The Hidden Barriers to Voting While Unhoused

In preparation for the November election, the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen in New Haven, Connecticut has begun incorporating voter registration information into the intake process at their drop-in resource center. Many unhoused people, according to Steve Werlin, the executive director, didn’t realize that they can vote without a permanent address. “The perception of eligibility is the biggest stumbling block,” Werlin said.

Voter turnout among people experiencing homelessness is understudied, but the best available data suggests the numbers are very, very low. The most recent study on the topic, on the 2012 elections, estimates that only ten percent of eligible voters experiencing homelessness actually voted—a fraction of the overall turnout of the country’s voting-age population, which was 54 percent.

Some may make a personal political choice not to vote. Others face barriers to registering and receiving election information without a permanent address. But even more pressing, experts say, is the widespread misconception that people cannot vote.

“One of the biggest barriers is misinformation,” Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said. “People do not think that being homeless creates the opportunity for them to vote if they don’t have a regular fixed address. Sometimes it’s actually information that is given to them by people that don’t want them to vote–there’s a lot of misinformation and even intentional voter suppression.”

To fight such misinformation, the National Coalition for the Homeless has launched a “You Don’t Need a Home To Vote” campaign, likely the only national campaign aimed at mobilizing unhoused voters. Though state laws vary, people can often list a shelter, a church, a park, or even a street intersection as their place of residence when registering.

Yet in many ways, our electoral system is designed around the idea that each voter is tethered to a specific residential address. Important voting information is often communicated via the US postal service: shelters can receive an overwhelming amount of election mail each month, and it may be difficult for individuals to receive information such as registration confirmation and the location of their polling place. For people living unsheltered, IDs are often lost, stolen, or thrown out during encampment sweeps, making it difficult to meet Voter ID requirements in certain states. Some polling places may be prohibitively far away, and accessing transportation can be difficult.

In Georgia, a new law concerning voters without a residential address has raised alarms for voting rights advocates. The law, SB 189, will take effect in 2025 and prohibits the use of a non-residential address while voting, requiring voters without a permanent address to instead register at their county registrar’s office. The law endangers the registration of thousands of unhoused people currently registered at non-residential addresses.

Andrew Garber, a counsel with the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Election Program, says increasing voter turnout among unhoused people requires expanding access to voting. Every person ought to have access to multiple methods of voting: early voting, in-person voting, no-excuse absentee voting. Such reforms, Garber believes, are healthy democratic practice that can benefit all.

“A lot of these hurdles are the same for unhoused voters as they are for all voters,” Garber said. “There’s just so many ways now that people who want to restrict voting are finding the ability to do it.”

In recent weeks, Whitehead has toured swing states to visit shelters as part of the “You Don’t Need a Home To Vote” campaign. In races with tight margins, Whitehead believes, mobilizing unhoused voters could make a difference. In the 2020 election, Biden won Arizona by some 10,400 votes, and the state has an estimated 14,237 residents who are unhoused.