LOS ANGELES — When you’ve lost and then regained the right to vote, a paper ballot in your hands just feels different, so Efrain Ortiz is soaking up this moment.
“To have this opportunity to vote, for me, is everything,” Ortiz said.
Ortiz recently served ten years in prison for a robbery he said he didn’t commit. Now, he’s only voting in California’s gubernatorial recall election because voters passed Proposition 17 in November, giving parolees the right to vote after they’ve served their sentences.
“Coming home, I promised myself I would continue to fight the fight," Ortiz said. "I would continue to fight for my brothers I left behind.”
So now he’s working for Initiate Justice helping to register California’s roughly 50,000 people on parole to vote in time for the Sept. 14 recall election.
“It’s positive. A lot of them are aware they have the right to vote now," Ortiz said. "Some of them told me they’re way ahead of me, they already filled out their ballots, dropped it off."
Criminal justice reforms, including statewide initiatives passed by votes, have also galvanized voters like Roxane Hoge, who says reforms have taken the state in the wrong direction.
“What’s happened in California is that it is a one-party state, so every dream policy has been enacted and come true and we get to see what the end result is and it ain’t pretty,” Hoge said.
Hoge is not shy about her support for the recall, proudly placing a “Kevin Kiley for Governor” sign outside her front doors and on the bumper of her car. She feels progressive reforms to reduce incarceration have made her North Hollywood neighborhood unsafe and exacerbated the homeless crisis.
“The growing homelessness crisis is tragic. It’s a human tragedy on an epic scale. Yes, it’s linked to letting people out of jail and to not putting them in jail in the first place,” Hoge said.
Ortiz, the first-time voter on parole, can’t say how he voted because his work is non-partisan, but he’s just one of thousands impacted by the system who will be making his voice count.