Women Silenced at the Polls: How Criminal Convictions Deny the Right to Vote

Overview

In a true democracy, every adult citizen has the right to vote. But, as the United States celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding, almost three-quarters of a million American women were banned from voting because they had a felony-level conviction.¹ Most of these women completed their sentences of community supervision or incarceration. In addition, women who retain the right to vote in most jails nationwide and in certain states’ prison systems struggle to exercise that right.

For nearly 100 years, diverse groups of women, as well as individual trailblazers, fought for equal voting rights, culminating in the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 then made voting a true reality for many, but not all, women of color. Today, the battle for women’s equal access to the ballot box continues. Laws associating criminal convictions with voting qualifications have a long history in this country, and they disproportionately impact people of color.²

In this policy brief, The Sentencing Project highlights six women – in California, Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Texas, and Virginia – who share their stories about voting and how their involvement in the criminal legal system affects their right to vote.³ For these women, voting restrictions, including access to the ballot, became a measure of their belonging in this country: Who is a full citizen in the United States? Whose voice counts during elections? Today, the work to ensure equal citizenship and voting rights for all women continues.

Introduction

Almost three-quarters of a million American women are barred from voting in elections.⁴ These women, U.S. citizens, are disqualified from voting, because state laws or policies remove them from the electorate based on a single defining characteristic: a felony-level conviction. The growth in the number of women who cannot vote today is intricately linked to the growth of women’s involvement within the criminal legal system.⁵ Over the last four decades, the number of women under U.S. correctional supervision has increased by over 160% – from roughly 388,000 women in 1985 to over 1 million women in 2023.⁶ Racial disparities in imprisonment continue to exacerbate disparities in who is banned from voting. While disparities in incarceration have decreased, Black women remain roughly twice as likely to experience imprisonment as white women, and Latina women have slightly higher imprisonment rates compared to white women.⁷

Source: Hester, T. (1987). Correctional populations in the United States 1985. Bureau of Justice Statistics; Nepal, D., Budd, K. M., & Rovner, J. (2025). Incarcerated women and girls. The Sentencing Project.

Overreliance on the criminal legal system fails to address women’s needs, including mental health care, substance use treatment, and trauma-informed support.⁸ At the same time, the growing number of women within the criminal legal system has made one thing clear: a felony-level conviction strips women, the nation’s largest voting bloc, of their choices on how limited resources are allocated to these critical issues. By taking away women’s access to the ballot, these restrictions also suppress perspectives from a broad range of political affiliations and ultimately weaken the diversity of voices that are essential to a representative and functioning democracy.⁹

The exclusion of women from the ballot box is not new. Although the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 enshrined women’s right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, it did not end efforts to restrict women’s access to the ballot. In the U.S. Supreme Court case Leser v. Garnett (1922), Oscar Leser, a Maryland resident who opposed women’s suffrage, unsuccessfully challenged the 19th Amendment, partly on the grounds that it infringed upon state sovereignty. In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the 19th Amendment’s validity and guaranteed women’s right to vote would be enforced nationwide.¹⁰ Despite this monumental win for suffrage, women of color faced ongoing voter suppression tactics.¹¹ Decades later, it was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that made voting a true reality for many, but not all, women of color. Progress toward equal ballot access has been undermined by the nation’s approach to tying one’s right to vote with felony-level criminal convictions.

Compared with many other nations, the United States is an outlier for its limits on the right to vote for people who have criminal convictions.¹² Women’s accounts of having their voting rights taken away or restricted by the state are powerful examples of how felony disenfranchisement further weakens an already “flawed democracy” – a classification the United States earned based on the Democracy Index from The Economist Group.¹³

Ultimately, racism, sexism, and class bias, along with other structural inequalities, have long influenced women’s treatment in the United States. Stripping women of their access to the ballot based on their criminal legal status further diminishes women’s political power and deepens these structural inequalities. When certain groups of American women are systematically carved out of the voting process, they lose the power to elect leaders who shape their lives and communities. How, then, can the United States claim to be a democracy? The battle to protect the 19th Amendment – to keep its fundamental principles alive and well – continues so that every eligible woman, regardless of criminal legal status, can vote.

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