Recommendations for Implementing Jail Voting: Identifying Common Themes
This guide is intended for advocates, organizers, and practitioners working across America to facilitate the voting process for eligible voters in jails.
This guide is intended for advocates, organizers, and practitioners working across America to facilitate the voting process for eligible voters in jails. Presently, about 427,000 individuals held in local jails nationwide have not been convicted of a crime. As such, they are eligible to vote — but they often encounter a range of barriers.
As more and more legal scholars, policymakers, election officials, and advocates look to expand access to voting for jail-based populations, several of them have issued reports with recommendations and best practices. By synthesizing their various insights and proposals, we aim to provide an annotated list of all the recommendations from the reports and identify the most common ones. Organizations, practitioners, and advocates can use this guide as a centralized resource to view current best practices for jail-based voting as identified by their colleagues. While not exhaustive, this document offers a starting point for practitioners eager to engage in this work.
Reimagining public understanding: Toward an institutional model
In a new research article, Democracy Visiting Fellow Gordon Gauchat and co-author Kassandra Thompson offer an alternative framework for public understanding of science, focusing on “science’s role as a social system” shaped by institutional norms and practices, rather than traditional approaches centered on knowledge possession or trust in experts.
Terms of Engagement – The Fight for the Student Vote: Campus Democracy Under Pressure
Jen Domagal-Goldman, the executive director of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, and Yael Bromberg, a constitutional rights attorney and leading scholar on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, join Terms of Engagement to explore what’s at stake in the ongoing partisan battle over student voting rights and civic participation.
Terms of Engagement – Men Without Work: Is a Hidden Trend Fueling American Populism?
American Enterprise Institute political economist Nicholas Eberstadt joints Terms of Engagement hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to discuss falling male labor force participation and what he says are its effects on politics and society.
Allen Lab Fellow Spotlight: City Charters Are Deliberative Democracy’s Friends
Allen Lab Fellow Tyler Fisher examines the untapped potential of city charters as a vehicle for deliberative democracy, arguing that advocates should work to embed tools like citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, and town meetings directly into the governing architecture of cities, institutionalizing deliberative democracy one municipality at a time.
Tova Wang, director of research projects in democratic practice at the Ash Center, shares her top picks for summer reads focused on making democracy more resilient, responsive, and inclusive.