison governors encouraging them to highlight the registration and voting process for people in prison and mechanisms have been put in place for people to register to vote. The Irish Prison Service, along with the Electoral Commission, ran an information and awareness raising campaign earlier this year.
Those who register while in prison are very likely to vote. Applications to be included on the register for postal voting by individual people in prison were to be received by the local authority by 11 May last week. While this is a tighter window for people in prison to be included on the supplementary register than the rest of the electorate, with the election campaigns ramping up, the numbers registering may increase.
In close electoral contests, especially in local elections, with a lower number of votes needed to get elected than in Dáil or European Union ballots, candidates argue that each and every vote counts. Lack of personal engagement between electors and candidates is one reason for low turnout in elections.
Already, a number of political representatives and candidates have indicated that they are willing to visit a prison in or near their constituency. Along with the efforts of staff in individual prisons, and the work of organisations such as IPRT in encouraging registration and voting, the campaigns are an opportunity for European Union and local election candidates to engage with their constituents, and listen to the concerns of voters in Irish prisons.
Dr Cormac Behan is a lecturer in criminology at the Technological University Dublin, and is vice-chair of the Irish Penal Reform Trust. He is the author of Citizen Convicts: Prisoners, Politics and the Vote.
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