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Sign up to collect signatures at an event this fall!
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Have questions?
Call Rachel, 617-869-2773 OR email: masspowervote@gmail.com
Mass POWER stands for Massachusetts Prisoners and Organizers Working for Enfranchisement and Restoration. Mass POWER is a campaign and a coalition consisting of EI, the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, Families for Justice as Healing, the African American Coalition Committee at MCI-Norfolk, BLACC at Souza Baranowski, Neighbor 2 Neighbor and other concerned citizens, incarcerated people and their loved ones committed to restoring the right to vote to people who are incarcerated. In the fall of 2019, we will be collecting 80,000+ signatures to get the issue on the 2022 ballot.
Background
In 2016, a group of free-world and incarcerated people in Massachusetts started Ballots Over Bars (now Mass POWER), a campaign to raise awareness about criminal disenfranchisement in Massachusetts. This campaign is the culmination of decades of work incarcerated people have done to resist the penal state and build political power inside, and incarcerated people have been fighting for their voting rights in Massachusetts for more than 40 years. We seek to raise awareness of the history of criminal disenfranchisement in Massachusetts and challenge it, particularly since Massachusetts was the most recent state to take away the right to vote from incarcerated people – which it did in 2000 due to fear of prisoners organizing. Through a combination of archival investigation, oral history, organizing and survey analysis, we are collaboratively bringing to life the ongoing history of incarcerated people’s fight for the right to vote in Massachusetts, with the goal of returning the right to vote to every resident.
Endorsements of the ballot initiative to restore the #right2vote
If you or your organization is interested in endorsing, please email masspowervote@gmail.com for more info.
Elected officials and Candidates:
- Senator Sonia Chang Diaz
- Senator Jamie Eldridge
- Representative Nika Elugardo
- Representative Tami Gouveia
- Representative Russell Holmes
- Representative Jay Livingstone
- Somerville City Councilor Ben Ewen-Campbell
- Cambridge City Council Candidate Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler
Organizations:
- ACLU MA
- Boston Democratic Socialists of America
- Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN)
- Boston Release Network
- Cambridge Area Stronger Together
- Coalition for Social Justice (CSJ)
- Common Cause MA
- Criminal Justice Reform Task Force of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek
- Great Falls Books Through Bars
- Jewish Voice for Peace Western Mass
- League of Women Voters of MA
- Massachusetts Against Solitary Confinement (MASC)
- Massachusetts Community Action Network
- Massachusetts Law Reform Institute
- Massachusetts Voter Table
- Our Revolution Somerville
- Prisoners’ Legal Services
- Progressive Massachusetts
- SOPRI
- Showing Up for Racial Justice – Boston
- Unitarian Universalist Mass Action
Current #Right2VotePriorities
Our three-pronged approach to restore the #right2vote to prisoners in Massachusetts:
- #DonateYourVote for the 2020 Election
- Legislator initiated efforts – S.12 & S.405
- Citizen-initiated proposed constitutional amendment
Sign up to stay up to date on the campaign.
Long-term Goals
- Educate people about the history of criminal disenfranchisement in Massachusetts and prisoners’ powerful acts of resistance and organizing
- Maximize voting power of enfranchised people incarcerated in Massachusetts jails and houses of corrections, civilly committed people, and recently released people by holding know-your-rights events, supplying access to absentee ballots, and ensuring voter registrars comply with the law and count incarcerated ballots
- Maximize voting power of disenfranchised prisoners in Massachusetts through donate-your-vote partnerships and build relationships across prison walls
- End prison gerrymandering, which transfers representation from people of color in urban areas to white people in rural areas
- Repeal the 120th Amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution, adopted in 2000, which denies people incarcerated in prison for felonies the right to vote
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release: Mass POWER Files to Restore Right to Vote for Incarcerated MA Residents
BOSTON, September 4, 2019: Massachusetts Prisoners and Organizers Working for Enfranchisement and Restoration (Mass POWER) delivered their citizen-initiated voting rights petition to the Secretary of the Commonwealth today. The initiative would amend the Massachusetts Constitution to restore the right to vote for people currently incarcerated on felony convictions. The volunteer-led coalition has until November 20th to collect over 80,000 signatures to place the amendment on the ballot in 2022.
Massachusetts is the most recent state to disenfranchise incarcerated residents. Massachusetts prisoners had the right to vote up until 2000, when a constitutional amendment stripped incarcerated individuals of their right to vote. Derrick Washington, an incarcerated organizer with Mass POWER, declares “Universal prisoner suffrage – that being incarcerated peoples’ ability to pick people who make laws that govern structures of arrest, incarceration, and eventual release – is the only way to begin reshaping how the process of criminal justice is interpreted, which would in turn strengthen our families and build our communities.”
Volunteer organizer, Austin Frizzell, a resident of Jamaica Plain, further notes that eliminating prisoner disenfranchisement should being an essential part of reducing the harm of incarceration in Massachusetts. “We know our criminal justice system disproportionately and unjustly targets people of color, especially Black communities, and therefore it is also a system of voter repression. The right to vote is fundamental and removing it does not contribute to healing for our state,” said Frizzell. Mass POWER is aligned with national efforts—sometimes called the #Right2Vote or New Suffrage movements—to re-enfranchise citizens who have lost rights due to incarceration. Recent victories include the 2018 restoration of voting rights to 1.5 million people in Florida with past convictions and 2019 laws returning the right to vote to 77,000 on probation and parole in Nevada and 10,000 on parole in Colorado. If Massachusetts voters support the petition, the Commonwealth would re-join Maine and Vermont in maintaining voting rights independent of incarceration status. The District of Columbia is also actively considering reversing prison disenfranchisement. To get involved sign up and follow the campaign on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @MassPowerVote. For more information contact masspowervote@gmail.com.