ABSTRACT
Contrary to the United States, most European countries protect the voting rights of system-impacted individuals. The extent of these protections varies; broadly, Eastern European countries generally have fewer restrictions on incarcerated individuals’ right to vote than Western European countries, despite their history of communist rule (Rozman, 2022). The Czech Republic has some of the strongest protections of this right, although this was not the case when Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918. At that time, incarcerated individuals could still exercise their voting rights, but there were restrictions related to specific crimes (Rozman, 2022). This chapter is dedicated to the practice of elections in the Czech Republic as they relate to incarcerated individuals, focussing on incarcerated voters’ turnout in previous elections, and a discussion on voting as a tool of reintegration. To obtain a deeper insight into the topic of this chapter, it is fundamental to review some of the country's basic characteristics, as the Czech Republic has gone through several significant regime changes in the 20th century.
