Off paper? You CAN vote!

By Alexandria Staubach
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WJI and a coalition of groups are working to get the word out: If you have a felony conviction and you’re “off paper,” you can vote.
 
Wisconsin restores voting eligibility when someone is “off paper,” meaning after full completion of all portions of a sentence, including incarceration, supervision, and payment of all fines, fees, and restitution.
 
In Milwaukee, the League of Women Voters, Souls to the Polls, and EXPO (Ex-incarcerated Persons Organizing) lead efforts to educate and register eligible voters with felony records.
 
Disenfranchisement upon felony conviction is nothing new. Its history extends back to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and Southern Reconstruction. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses (laws allowing old activities to persist despite new laws) have largely been disavowed among the 50 states, but felony disenfranchisement remains.
 
Christal Arroyo Roman of Milwaukee lost her right to vote because of conviction and incarceration, but has been off paper since 2020. Arroyo Roman, who serves on the WJI board, is now a paralegal, Marquette University student, and criminal justice organizer.
 
In an interview with WJI, Arroyo Roman said that voting in 2020’s election “felt liberating.” For so long she felt her voice was suppressed. Prior to incarceration, she thought that politicians did not care about her community, so she did not vote.
 
When she went to prison and felt the “laws and legislation that were being enacted against [her],” she became aware of the importance of voting. “Even if I feel like my community isn’t being heard, it feels good to have a voice,” she said.
 
Arroyo Roman highlighted that the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) wants formerly incarcerated people to participate in pro-social behaviors like paying taxes. “If the government wants us to participate, we should be able to vote,” she said.
 
Maine, Vermont, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico do not participate in felony disenfranchisement.
 
But some form of felony disenfranchisement persists in 48 states, according to the federal government website vote.gov. Twenty-four states permit a person to vote immediately after release from prison, and 13 states may preclude one from voting even after full completion of a sentence.
 
Wisconsin and 11 other states fall in the middle, restoring eligibility to vote after full completion of the terms of a sentence and being “restored to civil rights.”
 
According to the Wisconsin Legislative Council, the Wisconsin Legislature constitutionally “may enact laws excluding a person who has been convicted of a felony from voting until he or she is restored to civil rights,” and the law “precludes permanent felony disenfranchisement but does not define or describe what constitutes restoration of civil rights.”
 
By statute, a convicted individual must sign a DOC form acknowledging that they may not vote.
 
DOC is required by law to transmit to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, on a continuous basis, a list of each living person who has been convicted of a felony and is ineligible to vote, plus the date on which DOC anticipates the person’s voting rights will be restored.
 
The commission then forwards that list of ineligible people to municipal clerks. Clerks are responsible for notifying each person on the list in their municipalities that their voter registration is inactive until the person is eligible to vote again. 
 
Restoration under Wisconsin law occurs automatically upon completion of the terms of any sentence imposed, the Legislative Council says. No separate hearing or procedure occurs; no signed document from any entity is required or provided to prove restoration of the vote.
 
Once a person is off paper, the person must re-register to cast a ballot. 

The DOC is required to inform an individual when their sentence is complete, civil rights have been restored, and they can vote, says the Legislative Council.
 
An election clerk may nevertheless believe that someone with a felony record is ineligible to vote. In that case, the clerk must allow the person to cast a ballot. The ballot will then be marked for closer inspection, which could lead to a challenge.
 
After an election, each election clerk generates and forwards a list of all persons who voted in their county to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The commission then checks that list against the information provided by DOC.
 
The commission may refer any instance of voting by a disenfranchised person to the district attorney for prosecution in the county where the ballot was cast.
 
Despite the lackluster framework around restoration of voting rights, providing false information on a voter registration form is a class I felony, as is voting in an election when one is not qualified.
 
In recent years, organizations including EXPO, Wisdom, ACLU of Wisconsin, Project Return, Wisconsin Voices, Justified Anger (Madison), and Just Leadership USA, developed a package of legislation that sought to “Unlock the Vote.” The bill package addressed issues from prison gerrymandering (counting those in prison as residents of the prison location rather than as residents of their communities before incarceration) to restoring the right to vote to people who are out of prison yet still on supervision.
 
The bills were introduced in 2022 by Rep. Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) and Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee), who earlier this year left the Legislature after appointment as a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge.
 
The bills were referred to legislative committees but did not reach committee votes. The bills were not reintroduced in the next legislative session.