A recent disenfranchisement report estimates that 1.7% of adult Missourians cannot vote because of a felony conviction, however, the rate is more than double for Black Missourians.
The Sentencing Project’s Locked Out 2024 estimates disenfranchisement rates across the country, and Missouri is ranked among those states with some of the highest disenfranchisement rates. The rate ranges from 0.14% in Massachusetts to 7.8% in Tennessee, the highest in the country. The national average is 1.7%.
Missourians in prison or under court supervision — probation or parole — cannot cast ballots. The report shows 79,479 Missourians of voting age cannot vote because of felony convictions, which includes over 53,000 people on felony probation or parole.
Experts say with so many people on felony probation or parole, it has heavy consequences for communities of color because it could affect political representation.
“Sometimes people think about disenfranchisement as something that is not consequential, or maybe not as consequential as some other barriers that people who are formerly criminalized face like housing or employment, which are obviously really critical things,” said Marisa Omori, associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “But I also think it's not without consequence, right? These things have very real consequences for elections.”
Although the share of Missouri’s Black incarcerated population is relatively small compared to the entire disenfranchised population in the state, the rate at which they are incarcerated is disproportionate to the state’s Black population size. Omori said this racial inequality stems from racial segregation and has implicated communities of color through over-policing, which leads to a large group of people being unable to vote.
According to the report, Missouri disenfranchises 3.76% of Black people of voting age, which is down from 5.15% in 2020. There are nearly 19,000 Black adult Missourians incarcerated with felony convictions, which is down from over 26,000 four years ago. The report also estimates the Latino disenfranchisement rate in Missouri at 1.29%, which is below the national average of 1.55%.
In 2020, the Sentencing Project estimated that there were over 95,000 people disenfranchised in Missouri, which has decreased by over 20% today. Nevertheless, researchers caution against praising the decrease in incarceration, because versions of supervision are still quite high.
States might be putting fewer people in prison, but there are still so many people on probation or parole, and these two contrast, no matter the trends, said Omori.
“The big concern … is just the racial inequality piece of it, regardless of the scale and given the decreases in mass incarceration that we've had, we still incarcerate people at a really high rate — the highest of westernized developed countries in the world,” she said. “Regardless of that scale, which is huge, it's still disproportionately impacting Black and brown people … that's still the fundamental issue.”
In recent years, governors of states like New York, New Mexico and Minnesota have signed bills to immediately restore voting rights to people with felony convictions upon leaving prison. Missouri lawmakers have introduced voting rights legislation for people on probation or parole. Last session, Sen. Curtis Trent, R-Battlefield, sponsored SB 1199; Rep. Melanie Stinnett, R-Springfield, introduced HB 1927, and Rep. Kimberly-Ann Collins, D-St. Louis, introduced HB 2201 to restore voting rights, but all have since stalled.
Omori said there is huge legislative pushback on these measures because of the heightened awareness around barriers to voting. People see this, especially with the increase of voter ID laws that have passed in various states over the past decade.
“It ends up raising attention on both sides of the issue, you can have some folks who are trying to pass these rollbacks of voting restrictions to lower the disenfranchisement rates of people,” she said. “At the same time, you have other strategies or other people who are trying to work on voter ID laws or other kinds of political gerrymandering.”
