Bernie Sanders becomes the first presidential candidate to call for voting rights for current prisoners

• Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday said he supports allowing people who are currently incarcerated to vote.
• Sanders is the first Democrat to endorse this idea, which is already implemented in his home state of Vermont.
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed enfranchising felons who've completed their prison sentences, but has stopped short of promoting voting rights for current prisoners.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont over the weekend became the first Democratic presidential candidate to champion extending voting rights to people currently behind bars.

At a town hall in Muscatine, Iowa on Saturday, Sanders was asked whether he thought people who are incarcerated at present should have the right to vote.

"I think that is absolutely the direction we should go," Sanders replied, according to the Des Moines Register.

"In my state, what we do is separate. You're paying a price, you committed a crime, you're in jail. That's bad," he said. "But you're still living in American society and you have a right to vote. I believe in that, yes, I do."

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It's up to states whether or not current or former inmates are allowed to vote. In Vermont, felons maintain voting rights regardless of whether they're incarcerated, but it varies from state to state.

In Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, a lifetime voting ban is placed on people convicted of murder or rape. Meanwhile in Iowa and Kentucky, people with felony records are barred from voting for life unless the governor personally intervenes.

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A 2016 report from The Sentencing Project, a non-profit focusing on criminal justice reform, estimated roughly 6.1 million people in the US have been "forbidden to vote because of felony disenfranchisement, or laws restricting voting rights for those convicted of felony-level crimes."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another 2020 Democrat, has supported the notion of restoring voting rights for people with felony records who've completed their sentences, but didn't go as far as supporting enfranchisement for current prisoners.