The word is "restoration"

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Alert · August 27, 2026

The signal

Missouri HB 1871 takes effect August 28, 2026. It ends the rule that held voting rights until a person finished parole or probation entirely, which could take years after release. The Sentencing Project projects 41,100 Missourians get the vote back. Thousands more do not, and the list of who does not is longer than the coverage says. The registration deadline for the November 3 election is Wednesday, October 7, at 5:00 p.m.

The word

"Restoration." It sounds finished, and it sounds like everyone. Read the statute and it is a sorting. New section 115.133 restores the vote to people on probation or parole for most felonies, and withholds it from people on probation or parole for others, until final discharge. The law is not a door opening. It is a door with a list on it.

What it actually does

Missouri used to withhold the ballot until final discharge, meaning the vote came back only when supervision formally ended, sometimes long after a person was living and working and paying taxes at home. HB 1871 moves that moment forward for most people, to release rather than discharge. For the excluded offenses, the old final discharge rule survives untouched. Two people released the same day, both on parole, both employed, both paying rent, now hold different rights, and the difference is invisible from the outside.

Who it hit

The excluded list is where the coverage and the statute part company. Empower Missouri's own 2026 session recap describes the bill as restoring rights to people convicted of "all but 11 felonies." The statute names nine sections and two entire chapters. The nine are first and second degree murder, first and second degree assault, first degree domestic assault, the prior and persistent assault offender provision, incest, endangering the welfare of a child in the first degree, and first degree burglary. The two chapters are Chapter 566, Sexual Offenses, and Chapter 573, Pornography and Related Offenses, which together carry eighty two sections currently in force, forty five and thirty seven. Eleven is the count of items in the sentence, not the count of felonies. The number that makes the carve-out sound small is a feature of how the list is punctuated. On who is affected by race, the state counts twice and never crosses the two. Missouri's Department of Corrections publishes the racial composition of the supervised population, 19.5 percent Black on total supervision and 22.8 percent on parole in its FY2023 profile, and it publishes the population broken into offense groups. It never publishes those two together. So the one question this law raises, who the excluded list actually hits, cannot be computed from anything Missouri makes public. The counting exists. The crossing does not.

What to do

If you are on felony probation or parole in Missouri and your offense is not on that list, you can register starting August 28. Do it now rather than in October, because a prior denial can leave you off the rolls even after the law changes, and re registering takes time you will not have at the deadline. Register online at sos.mo.gov, in person at your local election authority, or by mail. The cutoff is set by statute at the fourth Wednesday before the election, which for November 3, 2026 is Wednesday, October 7, at 5:00 p.m. If you are unsure whether your conviction falls inside the excluded list, ask your parole or probation officer for the statute section number of your offense and check it against section 115.133 before you assume either way. If you helped someone register before and they were denied, go back to them. The denial may no longer stand.

The receipts

Primary (the law): Missouri HB 1871, SS SCS HCS, Truly Agreed To and Finally Passed, new section 115.133, subsection 2, read at documents.house.mo.gov. The exclusion reads, verbatim, "While on probation or parole after conviction of a felony pursuant to chapter 566 or 573 or section 565.020, 565.021, 565.050, 565.052, 565.072, 565.079, 568.020, 568.045, or 569.160, until finally discharged from such probation or parole." Trust tier: primary.
Primary (the deadline): RSMo 115.135, subsection 1, revisor.mo.gov, verbatim: registration closes "no later than 5:00 p.m. ... on the fourth Wednesday prior to the election." October 7, 2026 is computed from that language against a November 3, 2026 election day, not copied from a voter guide. Trust tier: primary.
Primary (the offense names): section headings taken verbatim from revisor.mo.gov chapter indexes for chapters 565, 566, 568 and 573, and the section page for 569.160. Chapter 566 is titled Sexual Offenses. Chapter 573 is titled Pornography and Related Offenses. Trust tier: primary.
Secondary, attributed in prose and never stated flat: the 41,100 projection is The Sentencing Project's own figure. Bolts, July 21, 2026, reported the carve out at roughly twenty percent of the affected population. Both are advocacy estimates, not state counts.
Effective date August 28, 2026, corroborated across the bill signing record of July 13, 2026, Ballotpedia, and the Jefferson City News Tribune. The truly agreed text carries no emergency clause, so the August 28 default applies.
RE-CHECKED 2026-09-01, after the claim's own expiry date passed: the Missouri Revisor of Statutes now carries new section 115.133 in force with the history line Effective 28 Aug 2026, and the enacted text matches the truly agreed bill character for character on the exclusion clause. The Secretary of State's elections page, the authority first named, carries no mention of the law, so the Revisor's own effective date line is the primary and the authority on this entry now names it. Next re-check is tied to the registration deadline, October 7, after which the alert is past tense. Trust tier: primary.
Primary (the race figures): Missouri Department of Corrections, Profile of the Institutional and Supervised Offender Population, FY2023, Table 9.1, Supervised Population by Gender and Race/Ethnicity on June 30, 2023. Total supervision Black 10,295 of 52,700, parole 22.8 percent, probation 18.3 percent. Table 10.3 breaks offense groups by gender only, never by race, which is the gap the prose names. Trust tier: primary.
The framing being corrected: Empower Missouri, 2026 Legislative Session Recap, states the bill restores rights to people convicted of all but 11 felonies. Cited by name rather than attributed to unnamed coverage.

What verification changed before this published

CORRECTED AT THE GATE, and it is the reason this alert exists in this shape: every secondary account frames the exclusion as all but eleven felonies. The statute names nine sections and two whole chapters, roughly eighty sections in total. Publishing the eleven figure would have repeated a count that makes the carve out sound small. The correction came from reading the truly agreed bill text, which had to be extracted locally after the PDF defeated automated fetch.
CORRECTED AT THE GATE: the October 7 deadline arrived as secondary corroboration from voter guides because the Secretary of State page would not render. It is now computed from RSMo 115.135's own words. November 3, 2026 is a Tuesday; the fourth Wednesday prior is October 7.
CORRECTED AT THE GATE, and this one was CC's error, caught by the receipt gate: the draft first stated that Missouri publishes no racial breakdown of the parole and probation caseload. That is false and checkable in one search. The Department of Corrections publishes it annually in its Profile of the Institutional and Supervised Offender Population, Table 9.1. What genuinely does not exist is an offense category by race cross tab, Table 10.3 being broken out by gender only. An unforced, falsifiable claim of absence was replaced with the narrower true one, which is also the better line.
Withheld: any claim about the pending Missouri congressional map referendum litigation. It bears on the same election but carries no action a reader can take beyond registering, which this alert already asks for.

Sources

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