This November, a new class of voters in D.C. will be able to cast ballots in elections. On Tuesday, the D.C. Council approved a second emergency police reform bill, which included a provision extending the right to vote to any D.C. resident imprisoned for a felony offense.

Under current law, residents serving sentences in the D.C. Jail are entitled to vote while in custody, and felons have their voting rights restored upon being released from prison. But incarcerated felons have been unable to vote since 1955, when Congress imposed a local prohibition.

Forty-eight states have similar laws on the books, many of which were linked to racially discriminatory laws. Only Maine and Vermont never denied felons their voting rights. And with the Council’s new bill, D.C. will become the first place in the country to actively restore those rights to its incarcerated felons.

“This is an exciting day for democracy. This is an exciting day for equal justice,” said At-Large Councilmember Robert White, who first introduced the bill last year. “And it really is made better because this effort was led by returning citizens themselves. My hope is state after state will follow out lead.”

Speaking at a public hearing last fall on the measure, Ward 7 resident Keith Towery said expanding the franchise would be a way to keep incarcerated D.C. residents connected to the communities many would eventually rejoin.

“We want our Washingtonians who are far away in federal custody to feel connected to their communities,” he said. “Washingtonians go to federal prison, they learn to read and write, why not teach them to vote? They can bring that back to the community.”

Despite some pushback from national Democrats after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) endorsed the idea last year, the entire Council and Mayor Muriel Bowser quickly came to White’s side in supporting the bill. And with the bill now on its way to becoming law — it only needs Bowser’s signature — attention will now shift to how to best implement it.

And that’s not an insignificant challenge: thousands of D.C.’s residents who were convicted of felonies are serving their sentences in federal facilities across the country, since the city has no state prison system of its own. As of last September, more than 4,500 Washingtonians were incarcerated in federal facilities overseen by the U.S. prison bureau.

As written, the bill requires that absentee ballots first be made available to felons held in the D.C. Jail, meaning they could cast ballots as soon as November. (While many inmates at the D.C. Jail are serving sentences for misdemeanors or being held pending trial, incarcerated felons cycle in and out of the facility for court hearings or ahead of a pending release.)

Starting in January 2021, the D.C. Board of Elections will be required to try to provide all felons in federal facilities with a voter registration form, a voter guide, educations materials on voting, and an absentee ballot. But the Federal Bureau of Prisons will play a critical role in implementing such measures, and it remains to be seen how cooperative federal officials will be.