Illinois lawmakers held a hearing last week to address censorship in prison after the Education Justice Project at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported that more than 200 books were removed without explanation from a library inside Danville Correctional Center.

Every year, 30,000 citizens re-enter society from Illinois correctional institutions. HB 2541 (“Re-entering Citizens Civics Education Act”) will provide re-entering citizens with a non-partisan civics peer education program.

This morning, members of the non-partisan Just Democracy coalition, including Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, sent a letter to Secretary of State Jesse White’s Office that outlines the agency’s violations of state and federal law in its flawed implementation of automatic voter registration (AVR) in Illinois.

Voting Rights Project intern Alexandria Boutros shares her journey uncovering voter disenfranchisement in the criminal justice system.

AVR was enacted in 2017 in Illinois, with unanimous bipartisan support in the House and Senate. Yet it appears that Illinois will not meet the July 1, 2018 deadline written in the law for establishing opt-out voter registration at Driver Services facilities, the cornerstone of AVR and the tool that would actually make registration “automatic”.

Yesterday, Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and partner organizations submitted testimony before the Illinois House Elections & Campaign Finance Committee in support of two important bills under consideration: SB 2273 and HB 4469.