She has faith in restoring people’s voting rights

Any kind of injustice bothers Faith Martin.

Whether it is a mom yelling at a brother for what a sister did, or someone being harassed by police, or people losing their reproductive rights, she can’t seem to sit still. She says that she has to get involved.

The injustice that has really kept her moving has been helping the formerly incarcerated get their voting rights reinstated. Here, she says, there’s almost too much to do, but the work is not just doable, it’s important.

So, she’s emerged in the Wichita community as a person to whom people can turn with myriad questions, including how to get your voting rights restored.

“When systems break down, people are a part of those systems and they can become collateral damage,” said Martin, the volunteer vice chair of the Wichita Racial Profiling Board. “We need to keep people engaged.”

Here in Kansas, when people are convicted of a felony, they lose their right to vote – this is called felony disenfranchisement. However, many people don’t realize that once they complete their sentence, they can vote.

Right now, there are as many as 30,000 Kansans with past felony convictions who are eligible to vote, but don’t know it.

So, we need a lot of Faiths.

She doesn’t do anything astonishing, she said in her own, self-effacing way. She says she’s good at finding information other people have difficulty finding for themselves and the more she has helped people, the more she’s made a name for herself as a go-to, do-gooder.

Kansas’s partial felony disenfranchisement does more than prevent Kansans from voting during their sentence – even after they become eligible again, it creates confusion, obstacles to voting, and discourages them from persisting even if denied incorrectly. Some community members have reported that when registering to vote with their local election offices after becoming eligible, they were initially denied based on outdated court records.

Martin said people don’t need a ton of paperwork, most of the information isn’t hard to find, and most people don’t realize that much of this can be accomplished in a short moment on a smart phone.

However, people trying to leave the felony and the incident that earned them that felony behind them on their way to a new life, can find adjusting to their new lives frightening or overwhelming. That’s where she often steps in to help.

She says it has become an important outlet for her own need for civic engagement. Sometimes, she said, people think their inability to vote, or their being profiled by police are political issues when they may have more to do with a general lack of civic engagement.

System-impacted people have tons to contribute. They have first-had experience with all sorts of state of issues and thus could offer vital insights into how best to manage our state’s affairs.

Participation strengthens our democracy, and she’s become an advocate for restoring rights after incarceration.

It has become work she enjoys, and, it’s no bother at all.