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The City Council wants to make it easier for thousands of Rikers Island inmates to vote by forcing jail officials to help them fix errors on their ballots — but the Department of Corrections said the law will cause huge problems for them.
The bill, filed by Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers, seeks to force the DOC to help inmates with so-called “ballot curing.”
But, the beleaguered DOC said that process is the Board of Elections’ responsibility — not theirs.
“At Rikers Island, the vast majority of individuals are eligible to participate in our elections, yet significant barriers prevent them from exercising that right,” Brooks-Powers, a southeast Queens Democrat, said.
Her bill would require the DOC and BOE to set procedures and timelines for delivering ballot cure notices in jails, help voters correct or replace defective absentee ballots and publish annual data on curing outcomes.
It currently has 11 co-sponsors, plus the public advocate, who does not vote.
About 83% of people held on Rikers are detained before and therefore could be eligible to vote if they haven’t been convicted of a felony.
However, fewer than 10% voted in recent elections, according to a Council committee report.
The average daily jail population reached about 7,100 in the 2026 fiscal year.
“Voting is our most basic right, the right from which all other rights flow,” Council Member Gale Brewer, chair of the Committee on Governmental Operations, said at a recent oversight hearing. “On Rikers Island, very few people seem able to exercise that right.”
Although voters are supposed to be notified and given a chance to fix administrative errors on their ballots, those notices usually go to inmates addresses outside the jail so they never get them, Brooks-Powers said.
A second bill, sponsored by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, would require an annual public report on voter registration and absentee ballot distribution in city jails, broken down by facility and demographics.
In the June 2024 primary, 364 detainees requested absentee or early mail ballots, but only 155 ballots were delivered and just 72 were counted.
“The BOE routinely rejects registration forms and absentee ballots,” Williams said. “This would not be acceptable in the outside world, and we should not accept it on Rikers Island.”
His bill has three other co-sponsors.
Advocates, meanwhile, urged state lawmakers to go further by authorizing in-person polling sites on Rikers, arguing the absentee-only system is effectively shutting out thousands of eligible voters.
“This is not radical. This is not complicated. This is about meeting people where they are,” said Darren Mack, a member of the Vote in NYC Jails Coalition who was previously incarcerated.
He spoke at a rally about the issue prior to the hearing.
“People on Rikers maintain a constitutional right to vote,” he said, “but in practice that right is too often denied.”
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