Testimony of Restore Your Vote Tennessee to House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties

This summer, our Restore Your Vote organizers in Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis helped shepherd hundreds of Tennesseans with past convictions through the state’s voting rights restoration process. We submitted this testimony for a hearing on “discriminatory barriers to voting” to share some of the lessons we learned from working with Tennessee’s disenfranchisement scheme up close. In light of our extensive work on this issue in Tennessee and elsewhere, we urge Congress to include explicitly both felony disenfranchisement and re-enfranchisement procedures within the coverage of a new Voting Rights Act bill.