Insights

New Orleans – June 16, 2021: Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), a Louisiana-based grassroots organization founded and run by formerly incarcerated people, and Advancement Project, a next-generation, multi-racial civil rights organization, along with Crowell & Moring LLP, celebrated the enactment of Act 127 – H.B. 378 in Louisiana, which was signed into law on June 10, 2021. The bill will ensure that individuals sentenced only to probation will not lose their voting rights due to a felony conviction, and will prevent government officials from expending unnecessary resources to suspend voting rights, and then having to work to restore them for people who should not have been suspended from voter rolls in the first place. More than 30,000 people are currently estimated to be on probation in Louisiana, and the new law will help additional people each year as new individuals are sentenced to probation.