Laws that bar people with felony convictions from voting have a major impact on lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender women of color, says a new report from the Human Rights Campaign.

All but two states have laws that place some degree of restriction on the voting rights of people who’ve been convicted of a felony, and discriminatory policing means that women of color and LGBTQ+ people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, according to the report, Banned From the Ballot Box: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws on LBTQ Women of Color, authored by Courtnay Avant, HRC legislative counsel.

Black Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than that of whites and represent more than a third of the current prison population, while Latinx people account for nearly 20 percent, Avant notes. She also cites a recent study by the Williams Institute indicating that sexual minorities are more than three times more likely to be imprisoned or jailed than heterosexual people. Women identifying as LBTQ make up 5.1 percent of the general adult population, but 40 percent of incarcerated women were sexual minorities.

The reasons for racial disparities include overpolicing of minority populations and harsher sentences for people of color than for whites, according to the report. The treatment of nonviolent drug offenses provides an example, Avant writes: “The statutory penalties imposed on users and possessors of crack cocaine, who are more likely to be people of color, are disproportionately more severe than those levied upon users and possessors of cocaine in its powder form.” Read more via Advocate