Faced with eroding federal protections, some states have tried to shore up voting rights. They have passed their own voting rights acts, banned partisan gerrymandering, and expanded the franchise. But their efforts are facing legal challenges as well, this time from the right, raising fresh questions as to what strategies can most effectively strengthen democracy.

Heading into this new political era, Bolts has identified eight legal battles that are likely to shape voting rights in 2025.

These cases will affect election rules locally, from redistricting in Florida and Louisiana to the future of mail ballots in Mississippi and the fate of new protections in New York. But their effects will also ripple nationwide, as other states eye how they may further buttress or cut down on voting.

1. Will a redistricting case out of Louisiana weaken the VRA?

Conservatives are pursuing a multi-pronged attack to eliminate what is left of the Voting Rights Act. Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, conservatives have objected with renewed vigor to the longstanding approach of considering race in redistricting to create minority-majority districts, arguing that race-based districting is unconstitutional.

Their effort is coming to a head this year in a blockbuster Supreme Court case that is centered around Louisiana’s congressional map.

After the 2020 census, Louisiana legislators approved a new congressional map that included only one Black-majority district, stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. A lawsuit countered that this map diluted the power of Black voters, and that the Voting Rights Act required two Black-majority districts. After lengthy proceedings, the Fifth Circuit of Appeals sided with plaintiffs in late 2023 and ordered that a new map be drawn by January 2024. 

The legislature abided by the ruling, creating a second majority-Black district that goes from Baton Rouge in central Louisiana to Shreveport in the far northwest corner. The district elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, in November.

But a group of mostly white voters, who describe themselves as “non-African American,” now wants to throw the new map out. They claim the legislature impermissibly relied on race to draw the districts, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Two Trump-appointed judges ruled last year that the map was likely unconstitutional and struck it down, though the Supreme Court stepped in and allowed it to be used in the 2024 election. 

The Supreme Court will hold hearings on this case in the spring of 2025. The justices will decide whether Louisiana’s new map survives by the end of their session in late June.

Complicating matters: The state of Louisiana is ostensibly defending the new map, but voting rights advocates have accused the state of deliberately undermining its own case. Louisiana officials already raised eyebrows last year when they chose to draw a new majority-Black district that bore a striking resemblance to a district that was struck down in the 1990s. Civil rights groups had pushed for a more compact design they deemed legally safer, and they suspected Republicans had different intentions. 

If the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs, it could gut Section 2 of the VRA, which shields minority-majority districts. Or, the court may introduce new restrictions on factoring in race in redistricting. Even if it doesn’t strike down Section 2, this would raise a host of new questions about its implementation and the viability of minority-majority districts nationwide. In either case, it would spell major trouble for Cleo Fields’s future in Congress.

2. How will courts treat new state-level Voting Rights Acts?

As the U.S. Supreme Court has trimmed the federal VRA, some states have stepped in to pass VRAs of their own. Though details vary depending on the state, they frequently go much further than federal law in safeguarding fairness in redistricting and access to the ballot. 

But these laws have sparked conservative challenges of their own. Last fall, a superior court judge in New York struck down the state’s VRA, concluding that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The case is now working its way through New York’s appeals process, an important test of the viability of state VRAs as an alternative to the federal law. Other VRAs have fared better in their own state’s courts so far, but still more states have adopted these laws in recent years (including New Mexico in 2023 and Minnesota last year), creating new battlegrounds to watch. 

3. Will mail ballots still be afforded a grace period to arrive?

In 18 states, mail ballots can trickle into election offices after Election Day, as long as they’ve been postmarked by Election Day. The approach helps people vote by mail without needing to worry about possible delays in delivery, but it also lengthens election counts, and Republicans have accused it without evidence of facilitating voter fraud. 

In a bombshell ruling in October, a panel of conservative federal judges threw this longstanding practice into question. The case will continue in 2025 and possibly create new obstacles to mail voting.

The Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party last year challenged Mississippi’s rule, which allows ballots to arrive up to five days after Election Day, arguing that it conflicts with a federal law that sets the date of the election. Three Trump-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit agreed. They ruled that “ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials” by the “day of the election,” though they did not apply their holding to the 2024 elections. Several voter groups have asked the full Fifth Circuit to hear the case; their appeal may end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, which could swat away the ruling. 

But the Supreme Court could also apply the rule nationwide, affecting all of the states that allow ballots to arrive after Election Day. This would risk disenfranchising thousands of voters. Administrative delays and errors in sending ballots out are common enough, and a requirement that ballots be received by Election Day would put voters at the mercy of how quickly the U.S. Postal Service operates. Trump has evoked the prospect of privatizing USPS, which could add further complications.

4. Will GOP states succeed at criminalizing voter assistance?

GOP-run states have passed new bans in recent years on civic organizations helping people vote. They’ve made it harder to provide assistance with registration, to fill out requests for mail ballots, and to collect filled-out ballots.

Just last year, Alabama adopted a law that imposes lengthy prison sentences on paid organizers who help people vote by mail. A new Missouri law similarly restricts assisting people with absentee ballots and with voter registration. And Florida barred non-citizens from assisting with voter registration efforts.

These bans on voter assistance now all face legal tests. All three suffered early defeats in 2024; the Florida and Alabama laws were suspended or struck down by a federal district court, and a state court judge blocked Missouri’s. But proponents of the bans have appealed to salvage the laws. These cases in 2025 will shape how similar restrictions evolve around the country.

5. Will lifetime disenfranchisement survive two lawsuits in Virginia?

Youngkin has made Virginia one of the harshest states in the nation when it comes to restoring the voting rights of people with criminal convictions. Two years ago, he rescinded policies put in place by his predecessors and brought back a lifetime ban on voting for anyone convicted of a felony. 

The ACLU of Virginia and other groups have filed an unusual lawsuit in response: They claim that Youngkin’s decision violates the Virginia Readmission Act, the Reconstruction-era federal law that allowed Virginia to rejoin the United States. In an effort to limit schemes to exclude Black residents, Congress in 1870 restricted the range of felonies that Virginia can use to strip people of the right to vote. Yet, Virginia today disenfranchises people who’ve been convicted of any felony whatsoever; the practice disproportionately affects Black Virginians.

The case is now poised to go to trial in federal court, after the Fourth Circuit greenlit the lawsuit in December. Jared Davidson, a co-counsel for the plaintiff, has said the case is a “milestone in terms of ensuring that the promises and guarantees of the Reconstruction Congress are finally fulfilled and honored by the state of Virginia.”

Virginia’s felony disenfranchisement rules are also the target of a separate lawsuit, this one brought by George Hawkins, a Virginian profiled by Bolts in 2023 who expected to regain his voting rights until Youngkin cut down his hopes. The lawsuit alleges that Virginia’s new rules violate the First Amendment. A district court ruled in favor of the state last year, and this case currently sits with the Fourth Circuit.

If courts strike down Virginia’s approach in either case this year, it may expand the franchise just in time for the state’s elections that will decide, among other offices, Youngkin’s successor. 

6. How will eligible voters be affected by measures targeting noncitizens?

Donald Trump and his allies have relentlessly spread the false claim that non-citizens are illegally voting in significant numbers in U.S. elections, and Republican state officials have taken a range of actions in response. Arizona and New Hampshire have passed laws requiring that voters provide proof of citizenship at the time of registration; the rule is tripping up many people who are citizens but lack the proper documentation. And in the final stretch of the 2024 election, several GOP-led states purged their voter rolls, claiming they were getting rid of alleged non-citizens. But the purges affected U.S. citizens who were eligible to vote. 

This issue is sure to keep grabbing legal headlines in 2025. 

Voting rights advocates have battled Arizona’s law for years, pointing out that the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, shields voters from needing to prove their citizenship. The Supreme Court last summer allowed parts of the law to be enforced in the 2024 elections, but the case remains alive in the Ninth Circuit. In September, voting rights advocates also filed a similar suit against the New Hampshire law. Should federal courts end up ruling that the NVRA authorizes proof-of-citizenship requirements, it may open the floodgate to similar laws in other states. Republicans in Congress have also signaled this will be a priority for them at the federal level.

And Virginia’s upcoming elections will be fought in the shadow of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s decision to order a big voter purge last summer. Youngkin issued his order 90 days before the presidential race, even though the NVRA bars “systematically” purging voters within 90 days of a federal election. A lawsuit to block his order saw some early success but, in a shock order, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened and allowed the purges to continue with no explanation. 

The case will still be heard in lower court to determine the legality of Youngkin’s purge. The result may set important precedent, not just for purges in other parts of the country, but also for how Youngkin himself acts in the lead-up to Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November.

7. Will courts allow noncitizens to vote in New York’s local elections?

Across the country, even as nativist rhetoric has amped up, some municipalities have gone in the opposite direction: They’ve allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, with the idea of giving them a voice in the decisions closest to them. 

But conservatives have sued to stop these laws, arguing that they dilute the political power of citizens. Federal law does not prohibit allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, so these lawsuits are usually playing out in state court. San Francisco, Washington, D.C, and multiple towns in Vermont have managed to implement this reform in recent years despite litigation to stop them. 

But with just months to go before New York City’s municipal elections this summer, this reform remains stuck in the country’s most populous city. The city council passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens to vote in its local elections in late 2021, but a local judge struck it down in the spring of 2022 and an appeals court affirmed that ruling last year. The city council has since appealed the decision to the state’s highest court, but there’s been no development since.

8. Will Florida judges destroy protections against gerrymandering?

Floridians in 2010 embraced redistricting reform. They approved two constitutional amendments that barred partisan and racial gerrymandering and set up other measures to force lawmakers to draw fair maps. After GOP lawmakers largely ignored those requirements, the state supreme court in 2015 struck down their maps for violating the 2010 measures. Significantly, this produced a new Black-majority congressional district that connected Tallahassee to Jacksonville in north Florida, which elected Democrat Al Lawson in 2016.

Urged on by Governor Ron DeSantis, Republicans in 2022 adopted new aggressive gerrymanders and eliminated Lawson’s seat. And this decade, the voting rights groups that are challenging the maps are faced with a judiciary that has veered sharply to the right during DeSantis’ tenure. This has left the Fair District Amendments on the brink of irrelevance.

The Florida Supreme Court heard a lawsuit against the state’s new congressional map in September. The plaintiffs argued that the state diluted Black political representation by eliminating the Black-majority district in North Florida, in violation of the 2010 amendments. “Under Florida precedent from last decade, this is an open and shut case,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told NPR at the time.

Instead, Chief Justice Carlos Muniz, a DeSantis appointee, raised the prospect that the 2010 Fair Districts Amendments might be unconstitutional altogether—and that the court might strike it down. 

While this court always appeared unlikely to strike down the legislature’s map, striking down the fair districting requirements entirely would be another matter. There would be no more protection against partisan gerrymandering in the Florida Constitution, allowing Republicans going forward to freely gerrymander without even the feeble threat of state court intervention.

Honorable mentions

There can be no exhaustive list of the challenges that await democracy in 2025, and there are plenty of other state-specific legal battles that are already brewing.

In the final days of 2024, North Carolina Republicans passed legislation that upended election administration, stripping the Democratic governor of his authority over election boards and transferring that power to an office held by a Republican; Democrats have signaled they will sue over these changes. Wisconsin awaits a supreme court decision on the fate of Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election administrator whom Republicans hope to fire. And today, Pennsylvania’s supreme court said it will decide whether mail ballots that have not been dated should count; the state has a complex legal landscape when it comes to mail voting.

And the upcoming legislative sessions may create new sources of litigation if states pass laws that affect voting rights. For instance, an Idaho lawmaker just introduced legislation to make it harder to pass ballot instance; the state supreme court struck down a prior round of restrictions on direct democracy at the beginning of this decade.

The post On Voting Rights, Eight Legal Battles to Watch in 2025  appeared first on Bolts.

Monique Worrell, the Democratic state attorney in Orlando who was suspended by DeSantis last year, won 57 percent of the vote, defeating incumbent Andrew Bain, a member of the conservative Federalist Society whom the governor had appointed to replace Worrell after accusing her of neglecting her duties as a prosecutor. 

“Tonight’s results underscore the resilience of our democracy and a powerful message from the people: No governor’s petty political maneuvers and no amount of dark money can silence the voices of thousands who demand a fair, smart approach to justice over the failed, outdated policies of the past,” Worrell said in a statement released by her campaign. “We’re bringing back a State Attorney who knows this role isn’t about racking up convictions but about pursuing justice without bending to a political agenda.” 

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren lost to incumbent Suzy Lopez, who was appointed by DeSantis in August 2022 after the governor removed Warren, arguing that he had also neglected his duties by vowing to not prosecute abortion cases and ending the aggressive prosecution of Black cyclists and pedestrians. Lopez won 53 percent of the vote.

In a statement, Warren defended his record and slammed the governor’s actions. “The best candidate doesn’t always win, especially when the other side cheats—illegally suspending you, then spending millions of dollars lying about you,” Warren said. “I hope Ms. Lopez grows into this role to become an effective and independent state attorney—not beholden to the governor or sheriff, but accountable to the people.”

Worrell and Warren had fought their suspensions in the courts, alleging that DeSantis overstepped his authority and removed them for political reasons. In August, the Florida Supreme Court, which is largely filled with DeSantis appointees, upheld the governor’s decision to remove Worrell by a vote of 6–1. Warren had found more success—two federal courts ruled that the governor’s conduct violated his First Amendment rights, but a decision by the federal appeals court hearing Warren’s case was stalled after DeSantis requested to argue his case in front of the full panel of judges. 

In the lead-up to Election Day, Warren and Worrell faced questions about whether DeSantis would ultimately remove them from office again and replace them with his appointees. In an interview with Bolts this summer, Warren acknowledged that he and other Democrats were being watched by DeSantis on the campaign trail. “Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” he said. 

Ahead of the election, DeSantis would not commit to deferring to voters if they again elected Worrell and Warren, suggesting he might remove them again. 

“When both of those folks were in office, they took the position that they didn’t have to enforce laws they disagreed with that caused people to be put back on the street who then victimized folks that should not have been victimized,” DeSantis told reporters at a September press conference when asked about what he’d do if they won. 

Under state law, Florida’s governor has sweeping authority to suspend local elected officials for several reasons, such as neglect of duty, drunkenness, or malfeasance. Louis Virelli, a constitutional law professor at Stetson University, told Bolts there’s a high standard for neglect of duty, the reason for which DeSantis suspended Worrell and Warren, and it usually requires being able to show that someone won’t do their job, not just that they’ve established certain policies. Virelli, who would only speak about Warren’s case because he was not familiar with Worrell’s, said DeSantis’ removal of the prosecutor didn’t rise to that standard. 

“Honoring the outcome of elections is what makes us a democracy,” Virelli told Bolts. “There’s nothing else to a democracy. Either we get to choose our representatives and our elected officials, or we don’t, and if we don’t, we’re not a democracy anymore.”

Beyond ousting local elected prosecutors, DeSantis was also accused of meddling in Orlando’s race for state attorney. Thomas Feiter, a Republican who lost in the August primary, said in a lawsuit last month that DeSantis’ team tried to bribe him to drop out of the race and help clear the way for Bain, who ran as an independent; the candidate who beat Feiter quickly dropped out of the race after winning the GOP primary. Feiter also wrote in a complaint to the Florida Bar Association that if Worrell won, DeSantis planned to remove her again and replace her with Bain. A local judge dismissed Feiter’s case last week on procedural grounds and the bar association did not follow up on the claim. 

“If Monique wins, I think—well, they told me that the plan is to remove her again, and just put Bain back in,” Feiter said in September on local radio channel WMNF. 

DeSantis did not respond to questions from Bolts about whether he plans to again remove prosecutors who were elected by voters. 

Residents in Tampa and Orlando quickly felt the impact of DeSantis’ removal of their elected state attorney. In Tampa, the governor’s appointee, Lopez, swiftly rolled back Warren’s policies. Warren had instructed line prosecutors to stop pursuing nonviolent, misdemeanor cases resulting from bicycle and pedestrian stops after a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation showing such police stops overwhelmingly targeted Black people. Within four days of her appointment in 2022, Lopez sent out a memo lifting restrictions on how her office handled bicycle and pedestrian stop cases. 

On Tuesday night, Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough County NAACP, an organization that helped craft Warren’s policy, said she was disappointed with the results. “Not good for Black people,” she wrote in a text message. 

In Orlando, Worrell had campaigned on a platform to reform the criminal justice system. Among her goals was to tackle mass incarceration and cut down on the number of kids tried in adult court. Worrell was also the director of the conviction integrity unit under former State Attorney Aramis Ayala and had approved DNA testing for two capital cases through her own unit shortly after taking office.

This story was updated on Nov. 6 to include a statement from Worrell. 

The post Orlando Prosecutor Ousted by Governor Wins Her Job Back appeared first on Bolts.

While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

In April 2023, the Florida legislature passed Senate Bill 7050, a law imposing a slew of new regulations on the activities of third-party voter registration organizations (or “3PVROs” as they are referred to by Florida government officials). Under the law, these groups must re-register with the state before each election cycle in order to collect voter registration forms, and they have a shorter time frame to return voter registration forms to the county supervisor of elections; just 10 days, down from 14, with a $50 penalty per late day, up to $2,500 per application. SB 7050 also requires that applicants are provided with receipts that contain the name of the volunteer or staff member who registered them. 

The law also prohibits individuals previously convicted of felonies from “handling or collecting” voter registration applications, and imposes $50,000 fines for each volunteer violating these standards. This effectively requires 3PVROs to conduct background checks. The ceiling for aggregate fines has also increased: groups can now face up to $250,000 in fines each year, quintupling from the previous figure of $50,000.

The effects of SB 7050 have been felt around the state. In a state that already sees lower voter registration rates across the board, particularly for Black, Latinx, Asian, and other communities of color, outside organizations have long stepped in to fill a void left by state actors. But that work is now stalling. When the law came into effect, Poder Latinx, an organization promoting civic engagement in Latinx communities, paused their programs as there were “no clear guidelines on how to move forward.” Carolina Wassmer, Poder Latinx’s Florida State Director, mentioned that the organization had to work closely with their legal counsel to understand the law’s implications and ways to ensure compliance before resuming voter outreach.

Advocates see SB 7050 as the latest in a wave of voter suppression laws to come out of the state legislature. It was preceded by other laws such as SB 90 and SB 524 which restricted vote-by-mail and increased fines on these groups, respectively. 

“7050 was sort of the deathblow to third-party voter registration,” said Genesis Robinson, interim executive director of Equal Ground Education Fund and Action Fund, a Black-led voter rights organization. “It was really a compounding effect with other voter suppression bills that had passed in previous legislative sessions.”

The requirement of re-registering with the state each election cycle, combined with the possibility of burdensome fines, has “radically changed” how the League of Women Voters of Florida registers voters. “We come prepared with voter registration applications, but we just no longer take them away and turn them in,” Cecile Scoon, co-president of the Florida League, told Bolts. 

Rather than collecting forms and submitting on behalf of voters, League volunteers now provide people with assistance with filling out the form as well as stamps and envelopes that the organization has purchased through fundraising so that applicants can mail the forms on their own. However, this new method only works if individual applicants take the initiative to mail their own form—which is more difficult to guarantee than when 3PVROs collected and submitted on their behalf.

“The whole process of explaining to mail it and everything like that is slower,” Scoon said. Before, volunteers could walk through crowds at Fourth of July parades and community events, handing out and collecting voter registration forms, but now, they are “more stationary at a table.”

D’Bria Bradshaw, Florida state coordinator of the Campus Vote Project, which supports universities in getting students to register, has had to try other novel strategies to avoid any possibility of fines. “The best way to get students registered to vote: direct them to the QR code, direct them to the website, and walk them through registering to vote,” said Bradshaw.

By scanning QR codes, students can access voter registration forms on their electronic devices and fill it out on their own (hopefully right there on the spot) without outside assistance.

Other organizations have also shifted to a digital strategy. Equal Ground has invested in tablets and electronic devices to bring to community events, where organizers walk applicants through the process of registration. “Because of 7050 and the implications with respect to fines and fees and potential jail time, we thought it necessary to mitigate risk as much as possible. And so we have foregone doing paper voter registration applications,” said Robinson. “That has a tremendous impact on the communities that we serve.” Robinson points out that voters of color are five times more likely to be registered to vote by a third-party voter registration organizer.

Recognizing the suppressive nature of SB 7050, several groups challenged the law in federal court shortly after its passage. Abha Khanna of Elias Law Group is the lead attorney on the case Florida NAACP v. Byrd, which challenges three provisions of the law: the personal information retention ban, a previous section that originally prohibited noncitizens from handling voter registration applications as well as people with felony convictions, and the increased fines for late applications or technical errors. The former two provisions are not currently in effect; the first was preliminarily enjoined due to a lack of clarity on what constitutes personal information, while the second was found unconstitutional and permanently enjoined.

The third provision, however, remains in effect and is hampering the functioning of voter organizations. 

“A single late day can really have serious consequences for many of these non-profit organizations on shoestring budgets,” said Khanna. “The result of all of these [provisions] individually and together is to really try to squeeze out and crush third-party voter registration organizations and limit their opportunities and their abilities to register.”

The law has also left voting organizations struggling to find enough willing and able volunteers. When the noncitizen provision was in effect, organizations like Poder Latinx that serve immigrant communities faced shrinking teams as some volunteers were not citizens. Though that provision has been struck down, the provision forbidding volunteers who have previously been convicted of a felony still burdens these groups, as they must conduct background checks to avoid the possibility of facing steep fines, with the maximum penalties of $250,000 per year often exceeding organizations’ annual budgets.

Threats of fines and criminal penalties without clear guidelines on what is required has produced a climate of fear surrounding voter registration work. Robinson of Equal Ground mentioned that many of the organization’s long-time paid canvassers have “walked away from that space voluntarily because their risk is just too great.” And according to Scoon, some League volunteers—particularly older women—are apprehensive about continuing to register voters as they feel that handing out their full names on receipts could endanger their physical safety in a tense political environment.

SB 7050 has also made it more difficult to track how many voters they have registered. Prior to the law, voting organizations had special registration numbers that were added to the forms they collected so that government data would reflect how many voters were registered by each organization. Now that many groups have stopped collecting forms, there is no way to know if voters who received paper forms actually completed and submitted them.

Though procuring an exact number is impossible, Scoon estimated that voter registration numbers have gone down “at least 30 percent” for the League. Wassmer mentioned that Poder Latinx has achieved less than 50 percent of its goal to reach 10,000 voters since the law’s passage. Robinson also described a “deep decline” in the number of voters Equal Ground has been able to reach, as well as an overall decrease in the registration of Black voters across the state.

In 2020, the most recent presidential election year, voting organizations in Florida had registered 458,197 voters. In 2024, they have registered only 13,521 Floridians as of August 31.

This drop is raising alarms about inequalities in voter access. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have implemented automatic voter registration in recent years, and some states have explored other innovative ways to reach groups of voters who don’t have contact with typical registration channels such as a DMV. Michigan last year became the first place to automatically register people to vote as they leave prison. And Colorado is working with Native leaders to register voters through tribal enrollment rolls. Several states have tried to enact automatic voter registration through Medicaid, though the reform is being held up at the federal level. 

Where these efforts are still fledgling, outside groups are standing in the gap to reach more voters by promoting voter registration and reducing disparities in civic engagement. “The voters that they tend to reach, that the other services—government services—don’t usually reach, tend to be Black and brown and poor voters,” Khanna said. 

As of November 2022, Florida had the fifth lowest percentage of registered voters as a share of the eligible population. It has no automatic voter registration, nor any state-sponsored mechanisms to promote higher registration numbers, and increasing burdens and punitive measures on outside organizations that threaten to reduce overall voter registration and turnout and widen racial gaps ahead of the 2024 election.

Yet, voting advocates question the need for such extreme restrictions. “It’s not that there’s a rampant issue of these 3PVROs sitting on applications or behaving in a way that was un-diligent when it came to submitting voter registration applications,” Khanna said.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true for many organizations, such as the League of Women Voters of Florida, which had robust training programs requiring volunteers to pass a quiz before registering voters, and pairing newer volunteers with more experienced ones to ensure guidelines were being followed. 

“If they had problems, just deal with the people you have problems with. The League has never had a problem. The League has never been written out, warned, or anything,” Scoon said.

Teresa Cornacchione is the civic engagement coordinator at the University of Florida’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service, an organization that is certified to register students to vote. A major challenge emerged for the Bob Graham Center in 2021, when SB 90 was passed by the Florida legislature, requiring that such groups submit voter registration forms to the supervisor of elections in the county in which the applicant resides. The University of Florida is comprised of students from all across the state, so submitting forms to each of Florida’s 67 counties increased the time and cost associated with voter registration. SB 7050’s narrowing of the time frame to return forms, combined with this 2021 requirement, has made the voter registration process more difficult for staff and volunteers at UF.

Yet, despite these barriers, voting organizations have not given up hope. According to Cornacchione, staff and students at the University of Florida are ready “to work even harder” to register voters. “I don’t think the 3PVRO stuff has really deterred these students from being engaged,” she said. The Bob Graham Center’s Gators Vote initiative visits first-year classes and registers students to vote with the permission of the instructor.

In April, Equal Ground began a statewide tour to educate voters on new registration requirements, the implications of voter suppression laws, and issues that will be on the ballot. Similarly, the League is hosting forums, litigating, participating in bus tours, preparing voter guides, and tabling at colleges, churches, and community events. The organization is also mobilizing voters around abortion rights, which is on the 2024 ballot as Amendment 4.

“There’s a lot of mobilization that you can do that is not directly attached to voter registration,” Scoon said. 

The post Florida Law Strikes “Deathblow” to Outside Groups Trying to Register New Voters  appeared first on Bolts.

Jeff Buongiorno, a slate member in Palm Beach County, has called elections in Florida “a conspiracy from the top down,” alleging that the state’s GOP leadership is enabling noncitizens to vote. Chris Gleason, the candidate in Pinellas County, has baselessly claimed that the local supervisor, Republican Julie Marcus, had made Pinellas “ground zero” of mail voter fraud.

The candidates hail from different corners of the state but many have held joint events and press conferences and they’ve appeared on podcasts as a group to air their grievances. “Every single one of them is running because they saw their local SOE not following election law properly or not maintaining their voting rolls, and they got really upset,” Cathi Chamberlain, who is loosely coordinating this coalition of 13 candidates and is the founder of Pinellas Watchdogs, a group that circulates fringe theories about fraud, said on a right-wing podcast in July.

The group hit a wall in Tuesday’s GOP primaries. 

Six of its members were defeated by incumbent Republican supervisors, including Gleason in Pinellas County. A seventh candidate trailed in his primary’s initial count.

But elsewhere in the state, six more coalition members, including Buongiorno, are advancing to the general election. They’ll continue their bid to take over supervisor offices into November. 

“Many of my colleagues have been worn down by the atmosphere we find ourselves in but it has only strengthened my resolve,” incumbent Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer, a Democrat who’ll face slate member Billy Christensen in the fall, told Bolts.

Christensen was unopposed in Hillsborough County’s Republican primary. He’s one of four slate members who moved to November with no intraparty competition, alongside the candidates in Alachua, Palm Beach, and Osceola counties. Alachua is staunchly blue. Hillsborough, Palm Beach, and Osceola all flipped from voting for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 to voting for Republican Ron DeSantis in 2022.

Two other coalition members moved forward after winning contested GOP primaries in Monroe County and Seminole County. Both will also face Democrats in November. 

Slate candidates lost, often by overwhelming margins, in Pinellas, Charlotte, Collier, Lake, Lee, and Santa Rosa counties. In St. Lucie County, a manual recount is expected to stretch into next week; it’ll decide whether coalition member George Umansky, who trailed by just two votes in the initial count out of roughly 25,000 cast, moves on to face Democratic Supervisor Gertrude Walker. (Editor’s note: The recount confirmed that Umansky lost the primary to Republican Jennifer Frey by four votes.)

“We are extremely concerned that people trying to shake the public’s trust in elections are seeking to run our elections,” said Brad Ashwell, the state director for All Voting is Local, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for marginalized communities to vote. 

“Voters saw through the lies and voted down a lot of these candidates,” Ashwell said of Tuesday’s results. “We are really hopeful the other candidates moving into the general see those losses and realize it is not a winning strategy.”

Supervisors of elections in Florida are responsible for running elections within their county; they oversee voter registration, design ballots, conduct voter outreach, and process mail ballots. 

They can’t unilaterally change election rules set by lawmakers and the secretary of state. So the slate’s candidates wouldn’t have the authority to execute the changes some of them are proposing, such as ending the use of voting machines or banning all mail voting. 

Still, Ashwell warned, county officials would have opportunities to upend the system. They may grow more aggressive in purging registered voters based on minor errors on their forms, rejecting more mail ballots based on technicalities, and using dodgy AI tools to chase down issues on voter rolls. A far-right group has been pressuring local election officials to purge voters based on lists generated by the tool Eagle AI, which scrubs voter rolls to identify inconsistencies with other public databases; the state’s top elections official encouraged local offices to “take action” based on those lists, but voting rights advocates warn that these lists are not reliable.

Counties also have a lot of discretion on how accessible to make voting—how many drop boxes to install, how long early voting locations are open. And some slate members signaled they’d curtail access. “‘Easy to Vote’ MEANS ‘Easy to Cheat,’” their candidate in Lake County, who lost on Tuesday, wrote on his website. 

No supervisor can single-handedly refuse to certify their county’s election results, but they all sit on the three-person body responsible for certification.

Some of the slate’s candidates have drawn support from prominent figures who support election denier networks, such as Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, and billionaire Richard Uihlein.

But not all thirteen candidates align on what took place in the 2020 election, and whether there’s widespread fraud within Florida—or only in the states that Trump lost. 

Several slate candidates have asserted without evidence that Florida officials are erasing tens of thousands of votes. Others like Sherri Hodies, who won an open GOP primary in Monroe County, home to Key West, have said they trust Florida but believe there are issues with the count in Michigan or Georgia, states where Trump has denied his 2020 losses. 

Meanwhile, Amy Pennock, the slate’s candidate in Seminole County, told the Miami Herald that she does not think the 2020 election was stolen.

Pennock, who did not respond to a request for comment, is the only slate candidate who beat an incumbent in Tuesday’s Republican primary. She ousted Chris Anderson, whose tenure involved major clashes with the county’s other GOP officials. Anderson, who is Black, said last year that he was encountering racial discrimination that was making it harder for him to do his job. And he accused members of the county commission of racism in a social media video. Anderson also faced a complaint this month for allegedly using his role as supervisor to boost his own campaign, but a judge tossed the claim after finding no evidence. 

Pennock, a conservative member of the county school board who last year proposed to review and restrict access to some books in public school libraries, will now face Democrat Deborah Poulalion in November.

Poulalion told Bolts that she worries that misinformation about election fraud could weaken the security and accessibility of Florida’s voting system. “One of the worst things that came out of 2020 was losing confidence in the integrity of the system,” she said. “I think the system is still working, but the lack of confidence in the system could lead to making changes that make the system less effective.” 

Since the 2020 election, DeSantis and Republican lawmakers extensively restricted Florida’s voting laws, ostensibly to boost voters’ confidence. They toughened voter ID requirements, made it harder to vote by mail, and have set up a new police force to investigate fraud.  

Lake County Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays, a Republican who defeated a slate candidate on Tuesday, told Bolts that he is satisfied by the result of his own primary. But he regrets that a lot of harm has already been done to the state’s voting systems.

“I certainly think it is a rebuke of the nonsense that has been spread,” he said of Tuesday’s results. “Unfortunately, we’ve had too many legislators already listen to the garbage that has been voiced by this side of the equation. That’s why some of the election laws have been modified the way they have.” 

Hays is part of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, a professional membership organization that lobbies state lawmakers on behalf of local elections officials. The organization has worked to dispel misinformation and fight proposals that risk jamming up the election process.  Hays, for instance, has spoken out against proposed legislation that would allow local officials to count votes by hand rather than use machines. This has become a rallying cry for conservatives who doubt election results, despite evidence that hand counting is error prone and expensive.

“Our association has been very active and we have been able to help craft the legislative changes so they are not as offensive as they would have been,” Hays told Bolts.

But Ashwell worries that, if more election deniers took over as local supervisors, they may use the association as a platform to advocate for statewide changes. 

“When we have more and more of these election denial candidates winning races, it changes the tenor of the association,” Ashwell said. “If they change the willingness of that association to weigh in on a bill to allow hand counts, then that could become standard in Florida.”

Christensen, the “America First” coalition’s candidate in Hillsborough County, told Bolts that he is eager to change the politics of the statewide association. He thinks the group has a thumb on the scale, and is weakening trust in elections by failing to address issues.

Picking up a key conservative grievance about the 2020 election, Christensen has blamed Latimer, the Democratic incumbent, for accepting a large grant to help run elections that year from a nonprofit organization with ties to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. These grants were distributed to thousands of election offices nationwide, but Trump-aligned conservatives have pointed to them to make unfounded claims that local election offices conducted inappropriate activities that year. 

Florida and dozens of other GOP-run states have banned private grants to election offices since 2020. Florida supervisors’ professional association successfully lobbied in 2021 to water down that legislation, fearing that it’d leave them cash-strapped and needing to cut crucial operations.

But Christensen also says it was a local issue, rather than presidential headlines, that led him to run for office. His family was affected by a data breach at the Hillsborough County supervisor of elections office; the county disclosed last year that a hacker accessed the driver’s licenses and social security numbers of about 58,000 residents. Latimer sent notifications to people impacted by the breach: The county’s voter registration database and tabulation system had additional security protections and were not affected, according to Latimer’s office.

Christensen casts the breach as an example of security gaps that make the county vulnerable. “When there are challenges, why is there a resistance to implementing new rules to address those challenges, for the betterment of everyone?” he asked. 

He said he’d allocate more of the office budget to security, and that he wants to “run audits locally” of the county’s elections. Following the 2020 election, conservative activists nationwide have demanded audits of local election systems. In Florida, Trump’s allies called for a forensic audit of the 2020 results, but DeSantis refused to organize one, angering the former president; some members of the “America First” slate, like Alachua County’s Judith Jensen, want to organize hand audits of future elections.

Latimer told Bolts that Christensen’s statements about the breach are an “outright lie and a completely irresponsible attempt to instill fear among our electorate.” He said, “It was a basic network intrusion that was discovered and contained quickly, before it could escalate to ransomware or anything more serious.”

On Wednesday, Christensen launched a video pointing out that Hillsborough County’s elections website crashed the day before, on election night. “This incident highlights the urgent need for new leadership to maintain trust in our election processes,” he said in the video.

The websites of dozens of counties crashed on Tuesday night, a widespread outage tied to the fact that many shared the same vendor. The vendor took responsibility, saying that its systems were overwhelmed by the increased traffic of people looking for election results. 

“Their technical issues didn’t slow us down or impede the results reporting at all,” Latimer said, “because I had backup plans in place. Our results were uploaded to the state, shared on social media and reported in our public Canvassing Board meeting, just as they always are. And yet my opponent immediately became accusatory once again.”

He continued, “It is absolutely critical that we have the right people in these positions to ensure that our elections continue to be run with actual integrity—and not threatened by those who don’t understand what that means.”

Hays, the Republican supervisor of Lake County who won his primary on Tuesday, agrees with Latimer; he told Bolts that the response to the crash shows how election skeptics fixate on an issue and conflate it with election fraud, with no evidence that any vote was affected. 

“It had nothing to do with any malicious activity. It had nothing to do with the local county. It has absolutely nothing to do with our tabulation system,” Hays said. 

“These people are blinded by their obsession and they refuse to acknowledge the facts,” Hays continued. “They don’t come up with any concrete evidence. All they bring you is hypothetical garbage. And too many people believe their nonsense.”

Editor’s note (Aug. 28): The article has been updated to include the results of the recount in the GOP primary for St. Lucie County, and a modified characterization of Amy Pennock’s proposals on public school books.

The post Six “America First” Candidates, Vying to Take Over Florida Elections, Advance to November appeared first on Bolts.

Andrew Warren is running to win back his old job as Tampa’s top prosecutor. Since the Democrat joined the race in April, he has released campaign videos, basked in endorsements, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—all the staples of a typical campaign.

But this campaign is anything but typical. Two years ago, Warren was abruptly suspended from his office by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he had neglected his duties because of statements such as a promise to not prosecute abortion cases. DeSantis summarily replaced him with Susan Lopez, a Republican who immediately reversed some of Warren’s signature policies, including his effort to stop the aggressive prosecutions of Black cyclists and pedestrians in Hillsborough County. 

Voters will now weigh in for the first time since DeSantis ousted the state attorney they elected. Lopez is running for a full term, but it’s Warren who won the office the last two times it was on the ballot, in 2016 and 2020. If he wins the Democratic nomination next week, he’ll face Lopez, who is running unopposed in the GOP primary, in November. (Editor’s note: Warren prevailed in the Aug. 20 Democratic primary; he will face Lopez on Nov. 5.)

The circumstances of Warren’s removal loom large over his third run. Hillsborough County has leaned Democratic in the past, but if Warren wins, DeSantis could try suspending him again. Warren filed lawsuits arguing that DeSantis exceeded his authority when he removed him the first time, and a federal appeals court earlier this year kept his case alive. Some experts say it’d be harder for the governor to suspend him again in the future, but these legal questions remain unsettled.

“Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” Warren told Bolts.

Last year, DeSantis also suspended the elected Democratic prosecutor of Orlando, Monique Worrell, whose sentencing practices he disagreed with. He had already removed Broward County’s Democratic sheriff, replacing him with a new sheriff who backtracked on a local reform.  

Lopez, too, rolled back Warren’s reforms within just days of replacing him. On Aug. 8, 2022, just four days after her appointment, she sent a memo to her staff announcing changes to the office’s policies. Among them: She lifted Warren’s restrictions on prosecuting people when their charges stemmed from bike and pedestrian stops conducted by the Tampa police.

“Effective immediately, any policy my predecessor put in place that called for presumptive non-enforcement of the laws of Florida is immediately rescinded. This includes the bike stop and pedestrian stop policy,” Lopez said in her memo. DeSantis had named this reform among his reasons for removing Waren, saying that it demonstrates a “fundamentally flawed and lawless understanding of his duties as a state attorney.”

Warren had set up his policy in the wake of a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation that revealed that the majority of cyclists stopped by the Tampa police were Black. The story sparked an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that reached the same conclusion in 2016: Of 9,121 bicycle stops made by Tampa police over a 20-month period, 73 percent of those involved Black cyclists. Tampa’s population is 26 percent Black. 

The data ignited organizing in Hillsborough County. Civil rights organizations demanded reforms from both the local police and the state attorney’s office, which handles prosecutions. In some of these cases, the office was ensnaring cyclists in the criminal legal system by charging them with misdemeanors over nonviolent actions related to the bike stops, such as riding away from police or refusing to show identification.

Once he became the state attorney in 2017, members of the local chapter of the NAACP met with Warren to ask him to stop prosecuting those cases. “We were having conversations over and over again,” recalled Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough County NAACP. The effort took years, with Warren forming a Racial Justice Work Group to examine the issue in the fall of 2020, after that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and finally releasing a new policy in January 2022.

In a memo to his staff, Warren instructed them to adopt a default approach of not prosecuting nonviolent, misdemeanor cases that result from these stops, broadening the policy’s purview to include pedestrian stops as well as bike stops. He also said line prosecutors should weigh whether the facts of the alleged crime still merit prosecution. “Actual or even perceived racial disparities in the use of bicycle and pedestrian stops undermine trust within the communities that law enforcement serves,” Warren said in a memo. 

In an interview with Bolts, Warren said “the reason why we were taking a critical look at those cases is because we don’t want to encourage that stop in the first place.” 

Prosecuting those stops without first examining them, he said, was “perpetuating the revolving door to the criminal justice system.” 

“Obviously, we want people to comply with law enforcement,” he said. “We also don’t want to put more people into the system that can have a negative impact on their ability to earn a living and potentially cost taxpayer dollars to prosecute them and take away their freedom when they hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place.”

Tampa’s Black residents cheered the change, Lewis said. “The community felt like, OK, they can take a deep breath.”

Since Lopez lifted Warren’s policy and signaled to police that the stops they made would get prosecuted again, the fear of aggressive prosecution has returned, Lewis says. 

“We were definitely devastated by what she did,” she said. “It took us 10 steps back when it comes to helping the most vulnerable people that need help.”

Lewis said she has met with Lopez about the change but has made no progress toward switching it back. “I don’t think she gets it at all,” she said. “She’s never walked in our shoes. When you try to talk to her to get understanding, she doesn’t come with an open mind.”

Erin Maloney, a spokesperson for Lopez’s office, told Bolts in an email that Warren’s policy was just for show. “By the time Andrew Warren instituted that policy, Tampa Police had already changed how bike stops were conducted altogether,” she wrote. “He took a problem that didn’t exist and offered a solution.” 

But Maloney also faulted Warren for going too far in refusing to enforce Florida law, saying, “State Attorney Lopez follows the law instead of creating blanket policies that change the law.”

In November 2022, months after she became state attorney, Lopez gave a deposition in which she seemed to confirm that the Tampa police were still sending over bike stop cases to the state’s attorney’s office during Warren’s tenure. Lopez worked as a staff prosecutor in Warren’s office for part of his tenure before she became a county judge in late 2021. She said she saw those cases come in, and criticized Warren for how he handled them. (Lopez gave this deposition as part of one of Warren’s lawsuits to be reinstated.)

It’s unclear how many people have been prosecuted under Lopez in cases that stem from bike stops. Maloney said the office does “not have a way” to  determine whether past charges were tied to such stops. Still, a review of the Hillsborough County court system database shows that Lopez’s office has pursued criminal charges in such cases. 

In March, for example, police arrested a 31-year-old Black man who was walking in South Tampa because he did not comply with commands to stop and show his hands. He was charged with resisting arrest without violence, a misdemeanor, and detained on a $500 bond. Lopez’s office took the case to trial and lost; the jury found the man not guilty. 

In another case, prosecutors sought charges against a homeless Black man who fled police on his bicycle after they tried to stop him for disobeying traffic signals. The case was dismissed, only after a judge declared the man incompetent.

Warren staunchly defended his past policy in an interview with Bolts, but he also was vague when asked whether he planned to bring it back if re-elected. 

He said he would look at the data to see whether there was a reason to implement it, noting that these cases make up just a small fraction of the 60,000 cases referred to the office each year. He also said he would “keep doing the types of things that we did before.”

Warren may be worried that DeSantis will use whatever promise he makes against him. In early January, Warren announced that he wouldn’t run for state attorney because he feared that the governor would just be able to remove him again. Up until that point, courts had rejected his pleas to overturn DeSantis’ suspension; even a federal district judge who said that DeSantis had probably acted unconstitutionally also ruled that he lacked the authority to reinstate Warren. 

Warren changed his mind about running after he secured a victory against DeSantis in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which instructed the lower court to reconsider reinstating Warren. 

Elizabeth Strauss, a local attorney, does not want Democrats to take the risk. She is running against Warren in next week’s primary and says she is a safer choice.

“A vote for Warren is a vote for Suzy,” she told Bolts repeatedly in an interview, warning that DeSantis could intervene to make sure Lopez remains in office if Warren wins.

“I just want people to vote with an informed decision and knowing that, okay, if I vote for him, there’s a chance he could get removed Day One,” Strauss said. “There’s other ways to challenge this and bring awareness to what the governor did without having the voters throw away their votes and end up with somebody that’s basically going to be his puppet.”

Strauss said she would not sign onto national policy statements like the ones Warren had joined while in office, which vowed to not prosecute cases involving abortions or anti-transgender laws. “I don’t plan on making myself vulnerable,” she said. In an email follow-up, she explained she would take a different approach to tackling issues with police stops by forming a civil rights unit. “While I will not refuse to prosecute based on any blanket policies, a Civil Rights Unit which actively investigates these matters is a more effective way to deter abuse of power by law enforcement officers,” she said.

Warren dismissed Strauss’ concerns, saying that he was focused on winning the general election in November. He has asked federal courts to expedite his case before the election, to no avail so far.

Carissa Byrne Hessick, director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina, says she can see voters reacting to Warren’s comeback effort one of two ways. “It could be the sort of thing that really motivates voters to go to the polls and check the box for him,” she said. But, she added, “They might think that was too much chaos, and we don’t want to be fighting with the state.”

Robin Lockett, Tampa Bay regional director of Florida Rising, a voting rights advocacy organization that has endorsed Warren, told Bolts that she falls in the former group. 

“I think it’s brave of Andrew to still do what’s right for the people,” she said. “He can’t run in fear.”

Some Democratic voters, meanwhile, may be living in trepidation that the governor will just keep disregarding election results, no matter the office and the Democrat who wins. Other candidates running for local office have faced a similar cloud. “Sometimes it feels like a set up—or it’s all just theater,” a Democrat running for prosecutor in St. Petersburg told Bolts two years ago. This year, Worrell is seeking her old job back in Orlando, much like Warren is in Tampa.

At a political forum in May that featured the three state attorney candidates, as well as two candidates running for public defender, one attendee told them, “All of you are subject to being suspended by the governor.” 

The post Tampa Voters Get Their Say Two Years After DeSantis Axed Their Democratic Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.

Lubin spent the night there. “It was so disgusting and it was dirty,” she said. “There was one toilet and like 20 of us in one cell.” 

“That was so disheartening because he didn’t have to take me to jail,” she added.

Under Florida law, whenever officers stop someone who is driving with a suspended license, they have the discretion to arrest them and book them in jail or issue a criminal traffic citation to appear in court. In some places, they can also issue a civil citation for a diversion program, which allows people to avoid jail and the criminal legal system. 

In recent years, Florida advocates have pushed for law enforcement agencies that patrol the state, whether police departments and sheriffs’ offices, to stop arresting and jailing people over low-level traffic offenses, which they say needlessly entangles people in the criminal justice system and saddles them with more fines and fees they can’t afford. The majority of licenses suspended in Florida are for unpaid court debt. 

Instead, advocates are asking law enforcement leaders to expand their use of civil citations for people who are pulled over for certain nonviolent driving offenses, such as driving with a suspended license, invalid license, or expired license plates. 

In Miami-Dade, where Lubin was arrested, this push has seen some success. County leadership is in the process of adding specific traffic offenses to the list of misdemeanors that are eligible for its civil citation program. But in neighboring Broward County, where Lubin worships, Sheriff Gregory Tony has reversed his county’s policy of listing nonviolent driving offenses in the county’s civil citation program. Broward County, home to Fort Lauderdale, has the largest sheriff’s office in Florida. It is the chief law enforcement agency in charge of patrolling the county. 

“I was fortunate in that I was able to get out and get that arrest taken care of. But not so many people are in that position,” said Lubin, who is a board member of BOLD Justice, a coalition of Broward County faith leaders who work to advance racial and economic justice. “We’re not even asking for something new to be put on the books. The program already exists. It’s just about ensuring law enforcement executes it.”

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office declined to make Tony available for an interview and told Bolts in an emailed statement, “BSO deputies will continue to follow Florida law and the criteria for Broward County’s Adult Civil Citation program.”

Tony was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2019 after the Republican governor removed the prior sheriff from office. A Republican at the time of his appointment, Tony soon switched parties to be a Democrat—Republicans struggle to win office in this heavily blue county—and DeSantis recently named Tony as one of his favorite Democratic officials in Florida. Tony is up for re-election this year and faces three challengers in the Aug. 20 Democratic primary.

One challenger, David Howard, told Bolts that he is open to expanding the civil citation program to include specific driving offenses. 

Doing so would have widespread impact. Out of the nearly 1.6 million residents of Broward County with driver’s licenses, more than 61,000 people have a suspended license, according to data from the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles provided to Bolts. It’s unclear how many of those are suspended because of unpaid court debt because the state did not return a request for records in time for publication. In 2019, however, 77 percent of license suspensions in Broward County were for court debt, according to a report that year by the Fines and Fees Justice Center, an organization that works to get rid of bills in the criminal justice system.

“We shouldn’t criminalize those individuals because they cannot afford to pay that fine or that fee,” said Brian Anthony Campbell, a minister who is a member of BOLD Justice. “That’s really what we’re fighting against, the criminalization of poverty.”

Before Broward County adopted a civil citation program in 2018, deputies who suspected someone had committed a low-level, nonviolent offense had to funnel them through the criminal legal system by either arresting them or issuing them a criminal citation. They also had the choice to let them go. The new program gave officers another option: People could avoid a criminal record and the costs that go with it by completing community service, attending educational programming, and paying a program fee.

The county left it to the sheriff’s office to decide which offenses are eligible for the diversion program. 

At first, the sheriff’s office included driving offenses on the list of eligible offenses, according to a 2019 training bulletin reviewed by Bolts that also lists misdemeanors such as battery with minor injury, low-level theft, assault, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, and possession of less than 20 grams of marijuana. “Misdemeanor criminal traffic offenses (DWLS w/Knowledge, No Valid DL, etc.) will be issued an Adult Civil Citation in lieu of a misdemeanor criminial [sic] traffic citation or physical arrest when feasible,” the bulletin said. 

Since its start in 2019, the sheriff’s office has referred 313 people to the civil citation program, according to data from the Broward County Division of Justice Services obtained by Bolts. Of those referrals, 284 people enrolled in the diversion program and 86 percent of people successfully completed it. 

According to the county data, deputies have never referred someone to the program for a traffic offense.

After realizing that the sheriff’s office wasn’t referring anyone to the civil citation program for driving offenses, BOLD Justice leadership last year pushed for Tony to include these offenses as long as the suspension wasn’t associated with a dangerous offense such as driving under the influence, as first reported by WLRN. Campbell said Tony agreed to the change when he attended the organization’s annual convening in spring 2023. 

“We left that meeting with the understanding that that would be the policy, what we were working on and fighting for,” Campbell told Bolts. 

By January, BOLD Justice obtained data from the sheriff’s office showing people were still being arrested for driving with suspended or invalid licenses. Veda Coleman-Wright, public information director for the Broward sheriff’s office, told Bolts in an email that it’s “rare” for someone to be arrested for only having a suspended license and that they usually have other charges. 

After receiving the data, Campbell reviewed a copy of the sheriff’s office’s operating procedures manual. It showed that in December 2023, rather than including misdemeanor driving offenses in the civil citation program as the 2019 bulletin did, Tony had actually reversed his office’s position and specifically excluded them.

Noel Rose, a pastor in Broward County and member of BOLD Justice, said the sheriff has voiced concerns to another member that DeSantis may remove him from office because of the civil citation program. DeSantis removed Tony’s predecessor, Sheriff Scott Israel, in 2019 because of the way his office handled the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. DeSantis also removed Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren and Orlando State Attorney Monique Worrell from their posts over their reform policies that he opposes.

“That has been one of the reasons that the sheriff shared but we were just disappointed with him…because he made a commitment,” Rose told Bolts.

Howard, one of Tony’s challengers in the primary and a former police chief in Pembroke Park, a town in Broward County, criticized the sheriff for backtracking. In an interview with Bolts, Howard called Tony “a great gaslighter” and said that if he were elected, he has “no issue” with expanding civil citations as long as the office’s legal team signs off on the change. 

Tony’s other two Democratic challengers, Steve Geller and Al Pollock did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts. (The winner of the primary will be favored in the general election against independent candidate Charles Whatley; no Republican has filed to run.)

A spokesperson for State Attorney Harold Pryor, a Democrat whose office is in charge of prosecuting people who are arrested by the sheriff’s office, told Bolts he has encouraged Tony’s office to expand the civil citation program, and will continue to do so.

Broward County prosecutors drop the charges against people who are arrested for having a suspended license as long as they get a valid driver’s license within 30 days of arraignment and the charge isn’t related to an accident, a spokesperson for the office told Bolts. People who don’t have the money to get their license reinstated within that period also have the option to enroll in a driver’s license diversion program that educates them about how to get their license back, in part by requiring them to enter into a payment plan. 

Since 2020, Florida advocates have urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would eliminate driver’s license suspensions for unpaid court debt, but the bills have failed to gain traction. That’s likely because Florida’s courts are funded by fines and fees resulting from criminal and traffic convictions, said Sarah Couture, Florida state director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center.

People who go through Florida’s legal system are billed fines and fees falling under dozens of categories. As of 2018, the average cost of a misdemeanor was $1,000. If someone misses a payment, their license can be suspended, and after 90 days, their court bills are sent to a collections agency, which can add a surcharge of up to 40 percent, further inflating the amount owed.

Roughly three-quarters of drivers license suspensions in Florida are for unpaid court debt and the majority of drivers licenses are suspended for two years, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center report. 

But the courts view license suspensions as “their only tool to compel people to pay their fines and fees,” so there hasn’t been an appetite to get rid of license suspensions for unpaid court debt, said Couture. 

In the absence of state legislators stopping the practice of suspending licenses for unpaid court debt, several Florida counties have implemented civil citation programs for people with non-dangerous traffic offenses. Advocates in Miami-Dade County, the state’s most populous county, began working to expand their civil citation program in 2021. 

Roughly one-third of licensed drivers in Miami-Dade County had a suspended license, according to a July 2022 report by a task force assigned to study drivers license suspensions in the county. Approximately 63 percent of those licenses were suspended because they failed to pay court debt. The task force also found that a disproportionate number of people with suspended licenses were from low-income areas. There were also racial disparities; six out of ten drivers who received a citation for a suspended license were Black, compared to the county’s population being just 17 percent Black. 

Miami-Dade officials—including the county’s head public defender, state attorney, clerk of the court, and chief judge—approved a plan to make driving related offenses eligible for their civil citation program this year. Those offenses include driving with a suspended license, not having a valid driver’s license, and having a suspended license plate. It excludes suspensions for DUIs and dangerous driving. 

County leaders are expected to give their final approval for the plan by the end of the summer.

“It would mean that thousands less people are being arrested and either ending up in jail or ending up with court fines and fees and also an arrest record,” said Jenneva Clauss, associate organizer for PACT, a sister organization to BOLD Justice. 

Clauss said she was disappointed that Tony in Broward County was not moving forward with the program as well. “It’s very unfortunate,” she said. “This needs to be happening everywhere in Florida because hundreds of thousands of people are impacted.” 

Correction (June 26): An earlier version of this story misstated Pryor’s name.

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The Florida legislature approved a bill this month that would further limit local civilian police oversight boards by barring them from investigating allegations of police misconduct. Police unions support the bill as a measure to protect the rights of officers, though critics say it represents yet another blow to police accountability efforts already shackled by existing state laws giving cops extraordinary legal protections.

Some of these civilian oversight agencies have been around for decades. The Civilian Investigative Panel in Miami, for instance, was created in 2002 amid concerns about police conduct in a number of high-profile shootings, as well as in the aftermath of the Elián González standoff when the city’s Cuban American community decried police treatment of protesters in the wake of the crisis. Miami’s panel was formed to investigate police misconduct incidents alongside the local police agency’s internal affairs departments. 

But many of the 21 agencies across the state that would be affected by the ban emerged in cities like Pensacola and Key West following the 2020 George Floyd protests amid widespread calls for additional police accountability. After the national uprisings, many local Florida governments threw their cities a bone in the form of hamstrung civilian oversight panels that could review cases but had practically no legal authority.

Critics say this current bill would undermine what were already baby-steps toward greater police accountability and walk back cities’ efforts to improve public trust in law enforcement.

“They’re making it seem un-American to question policing, which should be a huge red flag to everybody,” said Taylor Biro, a former member of Tallahassee’s police oversight board. “It is another way of showing how far to the right Florida wants to be seen. It’s a lot of political theater, and there’s not a lot of thought behind what the community review boards’ goals are.”

The bill forbids civilian panels from investigating complaints and misconduct cases involving specific officers, a key starting point for oversight agencies to uncover underlying policing issues. It would only let these boards review and advise on broad department policies and problems that emerge as patterns in police activity. 

It is now headed for the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis, who has yet to say whether he will sign it into law but has repeatedly positioned himself as a close ally to law enforcement groups. It aims to showcase Florida as “the most law enforcement-friendly state,” said state Representative Wyman Duggan, a Republican sponsor, at a January committee hearing. However opponents say it is part of a larger backlash against criminal justice reforms, which has become a cornerstone of the governor’s policies. DeSantis has been a leading voice rallying against reforms nationwide, pushing for harsher punishments for drug crimes, a lower threshold for death penalty sentences, and recruitment programs to draw out-of-state officers to Florida.

The bill’s Republican sponsors and police union supporters did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts. But in legislative hearings, proponents said the ban is not intended to eliminate civilian oversight boards entirely or stop them from reviewing department-wide policies such as use-of-force procedures.

“Those discussions about chokeholds, about knees on necks—that’s the stuff that could be valuable with a civilian review board, those discussions about policies and procedures,” said state Senator Blaise Ingoglia, the bill’s sponsor in the upper chamber, during a January committee meeting. “But stay away from the actual specific incidents that happen with the law enforcement officer.”

Oversight boards can still improve transparency and strengthen internal processes through these broader reviews of police department policies, says Ursula Price, executive director of Miami-Dade County’s 13-member Independent Civilian Panel. Her agency has made several recommendations to law enforcement in Miami-Dade County that have been adopted, including for more training in de-escalation, and a review of department processes for receiving and investigating complaints.

But even without explicitly banning oversight on department-wide policies, the new bill would still obstruct the panels from digging into misconduct incidents to get to the internal practice at the root of the problem, Price said. “We use individual complaints as data. It’s information to help us understand the system,” she said. “We cannot analyze that system or understand it without looking at some of the details in the accountability process.”

For Miami-Dade County’s Independent Civilian Panel, it was essential to look into specific complaints to determine whether the investigation process managed by the police’s internal affairs office was sufficient. By looking into individual cases, the panel uncovered that the investigation wasn’t always rigorous enough to match the gravity of the complaint, Price added.

“There were some anecdotal instances where complaints were getting shuffled off without anybody looking at it. We wanted to make sure that was the exception, not the rule. Luckily, the police department was open to making those changes,” Price said.

This review of the police department’s complaint process was only possible because of a civilian investigation into an incident where an officer was accused of making an illegal search, Price said. That investigation led the Independent Civilian Panel to review a large sample of complaint reports to get to the bottom of how the police department was managing similar accusations. 

The city of Miami has its own local oversight agency, the Civilian Investigative Panel, which has also historically reviewed both individual complaints and broader department procedures. Rodney Jacobs, the panel’s executive director, says many of their recommendations for strengthening internal policy have stemmed from misconduct investigations that bring light to the underlying policing practices that allow for misconduct to occur.

“In the course of an investigation, you often find systemic issues,” Jacobs said. “By doing it from an investigative lens, it raises red flags to have a proactive approach. By having active investigations, it allows you to stop misconduct before it becomes a metastasized issue.”

The city’s panel reviews up to 400 complaints each year, and many of these complaints result in policy changes within the Miami Police Department: Jacobs said the panel’s investigations have prompted the police department to revise its strip search policy, develop mediation programs between law enforcement and local communities, and clarify body cam procedures to improve transparency. By accepting these recommendations, Jacobs said local police have increased public trust by giving communities recourse for addressing individual cases as well as the underlying patterns of police conduct.

“The best way to build trust is having a great sense of transparency,” Jacobs said. “It helps bolster police work because police need the community to do their work effectively, especially when it comes to solving cases.”

Police unions and their allies in the statehouse say the new ban on civilian investigations is at its core an issue of protecting the due process rights of officers. Duggan, the bill’s sponsor, argued at a committee hearing that the oversight panels are a risk to officers since they don’t have uniform qualifications for the members overseeing investigations and lack due process standards for how they conduct their investigations.

The exposure to scrutiny from civilian panels can “hinder recruitment and retention of officers in jurisdictions that have these entities in place,” Duggan said.

But opponents of the bill say a ban on investigations wouldn’t give officers any additional protection because these oversight boards pose no risk to an officer’s due process rights in the first place; the state’s Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights already forbids them from having any authority to take disciplinary action following a misconduct investigation.

“They’re unable to conduct hearings or report their findings and recommendations publicly,” said NR Hines, a policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Even if they did report findings, they are recommendations that are not binding in any way and have no force over the officers that are mentioned.” 

Florida’s officers bill of rights, a law guaranteeing officers under investigation a list of special protections, was first passed in 1974 and has been expanded over time. The law allows officers accused of misconduct to select at least one member of the internal panel charged with investigating their case. Interrogations of police are also highly regulated, and officers are allowed to review all evidence and testimony against them before being interviewed by fellow police or prosecutors.

Accountability advocates worry those protections give officers advantages that prevent an impartial investigation. They say these built-in advantages underscore why independent reviews of police misconduct cases are essential for improving public trust, given the skepticism toward internal affairs investigations led in part by colleagues hand-picked by the aggrieved officer. 

“The processes that currently exist don’t always achieve accountability,” Hines said. “The intention is to be an unbiased board that can represent all residents and review police activity.” 

Even before this year’s legislation undermining local oversight panels, Florida’s supreme court ruled in 2017 that the protections granted to officers are so expansive that they prevent external agencies like oversight panels from having subpoena power to compel officers to appear at hearings or answer questions related to misconduct investigations.

Local rules in some cities place further restrictions on citizen panels. In Tallahassee, the oversight board cannot begin reviewing a misconduct case until it is already closed by law enforcement’s internal affairs office.

“When I was on the board, we didn’t know the officers’ names,” Biro, the former Tallahassee board member, said. “We would determine what policies a situation touched, and make recommendations on how to shift those policies, never touching those officers.”

Tallahassee’s city commissioners removed Biro from the oversight panel in 2022 after police unions complained about a sticker on Biro’s coffee mug that was critical of police. Two other members resigned after Biro’s removal to protest that the panel was hampered from taking real action to heighten police accountability. For most of 2023, the board was unable to meet due to lacking enough members for a quorum. 

“It was really eye-opening,” Biro said. “The grassroots folks who pushed for a board to happen got a very watered-down version of what a lot of communities imagined would be helpful. Now we see that watered-down version being taken away.”

Florida is the latest of several states to preemptively weaken civilian police oversight. Utah previously stripped police oversight groups from having the authority to revise department policy in 2019. New Jersey’s supreme court ruled in 2020 that existing state law limited oversight boards from investigating misconduct cases until police completed their own process, though a bill introduced this year would give civilian panels such authority as well as subpoena power.

More recently, Tennessee passed legislation in 2023 to eliminate community-led oversight panels and prevent advisory groups from investigating police misconduct cases.

In Florida, this push for a ban on outside misconduct investigations underscores how limited civilian oversight panels already are in their capacity to reach their goals of transparency and accountability. Further weakening civilian oversight serves more as a political posture rather than a policy that would truly address issues facing local law enforcement, Hines said.

‘It’s really based on a perception that accountability for law enforcement is ‘woke,’” Hines said. “It seems like they’re trying to find a problem where there isn’t one. Civilian review boards pose no threat to law-abiding officers.”

Jacobs, from the oversight panel for the city of Miami, worries that attacks on the already-limited powers of oversight agencies in the state signal a larger aversion to police accountability. “If police unions are able to sway elected officials, we may see attacks on internal affairs divisions,” Jacobs said. “This is probably just the first bite of the apple of police accountability.”

The post Police Oversight in Florida Is Already Weak. The State Is About to Gut It Further. appeared first on Bolts.

Conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal judges could not entertain complaints of partisan gerrymandering. In its landmark 5-4 decision Rucho v. Common Cause, the court said that it’s not for federal courts to decide whether an election map is designed to give one party an illegal advantage. But Chief Justice John Roberts assured plaintiffs that his decision does not leave them powerless to stop partisan gerrymandering since they still have a path for litigation: state courts.

The Rucho decision did not “condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void,” Roberts wrote, since states “are actively addressing the issue on a number of fronts.” 

New Hampshire last week became the latest state to show the promise was largely illusory. 

Its state supreme court ruled that it couldn’t consider whether the state’s election maps are illegal partisan gerrymanders because that’s not something that state judges should be deciding either. The 3-2 decision—with the three judges appointed by Republican Governor Chris Sununu in the majority—left in place the GOP gerrymanders signed into law by Sununu. This likely locks the party’s structural advantages in New Hampshire’s Senate and executive council through the 2030s. 

And it condemns complaints of partisan gerrymandering claims to echo into a void after all, with nowhere to turn in either federal court or New Hampshire court. 

The court said plaintiffs could address their grievances by getting state lawmakers to pass redistricting reform. But the odds of such a reform are low since the New Hampshire legislature is already gerrymandered, a circular dynamic that explains why voting groups tried to turn to federal and state courts on the issue. Any bill would have to be approved by the state Senate, a body whose districts have long been drawn to give Republicans an edge.

The New Hampshire decision adds to a trend in the nation since Rucho, with other state courts retreating from Roberts’ assurance and showing that they can just as easily refuse to answer the same questions. Earlier this year, for example, North Carolina’s supreme court ruled that partisan gerrymandering lawsuits can’t be brought under the state constitution, reversing past decisions to the contrary and paving the way for maps meant to maximize the GOP’s power.

New Hampshire Republicans won complete control of state government in 2020. They then proceeded to cement their advantage after the decennial census, adopting districts for the state Senate and executive council that created more Republican-leaning seats. A group of voters challenged the maps in court, alleging that they were partisan gerrymanders that violated New Hampshire’s constitution. 

But New Hampshire’s supreme court upheld the maps’ constitutionality on Nov. 29. The court declined to even consider the merits of the challenge, holding instead that partisan gerrymandering is a policy matter for other institutions to debate, and is a non-justiciable political question.

In practice, this means that no case alleging partisan gerrymandering, regardless of how egregious, can be brought in state courts. 

The New Hampshire court argued that there is no consistent method through which state judges could adjudicate such cases: no “discernible and manageable standards for adjudicating partisan-gerrymandering claims.” The language mirrors the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho on how federal courts should approach partisan gerrymandering claims: Roberts argued in that case that adjudicating such claims is overly subjective. “There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments, let alone limited and precise standards that are clear, manageable, and politically neutral,” the chief justice wrote.

The New Hampshire court’s decision flips an important part of the rationale in Rucho on its head. Roberts’ opinion also doubled as an ode to federalism; even as he sidelined federal courts, he invited states to look to their own laws and constitutions for alternative protections against partisan gerrymandering that don’t rely on the U.S. constitution. Writing in 2019, he offered as an example a 2015 decision  by Florida’s supreme court striking down a congressional map as an illegal gerrymander under the state constitution. 

Plaintiffs in New Hampshire asked state courts to similarly consider their own constitution. But in closing the door on their challenge, the state supreme court heavily relied on Rucho—calling it “directly on point” even though Rucho was interpreting the U.S. Constitution—and it drew extensively from Roberts’ opinion, even as Roberts invited states to chart their own path. 

“Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply,” Roberts wrote in Rucho, but that approach can’t get out of the starting blocks if a state court then turns to Rucho to decide how to interpret its state constitution.

Florida’s constitution, unlike New Hampshire’s, contains a clause that expressly restricts partisan gerrymandering. But even in states without such an express prohibition, some courts have found implied protections against partisan gerrymandering. In the last several years alone, courts in Alaska, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have all affirmed such protections. 

In their arguments to the New Hampshire supreme court, plaintiffs pointed to these decisions. They argued that the guarantee of “free” elections in New Hampshire’s constitution (which does not exist in the U.S. Constitution), along with other free-expression rights, established a right of voters to elect representatives on equal footing with each other. 

The court found this unpersuasive. It reiterated that developing and consistently applying standards for reviewing partisan gerrymandering isn’t possible in practice. As a “telling” sign of this inconsistency, the New Hampshire justices pointed to recent events in North Carolina, where the state supreme court struck down GOP gerrymanders in 2022 before reversing itself this year. 

But North Carolina’s court didn’t just change the standards for deciding whether maps are unconstitutional, or apply old standards differently. It simply ruled that this is not a question that judges can rationally decide, in language very similar to the New Hampshire decision. 

“There is no judicially manageable standard by which to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims,” North Carolina Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, wrote in February. “Courts are not intended to meddle in policy matters.”

New Mexico’s supreme court offered the opposite answer this year when it confronted a similar question.

It ruled that state courts can entertain claims of partisan gerrymandering, and decide whether a map is unduly giving an advantage to a party. To get around the concern that there’s no criteria judges could manage, the court identified a set of standards with which to analyze maps. It adopted a three-part test laid out by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent in the Rucho case; Kagan proposed that courts could strike down a map if they have proof that its creators’ purpose was to “entrench their party in power;” that it has had “the intended effect”; and, if so, that mapmakers cannot provide a “legitimate, non-partisan justification” for the map. 

The same court in November then upheld New Mexico’s congressional map, which delivered Democrats an additional seat in 2022, ruling on the merits that it did not violate Kagan’s test. 

The decision is a reminder that a state court’s decision to hear partisan gerrymandering claims does not mean they’ll automatically strike down a map. And when such cases come up, there’s no telling how left-leaning and right-leaning justices may rule, depending on who has drawn maps; in New York State last year, it was the conservative-leaning judges who struck down gerrymanders drawn by Democrats over the objections of more liberal judges.

But these decisions also underscore the widening contrast between courts on the first-order question of whether they’ll even entertain such claims: on whether partisan gerrymandering is a judiciable question. 

Conservative jurists have been more likely to rule that it is not. The North Carolina reversal came after the court flipped from 4–3 Democratic to 5–2 Republican last year. The Rucho decision was a similarly narrow 5-4 win for the court’s then-five conservative justices. 

And in New Hampshire, the decision to reject the partisan gerrymandering claims came down to a 3–2 vote, with the 3 justices nominated by a Republican governor in the majority, and the two nominated by Democratic governor dissenting. 

One of the justices in the majority was Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, whose nomination by Sununu was initially rejected by the executive council when it was under Democratic control. MacDonald was then confirmed to his seat when the council flipped to the GOP in 2020.

One of the Democratic-nominated justices who dissented in this case, Gary Hicks, left the court the day after the court issued its decision because he hit the mandatory retirement age. Sununu has nominated Melissa Beth Countway, a local judge, to replace him. 

Even Florida has come a long way since Roberts mentioned its supreme court: The mere threat that its new conservative justices may now shrug off partisan gerrymandering complaints has made the state’s existing protections virtually toothless. 

After voters amended their state constitution in 2010 to add provisions against partisan gerrymandering, Florida’s supreme court used those provisions to strike down state maps in 2015 for being “tainted” by partisanship. But by the time Republicans adopted a new set of aggressively gerrymandered maps masterminded by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, Florida’s judicial landscape was very different: The supreme court’s liberal majority had been wiped out, replaced by hard-right justices appointed by DeSantis. 

While plaintiffs initially filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s new congressional districts as partisan and racial gerrymanders, they later dropped all of their partisan gerrymandering claims, perhaps out of a concern that the Florida supreme court would be unwilling to meaningfully enforce the anti-gerrymandering provisions in the constitution.

Looming over all of this is the threat that the U.S. Supreme Court could step in against a state supreme court that actually does strike down a state map as a partisan gerrymander.

In its June decision in Moore v Harper, the court rejected the so-called independent state legislature doctrine, which argued that congressional maps drawn by legislatures (as well as other state statutes regulating federal elections) should not be subject to any review by state courts. But the decision, which was authored by Roberts, again, still kept open the possibility that it may intervene if state courts “transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review.” 

State courts trying to stop partisan gerrymandering may feel some trepidation about stepping over this ambiguous  line. After all, here was the same justice who told them in Rucho to look at their own state constitutions and statutes, now warning them in Moore that he may stop them even if they ground their rulings on state law. Roberts hollowed out his own promise, restricting with one hand what he had invited with the other.

The post Yet Another State Shuts the Door on Partisan Gerrymandering Complaints appeared first on Bolts.

“I was kind of numb,” Lindsey told Bolts. “I still couldn’t believe that I was convicted and facing death.”

At the time, a death sentence only required a recommendation from a majority of jurors. When the foreman read out the jury’s vote on Lindsey’s fate, it was 8–4. The judge then sentenced him to death. 

Three years later, in 2009, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously concluded that the evidence was “insufficient to support Lindsey’s conviction” and was “equally consistent with a reasonable hypothesis of innocence,” vacating his conviction. He was exonerated and freed from death row. 

Though Linsdey now travels the country speaking about his experiences with the death penalty, he still feels the lingering effects of death row and prefers to spend his time at home alone in his room, away from friends and family. “It was traumatizing,” said Lindsey, who is now the executive director of Witness to Innocence, an organization that advocates for ending the death penalty and is led by death row exonerees. 

After Lindsey’s exoneration, Florida revamped its sentencing scheme to require that jurors unanimously vote for capital punishment in order for judges to impose death sentences. But after a jury voted 9–3 to spare Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz’s life in 2022, some legislators responded by introducing a bill that removed mandatory unanimity. Instead, only an 8–4 majority would be required for death. 

Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law, creating the lowest standard among the 24 states that allow the death penalty. “Once a defendant in a capital case is found guilty by a unanimous jury, one juror should not be able to veto a capital sentence,” DeSantis said in a statement. “I’m proud to sign legislation that will prevent families from having to endure what the Parkland families have and ensure proper justice will be served in the state of Florida.”

Opponents, however, say that the legislation will contribute to more wrongful death sentences in the state. Florida’s death sentences are the most unreliable in the country: It is the state with the highest number of death row exonerations, with 30 people since 1973, the majority of whom were sentenced to death by non-unanimous juries. 

“It makes Florida the extreme death penalty state in this country,” said Maria DeLiberato, a capital litigation attorney and executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “We know that non-unanimity leads with less deliberation, less thoughtfulness, is rooted in racism and is designed to silence Black and Brown voices on a jury.”

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida’s capital sentencing scheme violated the Constitution. In that case, Hurst v. Florida, the court ruled 8–1 that the way the state decided whether to sentence someone to death violated the Sixth Amendment, the constitutional right to a jury trial, because the judge, not the jury, was responsible for considering the facts necessary for the imposition of a death sentence. 

Following Hurst, the Florida Supreme Court found that the jury must unanimously agree to impose a death sentence. Lawmakers moved to amend the statute, enacting a jury unanimity requirement in 2017. The change brought Florida in line with the sentencing standards of all other death penalty states, where juries must unanimously agree on a death sentence, with the exception of Alabama, which calls for a 10–2 majority.

As part of the overhaul, approximately 200 of 400 Florida prisoners who were sentenced to death under the old scheme became eligible for resentencing. One study found that the jury had failed to unanimously agree on a death sentence in roughly two-thirds of those cases. As of 2020, 34 prisoners were resentenced to life in prison, four were resentenced to death, and two were exonerated. 

Then in 2020, the Florida Supreme Court reversed course. Three of the seven justices reached retirement age and DeSantis filled those seats with conservative judges from the Federalist Society who pushed the court further to the right. As a result, it concluded in the case State v. Poole that juries didn’t have to unanimously agree on a death sentence after all, and the previous court “got it wrong.” While the decision didn’t change Florida’s capital sentencing law, it signaled to the legislature that if they were to pass a law dismantling jury unanimity, the court wouldn’t get in its way. 

After the jury in Cruz’s case reached a verdict of life without parole, DeSantis urged tougher sentencing. 

“We need to do some reforms to be better serving victims of crimes and the families of victims of crimes and not always bend over backwards to do everything we need to for the perpetrators of crimes,” he said at the time, according to the Associated Press. 

The case led state Representative Berny Jacques, a Republican from Pinellas County, to sponsor a bill permitting the death penalty without all jurors agreeing. Under the recently signed law, the jury must unanimously find at least one aggravating factor from a list of 16—such as the crime being “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel”—in order to consider the death penalty. 

If fewer than eight of the 12 jury members vote for the death penalty, the person will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the bill. If at least eight jurors choose death, the judge still has the authority to override their recommendation and hand down a life sentence—and then must explain their decision in writing. 

In pushing the legislation, Jacques, who did not return requests for comment for this story, also pointed to the case of a man convicted of killing a police officer in his county who was spared the death penalty after two jurors voted for a life sentence. “This law will correct a wrong in our statutes, a statute that was based on a flawed Supreme Court ruling that was overturned three years ago,” Jacques told a Florida TV station. He cheered the governor’s signing of the legislation last week in an update to constituents that he posted on social media, saying, “No more in the state of Florida will a small handful of jurors be able to stop the most heinous of criminals from receiving the death penalty.” 

Robert Dunham, former executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center and an adjunct professor of death penalty law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, cautioned that Florida’s new law will impact people wrongfully facing death more than mass shooters. 

“The effect…will be that people like Herman Lindsey are going to be sentenced to death,” he told Bolts.  “The effect is going to be most pronounced not in the tiny number of mass shooting cases that actually ever make it to trial. The effect will be in the large number of marginal death penalty cases.”

The imposition of non-unanimous jury decisions can be traced back to the Jim Crow era, when laws were created to ensure that white jurors, who reliably made up the majority of jurors in courtrooms across the South throughout the first half of the 20th century, won their desired verdict. In Florida, researchers have found that juries today are still disproportionately made up of white people. A 2021 study conducted by the ACLU of capital cases in Duval County, which is home to Jacksonville, found that Black people were excluded from serving on the jury at rates more than twice of white jurors. A 2010 report by the Equal Justice Initiative found the courts have invalidated more than 33 criminal convictions throughout the state because prosecutors unlawfully struck jurors because of their race. 

“That means that, the jury that is ultimately empaneled in Florida will on average have fewer jurors of color than one-third of the jury,” said Dunham. “And that means that in a jury non-unanimity system, in which you need more than one-third of the jury to ensure a life sentence, that you’ve just disenfranchised the minority community. The other jurors don’t have to listen to them because they don’t have to reach a unanimous verdict.”

In capital cases, the racial makeup of the jury can significantly impact case outcomes. One study published in 2004 found that white jurors were four times more likely to recommend the death penalty during sentencing compared to Black jurors. Jury unanimity has also been shown to impact the integrity of convictions: a 2020 Death Penalty Information Center study found that in the three states that had allowed death sentences by non-unanimous juries—Florida, Alabama, and Delaware (which abandoned the death penalty in 2016)—at least one juror had voted for life without parole in 93 percent of exonerations. 

In Ralph “Ron” Wright’s case, for example, five jurors voted to spare his life. An Air Force veteran and former police officer, he was exonerated in 2017 after spending three years on Florida’s death row. Like Lindsey, there was no evidence linking him to the crime. Wright remembered looking through his window to watch hearses rolling away with prisoners’ bodies on execution days. “You’re thinking ‘Is that day going to come for me?’”

Wright denounced the new law, telling Bolts, “It just makes it easier for someone to be sentenced to death.” 

Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin spent a decade on Florida’s death row even though not all of his jurors voted for life without parole. He was exonerated in 2018 after DNA evidence cleared him and someone else confessed to the crime. 

“It is taking the power from the people. Your vote should be respected. I guarantee you that there will be many, many more wrongful convictions,” he told Bolts.

Ed Brodsky, a state attorney and president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, defended the law, telling Bolts that under the previous unanimity requirement, weighing whether to seek the death penalty was a “much more onerous process.”

“So from 2017 to today, we were following this unanimous jury verdict procedure, which I think made it much more difficult, and I think certainly heightened our requirements, and our feelings that certain defendants would be out—you know, would we be able to satisfy that very high burden?” he said. 

Under the new law, jurors would still be required to unanimously convict, and the emergence of new technology and forensics such as DNA testing should safeguard against wrongful convictions, Brodsky said. “We’re talking about such a wealth of information that is now available to be presented to a jury so that when we go forward with one of these cases, and a jury makes a determination of life or death, I really feel that they are being given such an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence, forensic evidence, witness testimony.”

After DeSantis signed the bill last week, the law became effective immediately. DeLiberato of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said that the sudden enactment leaves many questions about how it will be applied to past, current, and future cases, or how it will affect the approximately 60 prisoners awaiting resentencing under the Hurst decision. Decisions about the application of the law will play out in courts across Florida. For her part, DeLiberato said she will argue that jury unanimity is required and the latest amendment is unconstitutional. 

“While the Parkland tragedy was unimaginable and horrific, we cannot and should not make important legislative decisions based on one case,” she said. 

For Lindsey, 17 years have passed since he was sentenced to death. He said that instead of enacting laws that eviscerate protections for capital defendants, legislators should focus on passing reforms to ensure more people aren’t wrongfully sent to death row.  

“Passing this bill, yes it will create more innocent people going to death row,” he told lawmakers when testifying against it at a legislative hearing in March. “My vote count was 8-4, and we don’t even understand how the jury reached the verdict of guilty, but the jury got it wrong.” 

“When the jury got it wrong in my case, and the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that I shouldn’t have been convicted, there was no bill on this desk to compensate me or get me my rights back,” Lindsey added. “The jury got it wrong then, and I don’t think it’s fair that we change the law now. I think what we need to do is find a way to fix our system, not to continue to break it.” 

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