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.
Contesting repression in divided democracies: Can counternarratives reduce support for police violence?
A new article in the American Journal of Political Science by Yanilda María González, Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy and Ash Center affiliate, and co-author, examines public attitudes towards police violence in Brazil. The authors find that while police discourse can increase public endorsement of violence, counternarratives from marginalized victims can be effective in reducing citizen support for repressive policing.
Reframing Efficiency: How Public Deliberation Strengthens Public Health Policy
In a recent essay for the American Journal of Public Health, Aditya S. Pawar, Democracy Visiting Fellow; Jon Alexander, former Non-resident Democracy Fellow; Archon Fung, Director of the Ash Center; and co-authors examine how public deliberation and representative engagement can shape more efficient and reliable public health policy.
Terms of Engagement – How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
What does it take to stand up for what you believe in when your personal safety, security and even liberty are at stake? Ami Fields-Meyer, a political strategist and former senior policy advisor in the Biden-Harris White House, joins Terms of Engagement hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to speak about speaking out in tumultuous times.
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.
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.
