FREE TO CAST A BALLOT, EVEN WHEN CONFINED

Molly Wieser looked into the eyes of the sixty-eight-year-old inmate sitting across the table and smiled.

“Will you be eighteen by November second?” she asked.

The bald black man laughed.

“Yeah, I’m going to be nineteen this year,” he said.

“Good,” Wieser said, writing on the voter registration form. “That means you’ll be able to vote.”

The inmate, a Clevelander serving a misdemeanor sentence in Cuyahoga County’s workhouse in Highland Hills, leaned in and asked Wieser the question she is used to answering: “You sure I can vote?”

“Absolutely,” said Wieser, a lawyer with the Ohio Free the Vote Coalition. “You’re serving a misdemeanor, so you can vote even while you’re in here.”

She explained what too many lawyers, parole and probation officers, and ordinary citizens don’t know: Anyone serving time in Ohio for a misdemeanor can vote. Once convicted felons are released from prison, they, too, have the right to vote in Ohio.

“The fact that people in prison can’t vote has a disparate impact in the African-American community,” she told him. “I really disagree with it. I think all people should be able to vote.”

He nodded. “As far as I’m concerned, this is America. You should be able to vote no matter where you live.”

Wieser nodded her head and handed him a printed card detailing his voting rights.

“If you know anyone with a felony conviction, you can tell them they have the right to vote,” she said. “In the meantime, you’ll be getting a card from the Board of Elections telling you where you can vote in your neighborhood. If you aren’t out of here before then, we’ll give you an absentee ballot.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Molly Wieser is one of our quiet heroes. At thirty-six, she earns a fraction of the salary commanded by many of her fellow law-school graduates, but a partnership in a major firm was never her goal. She has built a career around advocating for those most of us choose to ignore.

For the last two and a half years, she has been director of the Racial Fairness Project, which led to her work registering inmates to vote. She and her volunteers registered 450 before last fall’s general election. They have registered more than 250 for this year’s election.

The daughter of an Austrian father and a Mexican-American mother, Wieser was raised to be an activist. She decided to go to Case Western Reserve University’s law school after working in an Alaska salmon cannery.

“Most of the workers were white, but some were Latinos from Mexico,” said Wieser, who speaks fluent Spanish. “They didn’t speak English, and no one made any effort to find a translator, which was a real problem, because there were safety issues. Then two white college students who were deaf showed up, and everyone started learning sign language.”

Wieser became the migrant workers’ advocate.

“It was an important moment for me,” she said. “They stood to lose something. I stood to lose nothing. So that made me think: law school.”

She has been advocating for those who have a lot to lose ever since. For months, she has been leading the effort to register voters in the Cuyahoga County Jail. Last Friday, she loaded up her car with three young volunteers and the tools of voter registration—pens, forms, and phone books for checking zip codes—and headed for the county’s workhouse.

She met with the usual obstacles. Her visit was scheduled, but it took additional haggling before guards allowed her to visit each pod to tell inmates about their voting rights. Then she was ushered into the stark visiting room and waited. And waited and waited.

Only about two dozen male inmates came in to register. Wieser questioned one of the corrections officers.

“This is it? What about the other units? And what about the women?”

The guard shrugged his shoulders. “Nope, that’s it,” he said.

Wieser shook her head, then took a deep breath as she packed up supplies to head for the annex, where she and the volunteers registered five more inmates, including the sixty-eight-year-old Cleveland man.

“Are you going to vote?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you going to vote?”

She grinned. “Yes.”

He pressed her to reveal her candidate in the presidential race, but she resisted.

“This is supposed to be a nonpartisan effort,” she told him. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

“Okay,” he said. “I can understand that.”

Wieser leaned in. “You’re going to vote, right?”

“I’m going to be like you,” he said, grinning. “I’m going to think about it.”