The ACLU Voting Rights office is fighting in the 11th circuit for the ability of persons jailed for misdemeanors to be able to vote absentee. There is no constitutionally valid reason for any state to prevent persons convicted of misdemeanors from voting. Restrictions on voting, in all states, only involve persons convicted of felonies, not misdemeanors.

Nevertheless, a combination of Georgia laws and practices prevented some persons in jail from voting in the November 2008 election. One of them sued, but lost on a technicality in U.S. District Court in October 2010. Here is the ACLU’s opening brief in the 11th circuit. The case is Swann v Kemp, 10-14901. Georgia law protects the ability of voters who are in jail for a misdemeanor to receive absentee ballots at the jail, if their home county is a county other than where they are in jail. But if they are in jail in their home county, they can’t have an absentee ballot mailed to them at the jail. Instead, the absentee ballot can only be mailed to the prisoner’s home, and the prisoner is then dependent on having someone at the home address visit him or her and deliver the ballot. Furthermore, in this particular instance, the jail authorities did not inform the prisoners of this procedure. The U.S. District Court dismissed the case because the prisoner didn’t list the jail’s address as an alternative address on his absentee ballot application, even though even if he had, nothing would have changed, because it is against state law for the ballot to have been mailed to that jail.