And in Los Angeles, the ACLU has partnered with LARRP, the Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership, on an “Unlock the Vote”  campaign to reduce barriers to registration and voting for justice-involved and justice-impacted folks in Los Angeles County as well as Orange County. The project volunteers go inside the LA and Orange County jails to to educate and register eligible voters, both the prisoners and the family and friends who are visiting, and reach out through reentry fairs and other community events to educate and register people who are returning citizens or otherwise criminal justice system-impacted. If you are an LA County resident and would like to get involved, here is the information to volunteer.

In Illinois, the  Governor has on his desk and is expected to sign the recently passed HB 4469, which requires every jail in the state to provide voter education and make in-person or absentee voting available to all eligible incarcerated voters. Currently only eight counties in the state have any voting process for people in pretrial detention. “There is confusion around how election code actually applies to the jail,” says Jen Dean, who runs Cook County Jail Votes, the group that helps facilitate registration and voting in the largest jail in the country. “[This bill] creates a system of uniformity across the state to make sure there are systems in place so that everybody has access to the ballot.”

Meanwhile, in California, a bill to increase voter education in jails recently cleared the Senate Public Safety Committee. Assembly Bill 3115 would require jails to partner with at least one organization to provide “both written and verbal information about voting rights upon release from jail, providing affidavits of registration to eligible voters, assisting eligible voters with the completion of the affidavits of registration, and assisting eligible voters in returning the completed voter registration cards to the county elections official.”