Election 2024: four million disenfranchised due to felony convictions in the US

A new report published by the Sentencing Project documents the four million people who are disenfranchised due to felony convictions in the United States. Locked Out 2024 reports these Americans will be unable to vote in the upcoming 2024 election due to felony disenfranchisement laws:

Laws in 48 U.S. states ban people with felony convictions from voting. In 2024, an estimated 4 million Americans, representing 1.7% of the voting-age population, will be ineligible to vote due to these laws, many of which date back to the post-Reconstruction era. In this historic election year, questions persist about the stability of democratic institutions, election fairness, and voter suppression in marginalized communities. The systematic exclusion of millions with felony convictions should be front and center in these debates.

This report updates and expands upon a quarter century of work chronicling the scope and distribution of felony disenfranchisement in the United States.1 As in 2022, we present national and state estimates of the number and percentage of people disenfranchised due to felony convictions, as well as the number and percentage of the Black and Latino populations impacted. This year, we also present state-level data on the degree of disenfranchisement among men and women. Although these and other estimates must be interpreted with caution, the numbers presented here represent our best assessment of the state of U.S. felony disenfranchisement as of the November 2024 election.

“Although the number of people disenfranchised due to a felony conviction in the United States has declined by 31% since 2016, we estimate that four million people will still be barred from voting on November 5th," said Sarah Shannon, Meigs Professor of Sociology, Director, Criminal Justice Studies Program and co-author on the study. "States in the southeast, in particular, continue to have more restrictive laws and some of the highest rates of disenfranchisement of the total adult population as well as of African Americans. Our findings provide crucial data during this historic election year that can inform ongoing discussions of election fairness, voter suppression, and the health of our democratic institutions.”

Read the full report.

Image: Locked Out 2024 – Figure 2. Overall State Felony Disenfranchisement Rates, 2024