LWV of Pendleton County

In the past month, four states have taken a step to improve access to the polls. Voters in Pennsylvania and Nebraska can now register to vote online, while Iowa and Kentucky will have online voter registration systems by early 2016.

The National Voter Registration Act requires public assistance agencies to provide voter registration opportunities to applicants, and the Health Benefit Exchanges are public assistance agencies.

More than half of the 180,000 Kentuckians barred from voting because of a felony conviction would remain permanently disenfranchised under changes the Kentucky Senate made last week to a voting rig

 “Restaurant manager Jason Marvin Smith of Elizabethtown said he accepts full responsibility for a felony that landed him on probation as an 18-year-old ... what riles him is that after completing his probation, he still could not vote ... League of Women Voters of Kentucky estimated in a 2006 report that about 168,000 people would be affected. Proponents, including the league, Catholic Conference of Kentucky and the NAACP, say that voting is the most fundamental expression of citizenship.”