Secretary of State William F. Galvin said his office will produce long-delayed reports showing how many people in jails and prisons requested, and received, a ballot during the 2024 elections, settling a lawsuit brought by legal groups who said the data are crucial to understanding the extent of jail-based voting in Massachusetts.
Under an agreement made public Monday, Galvin’s office said it would compile and release the reports by June 1, three months ahead of the next Massachusetts state primary.
Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based group, and the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based legal organization, filed the lawsuit last month with the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, asking that it order Galvin to publish what they say are long-overdue reports.
The groups said a sweeping elections law the Legislature passed in 2022 required Galvin’s office to publish data, no more than six months after a state election, showing both how many incarcerated individuals were eligible to vote and how many requested a vote-by-mail ballot, including “the outcome of that request.”
Galvin, an eight-term Democrat seeking reelection this fall, has yet to produce the reports for either the September 2024 primary or the presidential election that November.
The groups said that thousands of people incarcerated in Massachusetts may be eligible to vote in state elections, but with the reports, they argue that the public can’t assess whether the 2022 law is working or “hold public officials accountable” for ensuring those who are eligible to vote are able to cast ballots.
Galvin said Monday that his office, the state attorney general’s office, and the two groups negotiated the agreement in meetings over the last several weeks.
“With this information, advocates can work more effectively to ensure that every eligible voter who wants to participate in our democratic process is given an opportunity,” Brooke Simone, an attorney at Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in a statement.
Galvin said his office’s failure to file the reports was not because of “a reluctance or willingness to comply,” but rather because of logistical challenges.
Those incarcerated aren’t recognized as submitting an absentee ballot from the address of the facility where they’re incarcerated, but rather their home address. That makes for painstaking work in tracking down voter information from both the various jails and from the towns and cities those incarcerated would otherwise be registered, said Galvin, who likened the effort to “counting the fish in the sea.”
Galvin said last month that his office had yet to receive all the required information from the state’s elected sheriffs, who oversee the county jails and correctional facilities, where the vast majority of those eligible to vote would be incarcerated.
He said in a phone interview Monday that his office has since received all the data it needs, adding that while “much of it had [already] been compiled, it was incomplete.”
“We’re obviously anxious to make sure the report is complete and accurate,” he said. “We don’t want to misidentify people. We don’t want to identify voters as incarcerated persons when they might not have been.”
In Massachusetts, people who are incarcerated awaiting trial, serving sentences for misdemeanor convictions, or who are civilly committed are all eligible to vote. People currently serving time for felony convictions — many of those in state prisons — cannot vote.
According to the lawsuit, as many as 9,000 people incarcerated “at any given time” could be eligible to vote; state data show that as of the end of January, roughly 7,300 people were incarcerated in county facilities. Galvin had challenged the lawsuit’s figure, saying last month that he estimates the actual number of those eligible to vote in prisons or jails is fewer than 1,000 people.
Kate Uyeda, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, said data about jail-based voting is “often opaque and incredibly burdensome for advocates to gather.”
“This settlement comes at a crucial time for the people of Massachusetts,” Uyeda said.
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.