Voting for Mayor From Rikers
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On a recent Wednesday, I stood in a room at Rikers with a dozen other volunteers from the Vote in NYC Jails Coalition, waiting for an escort to let us into the rest of the facility. In the corner behind the first of two ID checkpoints, just past the booth filled with rows of handcuffs, three correctional officers draped fake spiders and witch hats against a purple backdrop for Halloween. As they collected our IDs and we filed through the metal detectors, one white officer made a joke about Indigenous Peoples Day, which had been two days prior. "It's my holiday, for my people!" Another officer handed us yellow passes. "Don't lose those, unless of course you want to stay," he quipped.
We were there to register incarcerated New Yorkers to vote. Founded in 2021, the coalition works to enfranchise the thousands of New Yorkers held on Rikers and in other City jails. They visit the jail complex once a month—and twice in an election season—to register voters and answer questions about how to complete absentee ballot request forms. Registrations have increased recently, according to the coalition. In September, the group signed up 95 new voters; typically, the average hovers around 40 each month.
But the work of the coalition is far from enough, and structural solutions are needed, said Rigodis Appling of the Legal Aid Society, one of the coalition's member groups. "Even if we got 100 [voters] every time, that's nothing compared to the population," Appling said. Over the past four years, the group has pushed the City's Board of Elections (BOE) to open a polling site on Rikers. They argue that, much like those at nursing homes, people incarcerated at Rikers are particularly vulnerable and require voting accommodations. Their efforts have been met with resistance, particularly from the BOE. When voters on the Upper East Side demanded they be given a different polling site, the BOE opened one at the National History Museum. "And yet they told us to 'take it to Albany,'" Appling said. A bill introduced by Assemblymember Latrice Walker and State Senator Zellnor Myrie that would permit polling sites at the state's jails didn't make it out of committee last year. "But an early voting site at each facility would get thousands of people voting," Appling noted.
Conducting voter outreach at Rikers comes with a particular set of challenges. During one visit, Appling said, a group of volunteers walked through a cloud of tear gas just sprayed by a correctional officer. There are also bureaucratic delays; volunteers are often left waiting for hours, usually because the department has failed to assign an escorting officer—as was the case for our visit that day.
Armed with our assorted forms, bilingual pocket Constitutions, and a printout of the mayoral candidates, we began going floor by floor, split into two groups. On each floor, an officer would announce that we were there to help people vote and that we would be in the unit's rec room if people were interested.
At the first unit, I met 29-year-old Naquan (last name withheld for safety purposes) in the corner of the rec room, a shared space with three TVs and a few small, cafeteria-style tables scattered with chess sets and decks of cards. Naquan had enthusiastically cast his ballot in June for Zohran Mamdani, he said, having learned about how to vote in the primary while incarcerated via his tablet provided by the Department of Correction (DOC). Naquan scooted to show me his screen, scrolling to the registration information section buried at the end of the "FYI" app's list of general information guides. The section was labeled, typo included, "voting in DOC sustody." "You have to really search to find it," he said.
As he filled out the absentee ballot request form with his name, Social Security number, and the address where he lived before being sent to Rikers, he shared his priorities as a voter, which were informed by his experience at the jail. "I look around here and see people of color like me, and not so many white guys, which shows me things need to change," he said. (New York City jails Black people at almost 12 times the rate of white people, according to a report from 2023.)
He planned to again vote for Mamdani in the general election. As a younger voter, like many of the Democratic nominee's supporters (he will celebrate his 30th birthday in January, while still in jail), Naquan was enthusiastic about Mamdani bringing down the average age of those running for office. An avid student, having already taken every class provided by Columbia’s education program in the jail, he had seen the candidate’s ads and some televised interviews on one of the three TVs in his unit’s rec room.
Like many New Yorkers incarcerated at Rikers, Naquan couldn't afford his bail. He believed Andrew Cuomo would roll back the bail reforms he had signed into law while governor, reforms he swiftly began altering before he resigned in 2021. "The number one answer for the most corrupt job on 'Family Feud' is the politician,” he said with a wry laugh, before adding, "They're playing with our freedom."
According to the Coalition, in the November 2024 election, only half of the absentee ballots requested by New Yorkers incarcerated at Rikers were filled out and returned. That total amounted to 546 ballots, meaning that roughly 7 percent of the jail's population voted, compared to the city’s overall turnout rate of 54 percent. A large part of the problem, according to advocates, is the process crafted by DOC and the BOE. There is only one DOC employee who collects the voter registration forms and absentee ballots and delivers them to the BOE. "I've run into people who I registered to vote a year ago and they're telling me, 'I never received a ballot to cast my vote,'" said Takeasha Newton, a coordinator for the coalition and the lead community organizer with Legal Aid’s Community Justice Unit. "Every time I ask about it, no one has any answers for me."
COs also find subtle ways to suppress the vote, said Newton, such as telling prospective voters that their option to vote overlapped with recreational time. "Just because our incarcerated community members are detained at a City jail doesn't give anyone the right to interfere in that," Newton said, adding, "People in leadership still do not respect the vote of the Black population."
Neither the BOE nor DOC responded to requests for comment.
Unlike most voter outreach, Newton said, there's a more urgent need to build trust and display a level of sensitivity when speaking with incarcerated voters. When members of my group instructed voters to recall their address, for instance, some men shared they weren't sure if they had lost their apartment since the arrest and didn't know what to include on the form. Another voter, when a volunteer commented on his beautiful signature, looked up and said, "You know, I used to be somebody." She looked back at him. "You still are," she said. He merely shrugged. Newton deliberately wears colorful, retro Jordans and also offers to braid people’s hair (as well as teach people how to do it themselves) during her outreach sessions. "It’s my way of showing, 'I am here to invest in you, to care, so that we can build our communities,'" Newton said.
Escorted to our next unit on the floor above, I met Edward (last name withheld for safety purposes), a man in his 60s who would be voting for the first time this year. As he filled out his absentee ballot request form, he told me he wasn't familiar with Mamdani. He would be voting for Cuomo, because of, as he put it, "what he did for the incarcerated," citing the former governor's support of ending cash bail for those convicted of misdemeanors. Unlike Naquan, he trusted that Cuomo would continue to support the interests of incarcerated people.
Edward would be going home in a few weeks, he said, and was thinking of starting a YouTube channel where he could share his experiences at Rikers—a summer without any time outdoors, a three-week stint without soap, mice burrowed in the trunks at the foot of people's cots, and countless times when he and others were served toxic food that had been prepared in dirty pots and pans. "People need to know what's going on in here," he said.
He was excited to vote, but wasn’t confident it would count. He asked me if there was a database where he could trace his vote. "We don't trust [the system] because of what DOC has done to us," Edward said. "They don’t make us feel like our vote will matter."
That Wednesday, 90 people signed up to vote. At the second to last unit we visited, I spoke to a man (he requested to remain completely anonymous) who was initially adamant about not registering. He believed Cuomo was the only Democrat running, and he hated Cuomo. "He's just going to hire more cops and, respectfully, cops are corrupt," he said. I handed him a slightly outdated printout listing all the candidates (it still included Eric Adams). I pointed out the section on the Democratic primary winner, which outlined Mamdani's central campaign promises: universal child care, fast and free buses, and a rent freeze. He then perked up, asking about Mamdani’s stance on policing; I mentioned the candidate's plans to build a Department of Community Safety. I encouraged him to register, request a ballot, and to try to catch a debate on the rec room TV before he firmly decided against voting. Before showing me his worn, heavily annotated James Patterson novel, he filled out both forms.