The Sentencing Project used the eve of Rhode Island's primary to press the state to let people serving felony sentences vote. Its latest estimate puts that group at about 1,600 — and changing the rule would take a voter-approved constitutional amendment.
Uprise RI · Rocco Caravaggio · September 9, 2026
The Sentencing Project used the eve of Rhode Island's primary to press the state to let people serving felony sentences vote. Its latest estimate puts that group at about 1,600 — and changing the rule would take a voter-approved constitutional amendment.
Rhode Island's 2006 amendment restored the vote after release, including for people on probation or parole, but the Constitution still bars voting during incarceration on a felony conviction — a rule only Rhode Island voters can change.
On September 8, the day before Rhode Island's statewide primary, The Sentencing Project — the Washington-based research and advocacy nonprofit that has tracked felony disenfranchisement state by state for a quarter century — called on Rhode Island to extend the franchise to people still serving felony sentences behind the walls in Cranston. The number at issue is not enormous. It is, by the organization's own most recent estimate, about 1,600 people. That is roughly the population of a mid-sized Rhode Island village, and it is smaller than the margin by which plenty of legislative primaries in this state have been decided.
Here is the legal situation, stated plainly, because the advocacy language and the law are two different animals and readers deserve to know which is which. Article II, Section 1 of the Rhode Island Constitution says that no person who is incarcerated in a correctional facility upon a felony conviction may vote until that person is discharged — at which point the right to vote is restored. The corresponding statute, R.I. Gen. Laws § 17-9.2-3, mirrors it: courts must tell a defendant that a felony conviction costs the vote only if and for as long as the person is locked up, the Department of Corrections must notify people that their rights come back on release, hand them registration materials, and transmit completed forms, and DOC must send election officials monthly lists of who has become ineligible and who has become eligible again. Rhode Island, in other words, is doing exactly what its voters told it to do in 2006. The advocates are not alleging a violation. They are asking for a new rule.
That distinction matters, and it is the one most likely to get flattened in a press release cycle. When The Sentencing Project and the Rhode Island Freedom Collective — a local organization founded by Kyle Campbell, Mario Monteiro and Steven Parkhurst that works with formerly incarcerated people and their families — describe restoration in this state as unfinished, they are making a normative argument about where the line should sit, not a legal finding that the line has been crossed. Bob Libal, the organization's senior campaign strategist, said in the September 8 statement that voting rights are not fully restored so long as incarcerated people have no voice in the laws that govern their communities. Campbell said the state's next step should be extending democratic participation to people who are currently inside. Neither statement identified a bill, a draft amendment or a legislative timetable.
What the 2006 amendment actually did is worth getting right, because two decades of shorthand have blurred it. Before that vote, the disenfranchisement reached past the prison gate; testimony the ACLU of Rhode Island submitted to the 2024 Constitutional Convention Preparatory Commission traces the expansion to a 1986 constitutional change that stretched the bar beyond people incarcerated for felonies to people convicted of them, including some on probation or holding suspended sentences. On November 7, 2006, Rhode Island voters approved Question 2 by 191,877 votes to 180,394 — 51.54% to 48.46%. Fewer than 12,000 votes separated the two sides. The Sentencing Project has described that change as returning the ballot to more than 17,000 residents who would otherwise have remained disenfranchised on felony probation or parole; that is the organization's estimate of the 2006 effect, not a current headcount of anything.
So who is barred today, and who isn't? The bar attaches to incarceration following a felony conviction — nothing less. Board of Elections guidance says people held while awaiting trial, people charged but not convicted, and people serving misdemeanor sentences may register and vote by absentee ballot. The same guidance, along with the Department of State's registration materials, says people who have been released regain the vote even while on probation or parole, and the Department of State's active rule implementing the 2006 act reads "incarceration" to mean confinement in prison — not home confinement, not a halfway house, not mandatory confinement in a rehabilitation facility. Anyone who tells you every Rhode Islander in state custody is locked out of the November 3 election is wrong, and the error runs in the direction of discouraging eligible people from casting a ballot they are entitled to cast.
The number, and what kind of number it is
The 1,595 figure comes from Locked Out 2024 , the report The Sentencing Project produced with researchers Christopher Uggen, Ryan Larson, Sarah Shannon, Robert Stewart and Molly Hauf. Its Rhode Island line lists all 1,595 under "prison," with no separate entries for parole, felony probation, jail or post-sentence categories — precisely because this state restores rights on release — and it works out that total as 0.19% of a voting-eligible population of 824,516. Not 0.19% of everybody in Rhode Island; 0.19% of the people who could otherwise legally cast a ballot. The report describes conditions as of the November 2024 election, and it is an estimate built from state correctional reports, Census data and legal analysis, with adjustments for states like Rhode Island that run a unified system combining jail and prison functions, so that people awaiting trial and people serving non-felony sentences are subtracted out.
The state's own most recent tally is newer and measures something different. The Department of Corrections' FY2025 Annual Population Report counted 1,540 sentenced people held in its facilities on June 30, 2025, alongside 857 people awaiting trial. That sentenced figure is not a disenfranchisement count: it spans offense categories, and DOC cautions that it leaves out people serving Rhode Island sentences out of state, at Eleanor Slater Hospital's forensic unit, or on home confinement. The honest formulation is the modest one — somewhere around 1,600 people, as of the last careful estimate.
The six Adult Correctional Institutions sit in Cranston, but the people inside them come from everywhere in this state and go back to everywhere in it. Of sentenced releases with Rhode Island addresses in FY2025, DOC reported that 33.9% named Providence as their destination, 11.4% Pawtucket and 9.2% Woonsocket. That is a statistic about releases generally rather than about the disenfranchised specifically, and it is still the answer to the question of whose neighbors, brothers and mothers this argument is actually about.
Here is the part that should temper anyone's expectations of a quick legislative fix. Because the restriction sits in the text of Article II itself, and because the Constitution declares itself the supreme law of the state, removing it is not a matter of passing a bill; Article XIV requires that an amendment proposed by the General Assembly go to the voters. Rhode Island's Constitution is not a pot of pasta you can salt to taste once it's already on the stove — you go back to the electorate, or you don't change it at all. And the most recent suffrage amendment to surface at the State House went the other way: Senate Joint Resolution 2132, introduced January 16 and referred to Senate Judiciary, would have revised Article II's residency and registration provisions while keeping intact the sentence denying the vote to anyone incarcerated on a felony conviction until discharge. The bill tracker LegiScan recorded it as held for further study on February 26. A year earlier, House Bill 5874, introduced February 28, 2025, proposed a DOC voting coordinator and mail-ballot procedures — but for incarcerated people who are already legally eligible, not for those serving felony sentences.
To be fair to the skeptics, the strongest empirical case against urgency is not a moral one but a turnout one. A peer-reviewed study by Ariel White and Avery Nguyen, published in The Journal of Politics in January 2022, examined Maine and Vermont — the two states The Sentencing Project identifies as never stripping voting rights over a conviction — and found that fewer than one in 10 eligible incarcerated voters cast a ballot in 2018. The authors drew the conclusion that follows: the debate ought to turn less on whether prison voting would swing elections and more on whether eligible incarcerated people should hold the right in the first place. The Sentencing Project, for its part, cites research associating voting and restored eligibility with reentry and public-safety outcomes.
No state official has publicly answered the September 8 statement. Secretary of State Gregg M. Amore's office, the Board of Elections, the governor's office and the Attorney General have all put out general election-access material this year; none of it addresses this ask. And the law they administer is unambiguous about where things stand while it stands.
Rhode Islanders vote in the primary today. They vote again on November 3. Both times, the roughly 1,600 people at the center of this argument will be counted in the census that draws the districts and absent from the rolls that fill them — until somebody puts the question back on the ballot where it started.
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