LaVia had only two months to pay off the debt, the invoice warned, until it would be turned over to a collection agency. 

He didn’t have anything close to that amount of money, and even if he did, he was disinclined to pay because the demand seemed ridiculous; a jury had just found him not guilty of the charges that had landed him in the notoriously brutal Harrisburg jail to begin with. After all that time inside, it felt especially insulting for the county to hound him to pay for his own confinement even following his acquittal. 

LaVia and his loved ones tried to put the debt out of their minds, but it hampered his chances at successful re-entry, his mother told Bolts recently. “It’s hard to be a productive member of society when you have $17,000 over your head,” Judi LaVia Jones, said. Her son is 50 years old and has long struggled with addiction and mental health issues, and can ill afford the additional burden of state-imposed debt, she added: “Try applying for an apartment with that. Try starting a business. It is always hanging over you.”

In September, Dauphin County’s commissioners voted to forgive the nearly $66 million in pay-to-stay debt looming over formerly incarcerated people and their families. The move, championed by a commissioner who won in 2023 after running on jail reform, followed a 2022 decision by the commission that ended pay-to-stay fees but had not erased people’s previous debts for jail stays. 

LaVia Jones said the decision to finally forgive the outstanding jail debt will help her son move on with his life, calling it “a huge relief.”

“The longer you sat in jail, the more debt you incurred, the more debt your family incurred. People sit there pretrial for one year, two years. It’s so wrong,” she said. “So this really helps him to move on with his life.” 

Local groups that advocate for incarcerated people in Harrisburg argued for years that the pay-to-stay scheme worked against efforts at successful re-entry for people released from jail, who are typically poor and who are almost always more concerned with basic survival and staying free than with settling debts. 

Derrick Anderson of Harrisburg says that after he got out of jail a few years ago, the nearly $3,000 bill the county sent him for his stay seemed unreal and unworkable. “Even just $30 in my pocket felt like a lot,” he told Bolts. “It made the difference between me staying out here and me going back to prison. I could buy me something to eat, catch a bus, catch a cab. Something in my pocket. It makes a difference, and I’m telling you from experience. And they want to take it from you, and release guys with absolutely nothing.”

Lamont Jones, a Harrisburg City Council member who was formerly incarcerated, and who is running for mayor this year, was active in pushing for the county to erase people’s jail bills last year, saying such debts effectively work to encourage recidivism and degrade public safety. “In the scramble for survival, a lot of times, out of necessity, people will turn to a life of crime, not necessarily because they want to be a criminal. How can they figure out another way to pay?” he told Bolts.

Jones, who was released from incarceration in 2008, said it took him 15 years beyond then to pay off his debts to the system. He considers himself fortunate for not having succumbed to what he described as a financial “pressure cooker.”

“These fees, plus probation and parole constantly asking you for your supervision fee, plus the fines you owe, plus you may have child support, plus you need to feed yourself, clothe yourself—there just isn’t enough money in the pot,” Jones told Bolts. “And a lot of people, if they can’t find their way out of it, end up going back to the same thing that got them incarcerated in the first place.”

The jail-debt policy that Dauphin County finally ended last year is hardly unique. Such pay-to-stay schemes exist in some form in at least 43 states, according to Captive Money Lab, a research project of several universities that tracks economic punishment in the U.S. criminal legal system. The Associated Press reports pay-to-stay policies exist in many parts of Pennsylvania. 

The practice of charging people for their time in lockup is but one contributor to a vast array of fines and fees that extracts money from people at virtually every stage of the criminal legal system—starting with jail booking and often lingering, through probation and parole, for years or decades after someone has been released, and affecting even those charged as children.

Cities, counties, and states try to collect such fees to fund government operations. But by reaching into the skinny accounts of incarcerated people and the family members who support them, these governments place vulnerable people in financial ruin while often failing to generate sustainable revenue streams. 

In Pennsylvania, as in every other state, people dogged by fines and fees in the criminal legal system are disproportionately poor and non-white, a result of persistently classist and racist disparities in rates of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. (The jail population in Dauphin County is majority-Black, even though the overall county populace is under 20 percent Black.) The fact that so many incarcerated people are poor ensures that pay-to-stay debts, and those for many other fines and fees, are unlikely to yield much return for the governments and collectors that call for them.

“It is unbelievably ineffective,” Dylan Hayre, national advocacy and campaigns director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, told Bolts. “It’s one of those things where even surface-level scrutiny reveals the fact that this is not a smart thing to do.”

Justin Douglas, the Democratic commissioner who scored a shock upset win in 2023 on an uncommon platform of reforming the Dauphin County jail, and who championed the recent debt forgiveness, says that the county was spending about as much, if not more, on collecting those jail fees as it was taking in. 

“This is fake debt to begin with, in that we’re never going to recoup $66 million, and it’s comical to think we would,” Douglas told Bolts. 

Even those counties that put in serious effort to recoup criminal-legal debt can still struggle. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, spent the last four years carrying out a Delinquency Recovery Program that county leaders report has brought in less than 1 percent of the total debt owed there.

It was not any moral calling, but rather frustration over the county’s failure to recoup most jail fees, that first prompted Dauphin County to end pay-to-stay charges at the jail in 2022, when the commission moved to instead charge people a one-time booking fee. 

To ensure it actually received money for the booking fee, the county started automatically taking $125 from everyone who entered the jail, at the moment of entry. For those who could not afford that fee upfront, the county would garnish funds that loved ones sent incarcerated people to buy marked-up commissary items and to make costly calls to family and friends on the outside.

The jail has been garnishing funds for other debts for years, pre-dating the booking fee. “If I got $100, they were taking $25. I had a $25 money order come in, they took half of it. You’re essentially being robbed,” Jerome Coleman, who’s been incarcerated multiple times in Harrisburg, and free since 2017, told Bolts. He now runs a small local business at which he employs other formerly incarcerated people. 

Even as Dauphin County has now relieved all past pay-to-stay debt, it continues charging the $125 jail booking fee and continues to garnish funds to pay for it. Advocates hope the commissioners will abolish that system as a follow-up act to last year’s debt forgiveness, but they aren’t holding their breath. 

Douglas, the commissioner who put debt forgiveness on the county’s agenda last year, said it has been difficult to bring about even modest reforms since his election. In the last year, for example, the county let incarcerated people go outdoors, briefly, for the first time in decades. The county is also putting out a bid for a new medical services contractor at the jail for the first time in almost 40 years, following repeated complaints against the current, longtime provider.

“This year,” Douglas said, “I’ve learned a lot about the lane I live in, and it has certain levers I can pull. I don’t set bail. I don’t determine the length of stay for somebody in jail. The fee is something that does fall under our purview. Building a coalition takes a long time, though.” 

He added, “Dauphin County prison has some massive obstacles in front of it. We have earned our reputation, in a lot of ways.”

People formerly incarcerated in Harrisburg agree. 

“It’s a shithole,” Anderson said. 

Coleman remembered the food: “The meat they used to give us was green and pink.” 

“When it got cold, there was ice inside my son’s cell,” LaVia Jones said.

Douglas flipped the board to Democratic control with his 2023 election, but that by no means signalled a progressive turn. Douglas said he finds he and his fellow commissioners have “different value systems” regarding the jail they oversee.

When the three-member board voted on forgiving the pay-to-stay debt, the other Democratic commissioner, George Hartwick,  did not support the reform. It only passed, advocates told Bolts, because Douglas and a persistent outside advocacy campaign won over Republican Mike Pries, with whom Douglas is now forging an unusual power-sharing agreement. 

In an email to Bolts, Pries said it was “an easy decision” to vote with Douglas on debt forgiveness because the debt was undercutting other county programs meant to reduce recidivism. “We were literally spending money on a good conceptual idea and goal,” Pries wrote, “but at the same time keeping individuals from reaching that goal by making it almost impossible to get credit, unable to get a mortgage, unable to rent an apartment, unable to get a car loan. That then becomes a cycle of despair and many times forces them to make decisions that put them right back where they started.”

Hartwick did not respond to an interview request or emailed questions from Bolts about the debt forgiveness and the booking fee.

Even though Pries described his vote in September as a no-brainer, Onah Ruth Ossai, an abolitionist organizer in Harrisburg, said she’s skeptical the issue would have come to a vote at all had Douglas not joined the board. “Having someone like Justin Douglas in office, at least we start to be able to shed a light on what’s happening. We felt completely in the dark before,” Ossai said.

She believes the booking fee must be the next target. Douglas told Bolts he “definitely” wants to abolish that fee, and that he’s planning a push, but that he does not believe he has support yet from his board colleagues to approve the change. That reform would be even more politically challenging than the debt forgiveness because the booking fee, unlike the pay-to-stay fee before it, actually does generate consistent revenue for the county, as a result of the garnishment policy.

In its most recent annual report, published in May, the county said it took in an average of 17 new detainees per day. That comes out to more than $2,000 extracted daily from people who, with rare exception, are detained pretrial—that is, still presumed innocent because they have not been convicted of the charges that landed them in jail. Cash bail amounts set by judges in the county ensures many are kept in the jail only because they cannot afford freedom. 

In his email to Bolts, Pries said he’d be open to eliminating the booking fee, but only if the county comes up with a way to replace the money the fee generates. “If an alternative that does not negatively impact the county can be found, I will certainly consider that,” he wrote.

The organizers who sought the debt forgiveness say they will press now to end the booking fee and that they are encouraged by having an ally on the board in Douglas.

“What a light of hope this has been,” said LaVia Jones, Chad’s mother. 

She told Bolts that she spent 27 years working in law enforcement in Pennsylvania, mainly investigating cases of alleged medical fraud. Since retiring and bearing witness to the financial exploitation and general suffering of her son and others in jail in Harrisburg, however, she has had a change of heart.

“I was always proud to say I worked in law enforcement,” she said. “When I got a true picture of what it’s like to be poor and to be incarcerated, I started to say to myself, ‘Boy, this criminal justice is not so just.’”

The post This Pennsylvania County Wiped Out Millions in Jail Debt appeared first on Bolts.

But now Torres is nervous about what 2025 may bring. A lawsuit threatens to unwind the law against immigration jails, and the attorney general’s directive is still not codified into law, meaning that a new official who is more hostile to immigrants’ rights could quickly undo it. And New Jersey is electing many of its state and local leaders this year in a host of races that will test much more than just candidates’ openness to immigration detention.

“Somehow I have been dreading 2025’s cycle for even longer than I did 2024’s,” Torres told Bolts about New Jersey’s upcoming elections. “It’s not guaranteed that we’re going to get the protections that these communities deserve.”

The coming year indeed carries high stakes for policing and criminal justice, in New Jersey and beyond. There will be roughly 160 elections for prosecutor and sheriff this year. Most are concentrated in just four East Coast states—New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Filing deadlines are still months away. But at this early juncture, there are already several elections to keep an eye on including the re-election bids of Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, the former civil rights attorney turned prosecutor, and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, fresh off prosecuting Donald Trump. This year will also see important elections for prosecutor in Brooklyn and several Virginia cities, as well as sheriff races in Buffalo and New Orleans. (The full list of prosecutor and sheriff races is available here.)

Sheriffs and prosecutors are central to local criminal legal systems, with wide discretion over a large range of issues from sentencing to detention conditions, so Bolts closely tracks them each year. But criminal justice policy also hinges on offices that have broader purviews. This year, New Jersey and Virginia are selecting their state governments. The partisan or ideological majorities on Pennsylvania and Wisconsin’s supreme courts are also on the line.

Plus, dozens of cities are electing their mayors and city councilors in 2025, including places with major recent conflicts over policing like Atlanta, Minneapolis, and New York City.

Today Bolts is launching its coverage of these races by fleshing out six storylines that will define the cycle.

1. How will two prosecutors emblematic of the reform movement fare against national headwinds?

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA who brought Trump to trial this spring on felony charges of falsifying business records, famously secured 34 convictions against him. With Trump now headed back to the White House, this may well remain the only criminal trial Trump sits through. 

This has earned Bragg the intense enmity of conservatives nationwide, who have attacked his prosecution of Trump, as well as his affinities for criminal justice reforms. In 2024, a Republican prosecutor in Arizona even refused to extradite a suspect to New York, citing Bragg’s politics. When he first ran in 2021, Bragg positioned himself as a reformer and courted progressive voters, though his proposals were not as far-reaching as some of his rivals. 

MAGA fury is unlikely to mean much in a Democratic primary in Manhattan, which is the main hurdle standing between Bragg and a second term this year. Despite the New York Post’s negative coverage of Bragg as responsible for crime, he has touted the decline in shootings, homicides, and property crimes in the borough over his time in office. 

And some local progressives have distanced themselves from his policies. Eliza Orlins, a public defender who ran for DA against Bragg in the 2021 Democratic primary, has criticized him for breaking his campaign promises to scale back the tactics that ballooned incarceration locally, such as heavy prosecution of low-level offenses. “The political landscape has shifted significantly since 2021,” she told Bolts. “However, I think there’s still room to shape the debate—especially in races like the one for Manhattan DA,” she added. “Reformers need to push back against the fear-based narratives and ensure that the real impact of policies like bail reform and decarceration is part of the conversation.”

Just 100 miles away, in Philadelphia, Larry Krasner came to embody the “progressive prosecutor” movement after his 2017 victory. He curtailed prosecutions of low-level offenses, restricted the scope of probation, overturned many wrongful convictions, and clashed with police unions for taking a harder line on officer misconduct.

Krasner also comfortably won reelection four years ago despite a major push to oust him, and then also survived a GOP effort to remove him from office. However, as he now approaches his second reelection race, the national context has changed. Losses by high-profile reform DAs in California have put progressives interested in prosecutor reform on the defensive. Krasner may also face several challengers this year, including local judge Patrick Dugan, who recently divulged that he plans to run. 

Heavy spending against California reformers by the tech and real estate industry was a key factor in their losses in the state. And Krasner might have an even bigger target on his back: Last fall, he tried to stop Elon Musk’s electioneering schemes on Trump’s behalf in Pennsylvania. Musk has recently said he wants to fund campaigns against reform DAs, and he spent heavily in a failed effort to oust Austin’s chief prosecutor last year, fueling speculation of new confrontations between Musk and Krasner this year.

2. Can proponents of prosecutor reform keep or expand their footing in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia? (Plus, who will even run?)

Even if the other prosecutors on the ballot this year don’t have such national profiles, their fates still matter for local criminal justice policy.

DA Eric Gonzalez is also up for reelection in Brooklyn, which is the biggest county with a prosecutor race anywhere in the nation this year. A self-proclaimed ‘progressive prosecutor,’ Gonzalez has unveiled policies to shield some immigrants from deportation and dropped cases against hundreds of against sex workers, among other reforms, while also facing criticism from the left for not being bold enough. He ran for a second term unopposed in 2021.

In upstate New York, reformers in 2024 got rid of David Soares, one of their more vocal foils. Soares spent years railing against pretrial reforms as DA of Albany County and former president of the state’s DA association. Reformers have a similar opportunity in 2025 in Orange County, where David Hoovler, another former president of the DA association and critic of pretrial reforms, is up for reelection. Also on the ballot are Nassau County DA Anne Donnelly and Suffolk County DA Raymond Tierney, two Republicans who oversee Long Island’s two populous counties and keep calling for the state to roll back its 2020 bail reform.

In Virginia, a group of 11 reform-minded prosecutors formed an alliance in 2020 to advocate for statewide criminal justice reforms like ending mandatory minimum sentences. But the group’s agenda was sidelined when Democrats lost their governing majority in late 2021. 

Several members of this alliance face reelection in 2025. They include Stephanie Morales, the Portsmouth prosecutor who helped spearhead the creation of the reform alliance five years ago and who clashed with police during Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as well as Ramin Fatehi, the Norfolk prosecutor who faces critics who favor a more punitive approach to prosecution. If they survive this year, they could reprise their statewide advocacy, but that could also hinge on Democrats regaining control of the state government (more on that below).

Finally, roughly a third of Pennsylvania’s counties are electing their DA, including populous Bucks, Westmoreland, and York counties. As is often the case with prosecutors, the first test will be who even files by the March deadline; in the state’s most recent DA races, in 2023, most races saw a complete lack of competition, with candidates running unopposed across the state.

3. Will sheriff races question the harsh status quo on jail deaths, detention conditions, and collaboration with ICE?

The jail in Buffalo, New York, has drawn lawsuits and scrutiny for the mounting deaths of people in custody. When longtime Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard, a named defendant in these lawsuits, retired in 2021, his preferred candidate, Republican John Garcia, narrowly prevailed in the race to replace him. Deaths have steadily continued in the lock-up under Garcia, and local activists say detention conditions have remained just as gruesome as under Howard. 

In the city of Virginia Beach, an investigation conducted this fall revealed that a man died earlier this year due to the way in which he was restrained by sheriff’s deputies. 

And in Monmouth County, New Jersey, the sheriff’s office was hit by a lawsuit in 2024 that alleged that it was covering up drug-related deaths and overdoses in custody.

Each of these three jurisdictions is electing its sheriff this year, which could at least give local advocates a platform to further expose these detention conditions. And similar questions could surface in the other sheriff’s races taking place in New York and Virginia, plus parts of New Jersey. (Note that Pennsylvania also votes for sheriffs but in that state, as well as in some New Jersey counties, jails are run by the county board and the sheriff’s authority is much more narrow.)

Local detention conditions are also worrying advocates in Louisiana, which adopted legislation last year that is set to balloon local jails. New Orleans, which has a long history of deadly conditions, is the only parish to hold a sheriff’s race this year. Sheriff Suson Hutson, who won with the support of many local reformers in 2021, broke with the other state sheriffs who cheered the 2024 legislation and warned that it would create an “unmanageable population explosion in the New Orleans jail.” 

Sheriffs who run jails also have leeway in deciding how much to collaborate with federal immigration agents; for instance, many get to decide whether to rent out their space to ICE to detain people. Amy Woolard, chief program officer of the ACLU of Virginia, who is tracking how this issue plays out across her state’s 38 sheriff’s races this year, says it’s often difficult to even ascertain where sheriff candidates stand on it. 

“I would ask them, point blank, what are their policies and practices for working with ICE; what are their intentions around protecting immigrant communities in their jurisdictions” Woolard told Bolts. “I think having that knowledge is going to help immigrant communities understand what they may be facing depending on where they live.”

4. How will city elections impact policing? 

This year, 23 cities of at least 250,000 people will elect their mayor, a position that often comes with some control over the local police department. 

The most obvious highlight is the mayoral race in New York City, where incumbent and former police officer Eric Adams is preparing to run for a second term while under indictment on federal corruption charges. 

Under Adams, the New York Police Department has been rocked by incessant scandals and resignations, including over corruption and sexual misconduct allegations. Adams has championed more aggressive police tactics such as adding armed officers to public transit and reviving plainclothes police squads. He has already drawn a wide field of challengers, including a pair of progressive state Senators, Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, who have each been more critical of the NYPD. The possible candidacy of former Governor Andrew Cuomo may still rock the race. 

Then there’s Atlanta, where Democratic leadership remains locked in a battle with local activists over plans to construct a police training center widely known as “Cop City.” Mayor Andre Dickens has championed the proposal and secured the city council’s approval; these officials also blocked a ballot initiative that would have asked Atlantans to weigh in on Cop City. This year, Dickens is running for reelection; all city council seats are on the ballot as well. 

Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. Mayor Jacob Frey has agreed to reforms over the years but has drawn scrutiny over their faltering implementation. He has also resisted more ambitious overhauls; he won reelection in 2021 on the same day as voters defeated a proposal to replace the police department, which he vocally opposed. 

Omar Fateh, a progressive state lawmaker who backed the 2021 policing referendum, has announced that he’ll challenge the mayor in 2025 and has signaled that he’ll run to Frey’s left.

Other cities with mayoral elections in 2025 include Boston, where first-term Mayor Michelle Wu promised to reform policing but backtracked on some key commitments like ending a controversial police surveillance center. In Pittsburgh, a mayor who is generally allied with local reformers is up for a second term. In Omaha and Seattle, candidates who ran on growing their local police departments and defeated more left-leaning opponents in 2021 are again on the ballot. Plus, Bolts will track similar dynamics in cities ranging from Buffalo and Cleveland to St. Louis and Oakland. 

5. Will conservatives flip supreme courts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?

Just two years after a liberal takeover that paved the way for fairer election maps, control of Wisconsin’s supreme court is again on the ballot this spring. An open race to replace a retiring liberal justice, Ann Welsh Bradley, could flip the court back to the right. 

Conservatives have a similar opportunity in Pennsylvania, where three Democratic justices are up for reelection this year; Republicans need to win two of these seats to secure a majority on the court, and their chances largely depend on whether any incumbents retire.

The stakes around control of these courts are most clear around abortion rights, labor issues, and redistricting. But on criminal cases, these supreme courts also hear individual appeals and decide broader questions like the constitutionality of punishments. In Pennsylvania, cases currently on the supreme court’s docket include a challenge to draconian life sentence schemes and a dispute over an effort by Krasner to vacate a death sentence. 

But the Democratic majority on Pennsylvania’s high court has not delivered consistent wins for criminal justice reformers—for instance, declining to consider the legality of the death penalty.

And Wisconsin’s court, typically split by ideological conflicts, is strikingly uniform when it comes to justices’ professional backgrounds. Five of its seven members are former prosecutors; none is a former public defender. The 2025 front-runners, conservative Brad Schimel and liberal Susan Crawford, have both stressed their prosecutorial experiences as a former attorney general and former deputy attorney general, respectively.

6. Who will come to govern New Jersey and Virginia? 

Voters in New Jersey and Virginia will each elect their next governor and lawmakers this year.

Amy Torres, the New Jersey advocate for immigrant justice, says that, depending on who wins Democratic primaries and then the November elections, she could see New Jersey become more acquiescent toward the Trump administration. Or alternatively, she says, “There’s an interesting opportunity for New Jersey to be the voice of what resistance looks like.” She stressed that her state’s outlook feels especially uncertain due to a legal ruling last year that revamped primary ballots and loosened the control of party machines.

One unusual layer to the governor’s race: New Jersey does not elect local prosecutors, so the discretion to set prosecutorial policies rests largely with the attorney general, another office that itself is not elected but rather appointed by the governor. New Jersey has been under full Democratic control since the 2017 elections. 

Meanwhile, Virginia’s government has flipped back and forth during that time, with major ramifications for criminal justice policy.

In their brief stint running the state from 2019 to 2021, Virginia Democrats abolished the death penalty, banned life without parole sentences for kids, and ended prison gerrymandering, among other changes. But their agenda came to an abrupt halt in 2021 with the election of Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who effectively froze voting rights restoration and parole grants and vetoed other reform legislation. Another Republican, Attorney General Jason Miyares, has also targeted local reformers but lacks legislative allies to preempt their policies. 

These issues are sure to come to a head in 2025. Youngkin is barred from seeking a second term as governor. Miyares is running for reelection as attorney general. And legislative races will decide which party can pursue its priorities, from Democrats hoping to codify voting rights for people with felony convictions to the GOP pushing to ramp up policing of immigrants.

Amy Woolard with the ACLU of Virginia says the 2025 elections could be an opportunity to expand criminal legal reform in her state, but that some of the rhetoric around public safety makes the work tough. “It’s tough to get people to listen to community members inside the legislature. It’s tough to push back against the fearmongering,” she told Bolts.

But she is also excited about a new generation of officials who first came into office in 2023 and whose ranks she hopes expand this year. She said, “They brought with them a kind of excitement, fearlessness, energy around having candid conversations around excessive sentencing, about the racial implications of our criminal justice system.”

The post The Local Elections That Will Define Criminal Justice Policy in 2025 appeared first on Bolts.

Lee received a ray of hope last month when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal.

What the justices decide might ultimately give 1,100 others a chance at freedom as well. The case, which the court will hear later this year, marks a potential turning point for a state that’s exceptionally punitive by national standards in handing out life without parole sentences.

“With the recent development at the supreme court,” Lee told Bolts in an email last week, “many ppl have been sharing with me how this possibility has restored a [sense] of hope in their life to have another chance at freedom.”

In 2014, Lee, then age 29, participated in a burglary in which his accomplice fatally shot the homeowner. Lee had not been involved in the killing and wasn’t even in the room at the time. Nonetheless, two years later, he was convicted of felony murder, a type of charge that prosecutors can bring against someone who was involved in a crime that led to a death, even if the death was unintentional or the defendant didn’t participate in the killing.

In Pennsylvania, felony murder is classified as second-degree murder, and all convictions for second-degree murder trigger an automatic sentence of life without parole. These abnormally draconian laws have made Pennsylvania home to near-record numbers of people sentenced to die in prison. The state has the second-highest number of people serving life without parole, nearly 5,100 people; approximately one in five have been convicted of felony murder. 

“There are so many other individuals who have [served] so much more time. I hope that they will finally have that opportunity to go back into society and have a positive effect,” Lee told Bolts in an earlier exchange. “It’s easy for us to throw people away. But if somebody is putting in the work to truly transform and can be useful to society, families and communities, then why not use that person? I believe in redemption if somebody has done the work.”

Lee’s appeal argues that his sentence violates the state constitution, which prohibits “cruel punishment.” This wording is different than the federal constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which bans punishment that is “cruel and unusual.” Since some 1,100 people are sentenced to life without parole for felony murder in Pennsylvania, the punishment may not be considered unusual within the state, but Lee’s appeal argues that it is nonetheless cruel to automatically condemn someone to die in prison for a killing they didn’t commit. 

Other state constitutions have similar language against “cruel” punishments; their courts have used those clauses to issue protections that go beyond those afforded by federal courts.

Still, Lee’s appeal is making the case that his sentence also violates the federal constitution. His brief states that Pennsylvania’s statutes are “out of step” with contemporary standards, making them unusually punitive in violation of the federal constitution. Pennsylvania is the only state besides Louisiana that mandates life without parole for second-degree murder. 

Pennsylvania’s superior court, the lower court that handles criminal cases, rejected Lee’s appeal in June, ruling that it was bound by precedent to reject his plea. But one of the judges, Alice Dubow, called on the supreme court to take up the case and revisit the question of whether automatic life without parole sentences for second-degree murder violate Pennsylvania’s state constitution. Dubow is a Democrat, as are five of the seven justices on the supreme court, though partisanship is often not a strong predictor of how judges settle criminal justice matters. 

Life without parole has frequently been proposed as a more humane alternative to the death penalty, but advocates for reform call it “death by incarceration.” Ashley Nellis, senior researcher with the Sentencing Project, points out that LWOP sentences allow for virtually no second chance no matter a person’s transformation or the amount of time that has elapsed. 

“The state is killing you, just slower—and for a wider range of offenses or participation in those offenses,” she said.

Nellis points out that the expansion of life without parole has far outpaced the decline in the death penalty. The number of people serving life without parole has jumped 66 percent since her organization began collecting data in 2003, reaching roughly 56,000 people as of a 2021 report by the organization. In Texas, for instance, the number of life without parole sentences has grown as the number of those sentenced to death has dropped. “When you’re looking at a death sentence, you have a capital attorney and [other] special rights given to you because of the seriousness of the sentence,” Nellis noted, but those protections are not available to those facing LWOP.

Over the past decade, courts and lawmakers have begun to slowly reassess who can face such extreme sentences. In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Miller v. Alabama that mandatory life sentences for children under age 18 were unconstitutional. Four years later, the court made its Miller decision retroactive, enabling thousands to apply for resentencing. 

Since then, more than two dozen states have since outright banned sentences of life without parole for children. Some have also restricted life without parole for “emerging adults”, an acknowledgement of emerging research in neuroscience that shows people’s brains continue developing well into their mid-twenties. Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., have gone the furthest so far, effectively banning such sentences for people under age 21 and 25, respectively; in Massachusetts, the change came through a decision of the state supreme court earlier this year. Some lawmakers have also introduced legislation that would eliminate life without parole altogether, regardless of age. 

In Pennsylvania, the provision to automatically sentence people to life without parole for second-degree murder already is a contentious issue. U.S. Senator John Fetterman tried to expand clemency for that population while he was lieutenant governor, and then faced attacks over that work when he ran for Senate in 2022. Last fall, Democratic lawmaker Tim Briggs announced legislation to end these automatic sentences, though he has yet to file it —the same demand that Lee is making through the legal route.

Lee remains determined not to die in prison. In 2016, the court assigned him an attorney to assist with his post-conviction appeal. In Pennsylvania, a person must file a notice for appeal within 30 days. That attorney filed nothing, leaving Lee barred from making any further appeals for the next five years. By 2020, when Lee successfully petitioned to reinstate his appeal rights, he had connected with attorneys from the Abolitionist Law Center, an organization that had already mounted several challenges to life without parole in the state. The center, along with the Amistad Law Project and the Center for Constitutional Rights, agreed to take on Lee’s appeal and, with it, mount another challenge to the state’s inclination for “death by incarceration.” 

For Bret Grote, the lead attorney on Lee’s challenge and the Abolitionist Law Center’s legal director, a favorable ruling for Lee could have substantial implications for other states. “It could create momentum for legislative and judicial reform,” he told Bolts. “It could [also] provide a persuasive precedent of a state using its own constitution to provide greater protections than the federal constitution.” 

Nellis agrees. These types of challenges on the state level could not only provide relief both retroactively and in future cases, but, she said, “continue to shed more and more light on the fact that this sentence is applied in arbitrary and very unfair ways.” A clear majority of people who serve life without parole sentences in Pennsylvania are Black, according to data compiled by the Sentencing Project.

Lee says he reconnected with his Christian faith behind bars, which gave him the strength to keep fighting his extreme sentence. He says he only has to glance around his cellblock to know that the court’s decision on his case could affect many more than just him. 

“A lot of guys on the block are lifers with twenty, thirty years on their sentence,” he told Bolts. When they heard that the court would consider his appeal, hope rippled through the prison. 

“This is the greatest news I’ve gotten in so long,” he recalled one man, who had been imprisoned for over 30 years, telling him. 

“Your case is going to affect mine immediately,” another man, who had already served 26 years, told him.

The post Pennsylvania Reckons with Its Draconian Laws on Life Imprisonment appeared first on Bolts.

—

Neil Makhija spent years promoting voter turnout in South Asian communities, and, as a professor of election law at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching new generations of attorneys about the fragility of the right to vote. But in 2020, he says, he felt frustrated watching the presidential race from the sidelines as then-President Donald Trump and his allies sought to invalidate lawful ballots and overturn election results with a barrage of failed lawsuits.

He decided to run for county commissioner in Montgomery County, a suburban area of 860,000 people northwest of Philadelphia. That board oversees more than half a billion dollars in annual spending across about 40 departments, but Makhija, a Democrat, says he was primarily motivated by one sliver of the body’s authority: setting rules for election administration. 

Having won his election last November, Makhija is now in a position to secure voting rights from the inside. County commissions in most of Pennsylvania double as boards of elections, with broad discretion over election procedures, handing Makhija power to help shape how voting is conducted in the third most populous county of this pivotal swing state. And he’s intent on getting creative.

Makhija tells Bolts he intends to propose that Montgomery County set up a mobile unit that’d go into neighborhoods to help people resolve mistakes they’ve made on their mail ballots.

He likens his proposal, which election experts say does not currently exist anywhere in Pennsylvania, to an ice cream truck for voting.

“Imagine if voting was as efficient and accessible as getting an Amazon delivery or calling an Uber,” Makhija told Bolts. “Exercising fundamental rights shouldn’t be more burdensome.”

His idea is to strengthen Montgomery County’s process for ballot curing, the process by which voters get to resolve minor errors on mail ballots to ensure they are counted. 

This is no abstract matter: Thousands of Pennsylvania mail ballots are tossed out every cycle due to any number of possible mistakes, including a missing or inaccurate date, a missing signature or one that doesn’t match the voter’s signature on file, or a so-called naked ballot returned with no secrecy envelope. These rejected ballots disproportionately come from older people and communities of color. 

Pennsylvania provides no statewide guidelines for how local boards are supposed to handle mail ballots with errors. Some counties don’t allow voters to make any corrections to their ballots once they’ve been cast; others let them address a missing date or mismatched signature, but do little to notify them of the issue, much less to facilitate a fix. 

Montgomery County is already more permissive than other parts of the state. Its elections office says it makes multiple attempts to contact anyone whose ballot is at risk of being rejected, offering them opportunities to come in and cure it, through phone calls, emails, and written letters. But even in Montgomery County the vast majority of mail ballots with mistakes are never counted. Francis Dean, the county’s director of elections, reports a roughly 10-percent cure rate; he says the county rejects at least 1,000 ballots every election cycle. 

Makhija wants his county to do a lot more to stand out: He’s making the case that Montgomery County should meet people where they actually live, taking on more of the administrative burden of ensuring that mail ballots are cast correctly. 

Under his proposed mobile program, county election workers would flag and set aside ballots that come in with mistakes. Then, over a roughly three-week period—the early-voting window leading up to Election Day—they’d bring those erroneous ballots directly to  voters, who could cure them on the spot without having to make their way to an election office. 

“The idea that a county official would know a ballot isn’t going to be counted, and sit on it for weeks—that, to me, feels like you’re depriving a voter of their right,” he told Bolts. “One of our obligations in government is to help people enforce their rights.” 

Voting rights advocates in Pennsylvania say Makhija’s proposal would be a game-changer, even within the cohort of counties already making relatively strong efforts to prevent ballots from being tossed for technical errors. 

“Ideally, we’d have that everywhere: very proactive election administrators doing everything they can to make sure people’s votes are counted,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania.

Makhija’s plan is an ambitious one, to be sure. The commissioner says he still has questions as to whether the county can unlock the resources to implement his vision. Dean, the elections director, who says he’s eager to work with Makhija on this, also says that it won’t be easy to reach hundreds of cure-eligible voters over a short period every election. Dean says he’s working to develop a cost estimate, and that even if the county is willing to pay for this project, it would also take a push to hire the workforce to carry it out. “Big ideas require an equally big commitment of resources,” he told Bolts. 

Already this year, Makhija has led the way on another change that will ensure fewer ballots are rejected. The board of elections voted Jan. 23 to accept ballots even when voters have written the wrong year, or no year at all, on the envelope. (Voters who make that error won’t even have to fix, or “cure,” their mistake to be counted.)

The board’s decision codified part of a federal ruling in late November; following a legal fight, the judge ordered elections officials throughout Pennsylvania to count mail ballots on which voters either forgot to write the date or wrote the wrong date. That ruling is still working its way through the court system, now in the hands of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Montgomery County, more than most, understands how important the November ruling was: it changed the outcome of that month’s election in Towamencin Township, where Kofi Osei, a Democrat, was running to unseat Republican Rich Marino on the board of supervisors. 

Six Towamencin ballots with dating issues had been set aside before the court ruling, and those six broke five to one for Osei, erasing Marino’s four-vote lead and bringing the candidates to a tie. Per Pennsylvania’s bizarre rules to settle tied elections, Marino and Osei were each made to pick among a set of tiles numbered one through 30; the person who drew the lower number would win. Marino drew the number 28, and Osei drew 15.

Then, on Jan. 16 of this year, the county held a special election for a school district race. During the count, the county identified 75 voters who wrote no year on their ballot envelopes, or mistakenly wrote that the year was 2023; the Jan. 23 ordinance confirmed the county should count those ballots. The election was decided by more than 3,000 votes, so the 75 affected ballots didn’t determine the winner—but Osei’s earlier tiebreak victory reminds that 75 voters can be more than enough to tip a contest. 

Adam Bonin, a Democratic elections attorney who represented Osei in the last election, laments that these policies are left to local governments to decide. Two voters who live on either side of a county border, who cast mail ballots with the very same curable discrepancy, may be offered vastly different opportunities to fix them based on the inclinations of their local leaders. 

“It is incredibly unfortunate that we don’t have statewide standards on this,” Bonin told Bolts. “This isn’t about partisan results; this is about getting to every voter who is trying to vote, and giving them every chance for it to be lawful and get it counted.” 

He added, “I would beg of the counties: What can you do to empower your voters?” 

Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration late last year announced that the state would redesign its mail ballots with brighter colors and updated wording to minimize the possibility a voter makes a cure-worthy mistake. But with control of Pennsylvania state government split between Democrats and Republicans, advocates see little hope for a broader statewide fix this year to create uniform policy over the handling of ballots that are still erroneous. That means it will remain largely up to local politicians to set the tone in 2024. 

This patchwork can prove confusing to residents, but also to voting rights groups that need to stay on top of a tremendous amount of fragmented information to know what they can do in one place versus another. “You don’t always know what you’re getting from county to county, and folks who are not actively paying attention and abreast of the situation especially may not know,” said Kyle Miller, Pennsylvania policy strategist for the national nonprofit Protect Democracy. 

With exceptions, Democratic-run Pennsylvania counties have generally embraced more expansive rules on ballot curing, while GOP-run counties have tended to adopt more restrictive rules. Pennsylvania Republicans supported expanding mail voting five years ago, but mostly turned against it amid Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud.

Even Dauphin County (Harrisburg), which voted for President Biden by nine percentage points in 2020, has not offered ballot curing, as the idea was blocked by its then-GOP-controlled commission. The county flipped to Democrats in the fall of 2023 for the first time since at least the Civil War, and a new county commissioner told Bolts in November that he wants to advance reform this year. Democrats tend to also cast the majority of mail ballots in red-leaning places like York County that don’t enable curing, making them more vulnerable to having their ballots rejected.

But on the other end of the spectrum, counties that do allow ballot curing also differ vastly in how much they invest in making sure voters know about and can resolve ballot discrepancies. 

At least six Pennsylvania counties have published public lists with the names of people whose ballots are at risk of being rejected, enabling third-party groups to step in to help inform voters, according to a survey by Votebeat. Montgomery County does not publish such a list preemptively, but it does share the names of anyone whose ballot has been rejected with campaigns that ask, Makhija said.

That approach still puts the responsibility of outreach on outside organizations, and it still asks voters to find time to come into the elections office. Makhija wants to go further. “We should not be putting the burden on our residents,” he said. “We should be making it as easy as possible.”

He expects to formalize his proposal for mobile curing “in the coming weeks.” The board of elections is made up of the county’s three commissioners, with Makhija chairing it alongside Democrat Jamila Winder and Republican Tom DiBello. Winder, who is generally his ally on expanding voter access, did not respond to Bolts’ interview request. Last month, she issued a statement criticizing the practice of rejecting ballots because of “a simple mistake that we all have made at one point in our lives.”

If the board approves the program, Makhija says the county likely wouldn’t be able to implement mobile curing in time for the April 23 primary, but that he wants to make it happen by November.

Dean pointed to less ambitious things the county could do in the meantime. For one, he plans to seek county approval to open four more offices at which voters could cure their ballots. At the moment, this service is offered at only one location in the entire county, forcing some far-flung residents to drive more than 40 minutes to correct a ballot issue. 

He says he’s eager to think big and hopeful that Montgomery County can be an example for others in Pennsylvania. “I’m happy to be a part of a county that isn’t afraid to have those conversations,” he told Bolts. “The goal is to be setting the standard in Pennsylvania.”

The post How an ‘Ice Cream Truck’ for Voting Could Stop Pennsylvania Ballots from Being Tossed appeared first on Bolts.

There are many paths to elected office, Justin Douglas quips, “but fired pastor is not one.” 

A year ago, he says, he could not have named the three men who serve on the county commission of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, his home since 2015. This powerful body, with control of a $222 million budget and a county government workforce of 1,700, meets Wednesdays in downtown Harrisburg, in a building that Douglas had never entered. 

Still, he got a call in February from Run for Something, an organization that recruits progressive candidates for local elections, to see if he’d be interested in running for a seat on the county commission. The last time the office was on the ballot, in 2019, Douglas did not vote. He’d just been fired from his job as pastor at a local church for appearing in a promotional video welcoming LGBTQ+ people to join the congregation. He, his wife, and their three kids were forced out of the home, which was owned by the church. All this time later, Douglas, 39, is still working three jobs to make up for what happened: he’s a pastor at a new church and a fitness instructor, and last year he drove more than 2,000 miles for Uber. 

His stand at the church fit with what he describes as his longtime activist streak. A mainstay in various corners of Dauphin County where matters of social equity and justice are concerned, Douglas grew active in recent years in protest of conditions in the local jail, an aging and oppressive facility where people die at an alarming rate. The county commission has vast power over that jail, a significant factor, Douglas says, in his decision to take Run for Something up on its proposal. He still felt like an imposter when he decided in March to enter the race.

By any standard measure, his campaign seemed doomed from the start: He had no paid staff or office. His team of volunteers, a few friends of his with zero combined campaign experience, met in the corner of a Starbucks in Hershey. He ran without institutional backing or money; while his opponents combined to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, Douglas reports spending only about $12,000.

And he centered his campaign around denouncing the fact that so many people have died in Dauphin County’s jail—an unusual focus, to say the least, for a political candidate. 

He spent roughly a fifth of the little campaign money he raised on a single, highway-side billboard highlighting the lethal lock-up, which sits between Harrisburg and the Douglas family home near the southeast edge of the county. Dauphin County has admitted at least two jail deaths in each of the last four years, a pace that stands out even by terrible national standards. 

“Eighteen prisoners dead since 2019,” Douglas’ billboard read. “Vote for change on Nov. 7.”

In most states, jails are run solely by sheriffs. In Dauphin County, as in most of Pennsylvania, jails are managed directly by local bodies that each feature all three county commissioners, plus some other officials. That gives Dauphin County’s commission a potent vantage point from which to force change, but local advocates have long been angry at what they see as commissioners’ indifference in the face of this death crisis. 

Douglas hammered that message relentlessly—on social media, at candidate forums his opponents didn’t bother to attend, and on the few occasions journalists reached out to interview him. The day before the election, Douglas posted on TikTok urging people to vote, a standard campaign move with an atypically specific appeal: “What got me into this race is prison reform,” he said. “Restorative justice is the solution, and we need that throughout Dauphin County.” 

The following day, on Nov. 7, Douglas defied all expectations to win a seat on the commission, ousting Republican Commissioner Chad Saylor by just 184 votes. A video captures Douglas’ reaction when he learned his win: “Are you kidding me right now? Oh my gosh. Is this for real?” he says, pacing the parking lot outside of the restaurant where he’d gathered with his team.

His victory flipped Dauphin County’s three-person county commission to Democrats. This is the first time the party has won a majority here since at least the Civil War, and an exclamation point on a strong election night for Pennsylvania Democrats generally. Dauphin County now leans blue in federal politics, with Joe Biden carrying it by 9 percentage points in 2020, but Democrats have struggled down-ballot.

The upset has brought Douglas, who’ll be inaugurated on Jan. 2, a lot more attention. He says his calendar is suddenly jammed with people who’d never looked his way but now want to meet, and that he is invited into rooms he could not previously access. He’s been plunged into a new role, one that he hadn’t imagined he’d actually win, and must now figure out how to shake up the local political establishment from the inside. 

When I first talked to Douglas last month, he was still processing his unlikely victory, and planning with his allies how he could turn their newfound clout into better conditions—and a greater voice—for the people detained in Dauphin County. 

We met in downtown Harrisburg, early on a frigid Wednesday just before the weekly commissioner’s meeting, which he chose to attend—as a spectator, for now. He’s instantly recognizable as almost anything but a successful politician: he’s got gauge earrings, 42 tattoos, and dresses in jeans, band tees, and Nike sneakers. The morning we met, he’d put on a collared shirt and a blazer because, he said, he’s trying to look the part these days. 

When we arrive at the county building, a local NAACP chapter leader joins us in the elevator and gives Douglas a hey–aren’t-you-that-guy look, then asks to grab coffee some time. Douglas takes a seat in the back row of the commissioners’ meeting room, and tells me he feels a bit out of place. 

Later that morning, as he readies for an interview with Harrisburg’s CBS station, Douglas confesses that he’s got a lot to learn; that he’s not convinced the Democratic majority will work well together; that he feels icky about attending the inauguration on Jan. 2 at a fancy hotel downtown; that he’s having trouble trusting all the folks who now want to be his friend; and that he isn’t sure how, exactly, he’ll navigate the political terrain to bring about change inside the county prison that was the focus of his campaign. 

The TV crew leaves and he asks me how he performed, then ponders how to best articulate his ideas going forward. “I’m figuring it out. I’m figuring out how I’m going to move differently now,” he says. “Not in morals or in authenticity, but if this is a simulation and we’re in a video game, I leveled up and skipped a few levels. I’m the dude off the street.” 

Douglas is not alone in navigating these questions. He is brainstorming next moves with Lamont Jones, a like-minded reformer and political newcomer who won a seat on the Harrisburg city council in November. And he is in conversation with other central Pennsylvania advocates who are eager to build on this moment. 

Onah Ossai, an organizer with Pennsylvania Stands Up, is watching attentively. She thinks Douglas’s ascent was catalyzed by the protests for social and racial justice in 2020 that, in her words, “primed people” in Dauphin County to view the jail as an everyday scandal. 

“There was activism that made a candidacy like this viable,” Ossai, who met Douglas at a Juneteenth rally this year outside the jail, told me. “No one else was running on the prison or talking about it before. Justin put up a billboard, he came to prison events, he came to prison board meetings. I think people really understood that he was someone who was at least paying attention, that he was a real outsider.”

Despite its name, the Dauphin County Prison operates more like a common jail. Most of the roughly 1,000 people detained there on any given month have not been convicted and are held pretrial. Many are there because they can’t make bail, or due to violations of probation or parole. The average length of stay at the jail is 120 days, the county reports. 

While the county hasn’t recently published demographic information about the people it incarcerates, many who’ve been inside of it told me the detained population skews disproportionately Black, which is in keeping with the county’s historical trends.

Many Pennsylvania jails are deadly for the people who churn through, but Dauphin County’s jail death rate still exceeds statewide and national averages, PennLive determined in a recent investigation. More broadly, the county’s own numbers show over 2,000 incidents since 2019 in which staff used physical force or deployed chemical agents on people held at the jail. 

“You don’t have to live in Dauphin County long to know this is a problem,” Douglas tells me. “It’s hard to miss.” 

In addition, local journalists have found that the county has often misreported its jail deaths—in some cases, covering up its own responsibility. 

In one such instance, Dauphin County reported the death of Herbert Tilghman as a “medical event,” which, PennLive found, obscured the fact that prison staff failed to take Tilghman’s stomach pains seriously, providing minimal treatment and even accusing him of faking illness shortly before he died. In a separate case, the county initially said Ishmail Thompson died in a “medical episode,” failing to note that officers had placed Thompson in a restraint chair, and a hood over his head, then pepper-sprayed him soon before he fell unconscious and, ultimately, comatose.

A dozen people I interviewed for this story with knowledge of conditions inside the jail spoke of nearly round-the-clock lockdowns, and neglect for people’s mental and physical health needs.

“It’s disgusting,” Harrisburg’s Doniesha Bell told me this month, shortly after she was released. Though she hasn’t been convicted of any crime, she spent six months in jail because she could not make bail. She said she was staying at a local shelter, having no stable place to live.

“You have to sit in a cell and eat where you have to use the bathroom. You’re locked down 23 hours a day, and that’s if the guard feels like letting you out,” Bell said. “I was locked up with people who’d seen people die in there, and I get it: you’ve got to bang on the door because there’s no way to get ahold of the [correctional officers]. … The one day my blood pressure was up, they just told me to deal with it, to wait. And they never called the nurse.”

John Hayden, a local watchdog with a Quaker-led citizen group called the Harrisburg Advocacy Team, said the prison’s running crisis is the result of policy choices—namely, contracts with profit-driven companies Aramark and Primecare Medical to provide food and healthcare.

“The way they make more money is by providing lower-cost food and low-wage employees,” Hayden says. “They’ll go several weeks in a row with bologna sandwiches for lunch every day. Sometimes they’ve had bologna sandwiches for all three meals.”

These stories have spurred deep local activism. Meetings of the jail board are well attended, and some advocates have successfully pushed their way into unofficial oversight roles; the nonprofit Pennsylvania Prison Society takes regular tours of the prison and reports back to the community on what it’s seeing. Destiny Brown, a member of that group, tells me she and others in her advocacy corner were pleasantly shocked that Douglas won, and that they “hope and pray this brings change.” Her Prison Society colleague, John Hargreaves, adds that Douglas winning is “injecting a note of optimism. People feel somewhat hopeful now, whereas they didn’t before.” 

Douglas told me, “I’ve moved in activist communities in this area pretty much since I got here, and there are a lot of people who’ve come before me, who are much louder than me, who have educated me on this issue.”

While I was in town to see him, Douglas toured the prison for the first time. He reports back to me following the visit: Certain cell blocks don’t ever go outside, he learned. Rather, he says, they have gym time, which the jail counts as “outdoor” time because air flows in through barred windows. Douglas says he observed in the gym that some of the basketball hoops have no rims, and learned that the jail’s juvenile unit has no working showers. He says he saw leaking water from corroded pipes throughout the kitchen, and a man naked in a cell, defecating on the floor. 

He says he met another man on suicide watch, under supervision of an officer who told Douglas she is overworked and was filling in for a colleague on that day’s assignment. Douglas tells me, “That’s not a place I’d want to be in if I were in mental health crisis. That would not aid in my betterment.” 

He was escorted during his tour by the county’s director of criminal justice, John Bey, a longtime Pennsylvania police chief who was hired by the county earlier this year to oversee its correctional system. Commissioners touted him as an agent of change, and Bey himself said at the time of his hiring, “My position embodies transparency.” 

And so, when we spoke by phone this week, I was curious to hear how Bey feels the county can better communicate what happens inside the jail. He immediately rejected my premise and suggested that the county has been forthcoming about jail deaths, despite thorough PennLive reporting to the contrary. He acknowledged the jail’s poor reputation, but insisted conditions are improving and that “at no time in the history of this place” has accountability been higher.

“I can assure you that as a facility, as an institution, we take the care of our inmates here very seriously and we work closely with PrimeCare to ensure that inmates and those under our care receive at the very least adequate medical care to ensure they’re thriving as much as they can be, given whatever maladies they enter the prison with,” he said.

He added, “They’re not housed in their cells locked down 23, 24 hours a day.” I mentioned Bell’s claim that she had been locked in for that long. “I’m not going to say that that lady is lying,” Bey replied. “We do feed inmates in their cells. They’re very small cells.”

Douglas says he met more than 20 people detained at the jail during his tour, and some knew he’d been elected. He recounts one prisoner saying, “You’re coming in here to fix this place.” He responded, “I’m going to do what I can.” 

Douglas will soon have some real power over the jail. When he is inaugurated, he will automatically join the county’s prison board, the facility’s governing body, on which all three commissioners have a seat alongside four other local officials. The board proposes contracts and settles policy questions in the jail, and it regularly holds meetings to take public input.

The three-member commission, as a separate, standalone body, has final say on budget questions and on contracts for health care, food, and other services. Douglas has been critical of the county’s relationship with those vendors, suggesting that local leaders are influenced by campaign donations from potential vendors. 

None of the current commissioners—Democrat George Hartwick and Republican Mike Pries, who will stay in office next year, plus Saylor—responded to my interview requests. 

Douglas vows that he’ll use his new standing to demand major improvements in detention conditions, from fixing the broken pipes to restricting solitary confinement. 

He’s also aware that the best way to keep someone from dying at the jail is to make sure they never get there at all. He insists that focusing on improving economic conditions throughout Dauphin County would have that effect. He thinks the county should detain fewer people pretrial, a reform that other parts of Pennsylvania have adopted, and hopes to partner with the Dauphin County Bail Fund, a local anti-carceral organization, to highlight punitive bail practices.

But Douglas knows change will be difficult. Many of his ideas have gotten little visibility from the local political establishment until now. On the prison board, he’d need to form a broad coalition to force changes; for decisions made by the commission, he’d have to win over at least one of his colleagues.

Douglas is the first to concede that he isn’t anywhere close to functioning majorities in favor of bold jail reforms. While Douglas and Hartwick will form the board’s new Democratic majority, and could shift policy on some issues, like access to voting, Douglas is skeptical this will easily extend into criminal justice policy; the two men have little relationship so far.

“I don’t trust that everything’s better,” Ossai says. “We’ll see if they’re able to work together, and to what end, and we’ll see who holds the power. Justin’s new, he’s outside.” 

But Douglas thinks his activist background is an asset and says that he is prepared to use his bully pulpit to disrupt normal proceedings in the county, forcing other officials to reckon with the deaths and the suffering happening under their watch.

He says he’ll frequently and loudly talk about what goes on in the jail. He wants public meetings on that and other topics to be understandable to the public—that is, no more sailing through agenda items without discussion. He wants meetings of the prison board to be events and hopes to invite more voices of activists, including currently and formerly incarcerated people, into those spaces. He says he’ll take journalists on jail tours and that he plans to pop in often for his own tours, sometimes without warning. 

He tells me, “The prisoners whose hands I shook—I’m going to get to know their names. They’re going to see me regularly.”

Inside a coworking space in Harrisburg, which serves as Douglas’s office for the time being, he ponders these power dynamics in a meeting with Jones, the incoming Harrisburg city councilor. 

Jones, too, overcame tremendously long odds to reach these heights. He’s formerly incarcerated, including two stints inside the Dauphin County jail. He’s Black, was raised in poverty in Harrisburg, and by 15 was selling cocaine. Now 48, he voted for the first time at age 39; like so many in the country, he says, he spent years wrongly assuming his felony record meant he could not vote. He’s got a close perspective on the dangers of the local jail: his cousin, Ty’Rique Riley, died after being detained there in 2019—one of 18 names behind the statistic on Douglas’s billboard.

When Jones decided to run for Harrisburg’s council this year, local Democratic power players  conspired to keep him off the ballot, arguing his criminal past should disqualify him. Jones prevailed in court and again on Election Day. 

In this heavily Democratic city within this light-blue county, Jones says, he has a hard time talking about his path to the ballot without crying.

“We’re in the era of criminal justice reform, right? Here, I’m someone who has exemplified that enough to be elected into a position to give hope to people who didn’t think they could do anything with a felony, who didn’t think they could get out of the situation. But none of those people who talk about criminal justice reform was willing to stand beside me,” he says.

I listened as Jones and Douglas considered how they can work together to reduce poverty, criminality, and incarceration. They know they’ll need to build consensus in circles that have upheld a status quo that is deeply punishing for communities like the one Jones was raised in.

“We’re going to have to make some relationships with some people that we don’t even care for,” Jones tells Douglas. “We may have to take some losses.”

The two men feel politically lonely and they’re already bracing for blowback, but they’re also focused on building power on the outside. “It can’t stop with just him and I,” Jones tells me. “We’re going to need more people.”

Upon my return from Harrisburg, Douglas contacts me with news of two local developments: 

First, another man has died inside the prison. His name was Christopher K. Phy, he was 38 years old, and he hanged himself. PennLive reports this is the county’s 19th jail death since 2019. 

Second, the county has agreed to a $4.25 million settlement with the family of Ishmail Thompson, the man who died after jail staff restrained and pepper-sprayed him. 

Douglas is disgusted, furious. I ask him how it’ll feel after he’s inaugurated, if and when someone else dies in there, or the county is made to pay for its violence against a future detainee, and reporters or members of the activist base from which he’s risen call him demanding answers. He tells me local officials are already advising him to not talk openly to the media, because too much sunlight could expose him or the county to liability.

“I’m not going to cost the county anything,” Douglas tells me. “What actually happened is what’s costing the county money.”

He continues, “I’ll lose this job and they can sue the hell out of me, if that’s the consequence of being honest and transparent. Let’s be honest: the county just paid a family $4 million because they murdered somebody. If that happens again on my watch, I’m going to want to say a lot.”

The post His Shock Win Flipped a Pennsylvania County. Now He Vows to Raise Hell over Its Lethal Jail. appeared first on Bolts.

For one, Democrats swept the state’s judicial elections, including a decisive win in a hotly contested supreme court election, which gives them a stronger position when election lawsuits inevitably emerge next year.

They also celebrated a wave of wins in county commissions, which double as boards of election nearly everywhere in Pennsylvania and have a startling amount of discretion to shape ballot access in their counties, from deciding whether to install any ballot drop boxes allow voters to fix mistakes on mail ballots. Democrats defended all the local gains they made four years ago in what was already a historically excellent election cycle, and also appear to have flipped two more populous counties away from Republican control. 

Some Pennsylvania counties have drop boxes for voters to conveniently deposit absentee ballots and proactively notify voters who make mistakes that risk invalidating their ballot, such as leaving the outer envelope undated or unsigned—a policy called ballot curing. Other counties choose not to have drop boxes or ballot curing processes since state law leaves that matter entirely up to local officials. While these differences do not neatly break along party lines, populous counties run by Democrats have been more likely to set up drop boxes and allow ballot curing.

“You can have boards of elections that are 15 minutes apart and yet the rules are so different,” says Kadida Kenner, executive director of New PA Project. 

The resulting patchwork frustrates voting rights advocates who want the state to enforce stronger standards, but for now it compounded the importance of Tuesday’s elections for ballot access in Pennsylvania. “We’re heartened by the fact that, because of these elections, voters will have greater confidence that curing provisions and ballot drop boxes will stay in place in many places where they currently are,” Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, told Bolts on Wednesday. 

Tuesday’s results would also make it tougher for the Trump campaign to try to invalidate results, if the former president, who is the frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination, attempts to overturn an election as he did three years ago. 

They mean that the former president would face an even more uphill climb in state courts. And they leave him with nowhere to turn in this state if he tries to reprise his 2020 strategy of pressuring counties that went for Joe Biden to block certification, since Democrats have now secured control of all such counties across Pennsylvania. 

“Pennsylvania voters soundly rejected candidates that ran on platforms that supported the Big Lie, that supported the idea that our elections are unsafe or any idea that we should restrict access to the ballot,” said Nick Pressley, Pennsylvania director for All Voting is Local. “We saw that up and down.” Pressley lives in Centre County, an area that Biden carried by 5 percentage points in 2020 and where Democrats easily defended their majority on Tuesday. 

Still, election deniers and Republicans who have amplified Trump’s election conspiracies and resisted past election results did score some victories on Tuesday. 

These candidates largely won in red-leaning areas where they were favored to prevail as soon as they won the Republican primaries, as Bolts reported in May. In some counties like Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster, the incumbent commissioners who secured new terms already played with the election system last year by briefly refusing to approve election results. 

These jurisdictions may emerge as hotspots for litigation once again next year, a looming prospect that explains why Democrats are relieved to have buttressed their supreme court majority as they did. But they are also a reminder that the Republican base has shown little inclination to punish politicians for toying with election conspiracies.

“It doesn’t seem to me like they’ve even gotten over 2020 yet,” says Duncan Hopkins, a local organizer with the group Lancaster Stands Up, who confronted Lancaster County’s two Republican commissioners at a 2022 public meeting about their ties to election deniers. He said of the commissioners, “If they try to pull what they pulled last year with their blatant attempts to disenfranchise voters, we’re absolutely going to organize folks to stand up to them.”

Heading into Tuesday, Democratic operatives in Pennsylvania were nervous about losing some counties, with several pointing to Bucks, a populous swing county in the Philadelphia suburbs, as a critical battleground. 

Trump in 2020 sued the county’s Democratic commission, demanding that they toss thousands of mail ballots, and the chair of the Bucks County Republican Committee, Pat Poprik, signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, which fueled Democratic concerns about losing control of election administration in that county this year. Another fake Trump elector, Sam DeMarco, is a commissioner in Allegheny County (home to Pittsburgh), and he would have found himself in the majority on Allegheny’s board of election had the GOP won the county executive race on Tuesday.

Instead, Democrats kept their majority in Allegheny and Bucks counties, as well as in four other counties that they flipped from GOP control in 2019: Chester, Delaware, Lehigh, and Monroe. 

Some of these counties, like Chester, had swung Democratic for the first time in decades four years ago, so Democrats were relieved to extend their streak this year. They also held off a Republican surge in Allegheny County, where they only prevailed by 2 percentage points in the executive race after statewide Democratic officials rallied for their nominee. 

This secures Democratic control throughout the populous ring of suburban counties that surrounds Philadelphia, as well as in the state’s other urban core in western Pennsylvania. Democrats also expanded their majority in Erie County, a swing jurisdiction in northwest Pennsylvania.  

Democrats also appear to have flipped two new counties. They regained a majority on the Northampton county council, which they’d lost in February when a Democratic commissioner joined the GOP. And they’re on track to gain a new majority in Dauphin County, home to Harrisburg, the state’s capital city; they currently have a lead there, pending the final count of provisional ballots next week. 

If Democrats hold their lead and win in Dauphin, this would be the party’s first time with a majority on the county commission in at least 100 years, according to The Pennsylvania Capital-Star. It would also mean Democrats have a governing majority in every county that Joe Biden carried in 2020.

Justin Douglas, a Democratic candidate and political newcomer who would join Commissioner George Hartwick as the second Democrat on the three-person commission, told Bolts that he is eager to expand ballot access next year and will propose that the county install more ballot drop boxes to ensure they are accessible to more voters. “We have to be mindful that voting access can always be improved,” he said.  

Unlike many of its neighboring counties, Dauphin County did not allow ballot curing in 2020 and 2022, denying voters who made a mistake a chance to correct their ballots before they got tossed. The county’s elections office did not reply to questions about its current policy or whether it reached out to people this fall whose ballots may otherwise be rejected.

Douglas says he wants to ensure that Dauphin County enables ballot curing in 2024 and that it proactively reaches out to voters to inform them of any problem. “The county should be making every effort to call those people and have them come down to the board of elections or a local polling place,” he says. “I just think that we should be doing everything so every vote counts.”

Hensley-Robin, of Common Cause, hopes to persuade local officials throughout the state to embrace similar positions.

“Any newly elected county commissioner should look at providing notice to voters—some counties are not providing notice at all—and provide a means to cure ballot errors,” he told Bolts. “We would go to newly elected county commissioner, Democrat or Republican, and argue that the voters in their counties should have as many opportunities as voters in any other county.” 

Against this patchwork of ballot access, with each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties deciding how easy it is for people to vote, advocates have sought statewide reforms. Common Cause is currently asking state lawmakers to pass legislation that would clarify that all counties must allow voters to correct their ballots. 

In the meantime, voting rights advocates think the result in Tuesday’s state supreme court election may open the door for stronger protections for voters throughout the state. 

During last year’s midterms, Pennsylvania tossed thousands of mail ballots that had no date on the envelope, or an incorrect date, because the Pennsylvania supreme court deadlocked 3-3 over whether it should order counties to count them; the seventh seat on the court was left vacant when Democratic Chief Justice Max Baer died last year. 

On Tuesday, Democrat Daniel McCaffery prevailed 53 to 47 percent in the race to replace Baer against Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican nominee, after a campaign that broke fundraising records. 

The result gives Democrats a 5-2 lead on the court. Election cases haven’t always been party line on this court, as with last year’s 3-3 decision on undated mail ballots. Voting rights advocates hope that the court will revisit that decision and others like it to rule in a manner more favorable to ballot access.

McCaffery, the incoming justice, told Bolts before the election that he would take an expansive view of how to treat ballots.

“If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes, as opposed to disqualifying votes for technicalities, or perceived technicalities,” he told Bolts. 

Democrats on Tuesday also flipped the majority on Pennsylvania’s Superior Court, an appellate court that largely deals with criminal cases; their nominees won two seats that were held by GOP judges. Republicans will retain a 5-4 majority on the Commonwealth Court, the other intermediate appellate court that is likely to hear appeals in election cases, but a Democratic candidate on Tuesday also won a GOP-held seat on that court and narrowed Republicans’ edge.

Beyond cases dealing with mail voting, the supreme court result also hands Democrats a buffer for any cases that may emerge after the 2024 presidential election if Trump, who is on track to again be the Republican nominee, attempts to contest another possible loss in the state.

Carluccio, the Republican nominee, echoed some of Trump’s unfounded allegations of fraud during this year’s campaign, saying that mail voting had provoked “hanky panky” in past elections. She also seemed to invite a new legal challenge against Act 77, the bipartisan law that authorized no-excuse mail voting in 2019. 

Asked by the Inquirer editorial board in October who won the 2020 presidential election, Carluccio replied that she did not know, before trying to modify her answer upon seeing startled reactions from board members. 

Pennsylvania Democrats attacked Carluccio during her campaign for her statements echoing election conspiracies. J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist active in this year’s campaigns, told Bolts that the threat of election denialism remains a strong motivator for his party’s base—an important factor in off-year elections where pumping up turnout is critical. 

“That’s going to continue to be an issue for Republicans, and I think it’ll be even more acute if Trump is the nominee,” he said. 

Questions remain, though, about a string of counties where Republican county commissioners have made moves in recent years that are in lockstep with Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the election system. 

In the spring of 2022, three GOP-run counties refused to certify the results of their primaries; the  six Republican commissioners across those counties—Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster—said they disagreed with the state’s rules on mail ballots and wanted to exclude valid ballots from the count. The matter escalated until courts forced the commissioners to reverse course and certify the election results. All six commissioners secured reelection on Tuesday. 

Several voting rights lawyers in Pennsylvania told Bolts that they’re confident the state courts would quickly intervene again if these counties, or any other, try to stall certification next year. But they’ve also expressed some anxiety that a rogue commission could at least open the door for the Trump campaign to falsely claim the election is unresolved and try to escalate matters in federal court. 

Dante Santoni was elected to the Berks County commission on Tuesday as the sole Democrat, and he will now join Republicans Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera, the commissioners who voted to block certification last year. (Leinbach and Rivera have also opposed allowing ballot curing in Berks.) 

Santoni told Bolts he’d be vigilant about any attempt by his colleagues to stall the election results next year. “That will not be met with quietness for me,” he said. “I will scream from the mountains that we will make sure that Pennsylvania will not be one of those states that drags things out.” 

He added, “When the legitimate votes are tallied, we will certify those votes, and if my Republican colleagues refuse to do that, I will raise hell.”

Alex Burness contributed reporting for this article.

The post Democrats’ Strong Election Night Will Likely Shield Ballot Access in Pennsylvania appeared first on Bolts.

The race was a rematch of the county’s Democratic primary in May, when Dugan beat Zappala by about 10 percentage points. But Zappala soon flipped party affiliation and ran in the general election as a Republican after the local GOP, lacking its own DA candidate, organized a write-in campaign to make him its nominee. With nearly all ballots counted by early Wednesday morning, Zappala led Dugan 52 to 48 percent.

As Zappala clung to power this election, Allegheny County’s reform movement scored a significant win in the race for county executive: progressive Democrat Sara Innamorato, who has criticized mass incarceration and who favors overhauling the troubled local youth detention system, beat Republican Joe Rockey. The margin was tight: Innamorato was up about 2 percentage points—fewer than 10,000 votes—as of early Wednesday.

In a county that is very racially segregated and where Black and poorer residents face much higher rates of incarceration, Innamorato pledged a new vision. “We’re bringing together people who have been left out and pushed out and shut out of Allegheny County Government for too long,” she told supporters Tuesday night. “We will create compassionate solutions to addiction, violence, and poverty.”

Tanisha Long, an Allegheny County-based organizer with the Pennsylvania nonprofit Abolitionist Law Center, said Innamorato’s win is thrilling for those working in the Pittsburgh region to reduce incarceration and over-policing. Among other things, the new county executive will inherit power to nominate a new warden for the county’s deadly jail and will wield considerable influence over the board overseeing that jail; she will also be in charge of the city’s scandal-plagued youth detention system. “Those are real things, and there is real hope,” Long told Bolts. 

But Zappala’s victory places substantial limits on many moves toward more progressive criminal justice policy in Allegheny County through 2027, when he’d be eligible to seek an eighth term. 

He’s long been a staunch opponent of reform: He claims to hold police accountable but has seldom prosecuted any officers and, in one famous 2010 case, declined to file charges against a group of white officers who brutalized an unarmed Black teenager. In one year alone, The Appeal found, he prosecuted nearly 2,000 low-level drug possession cases. He mocks the idea of “conviction integrity” units in D.A. offices, which are meant to examine past cases in which innocent or overcharged people were imprisoned. A 2018 investigation found that the vast majority of children charged as adults by his office were Black. And two years ago, Zappala instructed his staff to offer no plea deals to the clients of a local Black attorney known for pursuing racial justice. 

Activists worked hard in recent years to win over voters in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, which lean whiter and more conservative than those in the city. An April Bolts analysis found that areas of Allegheny County that most acutely feel the weight of incarceration have clamored for reform in the DA’s office, but that Zappala has held onto power thanks to suburban voters, who generally have much less direct experience with the local criminal justice system.

That dynamic held on Tuesday night: Dugan dominated in the city of Pittsburgh, which has a population of about 300,000 people, but Zappala hardly lost a precinct in the suburbs, which represent about 900,000 people.

“It’s really disheartening and disappointing that a person who has shown that they have no regard for people of color in Allegheny County, for kids in Allegheny County, has been given another few years,” Long said. “As a Black voter, it feels like the county does not care about us.”

In his campaign, Zappala played up suburban antagonism toward the city. One of his recent television ads painted a grim picture of what Pittsburgh would look like with Dugan as prosecutor, using dark surveillance footage from other cities—gunmen on roadways and at a gas station in Philadelphia, an assault and a carjacking in San Francisco, a drug deal through a car window, a break-in at a jewelry store.

“I will never permit your safety to become an experiment,” Zappala said in the ad. In the days leading up to the election, Zappala reportedly threatened to sue to gain control of the city’s police force, which he has argued does not adequately respond to violent crime.

The public radio station WESA reported Zappala told supporters Tuesday night that this election was “a referendum on us as a community.” 

Rockey used rhetoric similar to Zappala’s in his campaign for county executive. “This is our home, not a laboratory for progressive experiments,” he said in a television ad, during which he also touted endorsements from local police leaders.

Activists had hoped the outcome of this year’s DA and county executive races would help them build on recent wins. The Pittsburgh region is far from the deep-blue bastion found to the east in Philadelphia, and Republicans held key positions in Allegheny County in the 1990s and 2000s, and Pennsylvania’s last GOP governor, Tom Corbett, carried the county as recently as 2010. But progressive-backed candidates have amassed substantial power this decade, winning races for Pittsburgh mayor, U.S. Congress and the county council. 

County Councilmember Bethany Hallam, who is among those Allegheny County progressives swept into office in recent years, told Bolts ahead of Tuesday’s election that Dugan and Innamorato represented the last major pillars in the local political makeover. “If progressives can win these two, we can show what we can do when we are finally in a position to implement our policies,” she said.

Instead, Hallam, Innamorato, and others looking to reduce incarceration and build a justice system in the Pittsburgh area that relies less heavily on punishment will have to contend, yet again, with a top prosecutor resistant to the very idea of reform.

“It’s going to make it very, very difficult to affect radical change, for a while,” Long said.

The post Anti-Reform DA Survives in Pittsburgh Region After Switching to GOP appeared first on Bolts.

In this guide, Bolts introduces you to ten elections that are coming up this month that will impact how local officials administer future elections, and how easily people can exercise their voting rights. 

Voters this month will select the secretaries of state of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who’ll each be the chief elections officials within their state. They will choose a new supreme court justice in Pennsylvania, a swing state with looming election law battles, and dozens of county officials who’ll decide how easy it is to vote in Pennsylvania and Washington state next year. And some ballot measures may change election law in Maine and Michigan.

All these elections are scheduled for Nov. 7, except for Louisiana’s runoff on Nov. 18. 

As we cover the places where democracy is on the ballot, our staff is also keeping an eye on the other side of the coin—the people who are excluded from having a say in their democracy: Three of the eight states featured on this page have among the nation’s harshest laws barring people with criminal convictions from the polls, and our three-part series highlights their stories. And beyond the stakes for voting rights, our cheat sheet to the 2023 elections also lays out dozens of other local elections this November that will shape criminal justice, abortion access, education, and other issues. 

Kentucky | Secretary of state

Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, has vocally pushed back against the false conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election, and he has touted his efforts to facilitate mail and early voting during the pandemic. He survived the GOP primary this spring by beating back election deniers who wanted to replace him as the state’s chief election administrator.

Buddy Wheatley, Adams’ Democratic challenger and a former lawmaker, says the state should go much further in expanding ballot access. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the candidates disagree on whether the state should institute same-day registration and set-up an independent redistricting commission, two proposals of Wheatley’s that Adams opposes. 

The election is unfolding in the shadow of the governor’s race, in which Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear is running for reelection four years after restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of people who had been barred from voting for life. (Adams and Wheatley have both said they support the executive order.) Voting rights advocates regret that the order still leaves hundreds of thousands Kentuckians shut out from voting and that the state hasn’t done enough to notify newly-enfranchised residents; Bolts reports that a coalition led by formerly incarcerated activists has stepped into that void to register people.

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

In trying to appease election deniers since the 2020 presidential election, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin weakened Louisiana’s voting system and gave a platform to election conspiracists. His successor will be decided in a Nov. 18 runoff between Republican Nancy Landry, who currently serves as his deputy, and Gwen Collins-Greenup, a Democratic attorney. Each received 19 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on Oct. 14, but Landry is favored in the Nov. 18 runoff since much of the remainder of the vote went to other Republican contenders.

Not unlike Ardoin, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals but she has also echoed unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities, Cameron Joseph reported in Bolts. The next secretary of state will have to deal with continued pressure from the far-right, Joseph writes, while making critical decisions regarding the state’s outdated voting equipment: The state’s efforts to replace the equipment have stalled in recent years amid unfounded election conspiracies about the role of machines in skewing election results.

Maine | Question 8

Since its drafting two centuries ago, Maine’s constitution has barred people who are under guardianship from voting in state and local elections. Then, in 2001, a federal court declared the provision to be invalid in response to a lawsuit filed by an organization that protects the rights of disabled residents.

Mainers may scrub this exclusionary language from its state constitution on Nov. 7, S.E. Smith explains in Bolts: Question 8 would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.” While Mainers under guardianship can already vote irrespective of this constitutional amendment due to the 2001 court ruling, Smith reports that the referendum could spark momentum for other states with exclusionary rules to revise who can cast ballots and shake up what is now a complicated patchwork of eligibility rules nationwide. 

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

Three Michigan cities will each decide whether to switch to ranked-choice voting—a system in which voters rank the different candidates on the ballot rather than only opting for one—for their local elections. If the initiatives pass, residents in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak would join Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021.

But there’s a catch: Even if voters approve ranked choice voting, it will not be implemented until the state of Michigan first adopts a bill authorizing the method statewide. The legislation to do so has stalled in the legislature so far.

Many cities have newly adopted ranked-choice voting in recent years, and some will use the method for the first time this November; they include Boulder, Colorado, and several Utah cities such as Salt Lake. Other municipalities this fall will also consider changing local rules: Rockville, Maryland, in the suburbs of D.C., holds two advisory referendums on whether their city should lower the voting age to 16 and enable noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Mississippi | Secretary of state

Republican Michael Watson spent his first term as secretary of state defending restrictions on ballot access. He stated he worries about more college students voting, rejected expanding mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and championed a law that banned assisting people in casting an absentee ballot (the law was blocked by a court this summer). He is currently fighting  a lawsuit against the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising people with some felony convictions.

Watson is now seeking a second term against Democrat Ty Pinkins, an attorney who only jumped into the race in September after the prior Democratic nominee withdrew for health reasons. Pinkins has taken Watson to task for backing these restrictions, and he says he is running to expand opportunities to vote, such as setting up online and same-day voter registration. Pinkins this fall also teamed up with Greta Kemp Martin—the Democrat challenging Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is currently representing Watson in the lawsuit against felony disenfranchisement—to say that the state should expand rights restoration for people with felony convictions.

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

Pennsylvanians will fill a vacant seat on their state’s high court, where Democrats currently enjoy a majority. The outcome cannot change partisan control but it will still shape election law in this swing state, Bolts’ Alex Burness reports. For one, a GOP win would make it easier for the party to flip the court in 2025, affecting redistricting. It may also make it easier for the GOP to win election lawsuits next year: Voting cases haven’t always been party-line for this court, especially ones that revolve around how permissive the state should be toward mail ballots. Recent rulings made it more likely that mail ballots with clerical mistakes get tossed, an issue that now looms over the 2024 election.

Burness reports that Republican nominee Carolyn Carluccio has echoed Trump’s attacks against mail voting, implying an unfounded connection to election fraud, and she appeared to invite a new legal challenge to a state law that expanded ballot access in 2019. Dan McCaffery, her Democratic opponent, has defended state efforts to make voting more convenient, telling Bolts, “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes.”

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

Pennsylvanians are electing the local officials who’ll run the 2024 elections, and the results will shape how easy it is for millions of people to vote next year in the nation’s biggest swing state. Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts that counties have a great deal of discretion when it comes to the modalities of voting by mail, and local voting rights attorneys warn that if more counties adopt tighter rules, tens of thousands of additional ballots may be rejected.

Bucks County stands as the clearest jurisdiction to watch, Nichanian writes. Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019, part of a firewall against Trump’s efforts to game the following year’s election. The county commissioners made it easier to vote by mail, attracting legal challenges from Trump.  Now, they’re now running for reelection, but the Republican Party is hoping to gain control of this swing county’s commission. 

Also keep an eye on the Democratic efforts to retain majorities in the other Pennsylvania counties they gained in 2019, often for the first time in decades: Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Monroe. The GOP would also gain control of the board of elections in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, if it scores an upset in the county executive race. Sam DeMarco, who signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, is already certain to sit on Allegheny County’s board of elections.

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

Will any Pennsylvania county try to stall the certification of elections next year, in a repeat of Trump’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race? The results of next week’s elections will determine which are susceptible to try out such a strategy, Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts. Election attorneys told him that this would be a dereliction of duties on the part of county commissioners but that it may still cause some legal and political upheaval. Already in 2022, the Republican commissioners in three counties resisted certifying results because they insisted on rejecting valid mail ballots; they’re now all seeking reelection.

The Democratic challengers running in Berks County—the most politically competitive of these three counties—say this is a key issue in their race. “The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” one of them told Bolts. But they’re also running on a platform of easing mail voting by installing more accessible ballot drop boxes, and instituting new policies to notify residents if their ballots have a clerical error. Also keep an eye on Fayette and Lancaster, the other counties that tried to not certify the 2022 results, and in the many red jurisdictions where candidates with ties to election deniers made it past the Republican primaries.

Virginia | Legislative control

Since Virginia Republicans gained the governorship and state House in 2021, they have passed bills through the lower chamber to repeal same-day voter registration and get rid of ballot drop boxes, among other restrictive measures. Until now, these bills have died in the Democratic-run Senate. But will that change after Nov. 7, when Virginians elect all lawmakers?

The GOP is hoping to gain control of the Senate while defending its majority in the House, Bolts reports, a combination that would hand them full control of the state government and open the floodgates for the party’s conservative agenda on how the commonwealth should run elections. Inversely, if Democrats have a great night—flipping the House and keeping the Senate—they may have more oversight over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic curtailment of rights restoration and over his administration’s wrongful voter purges; still, those matters are decided within the executive branch, and the governor’s office is not on the ballot until 2025.

Washington | King County director of elections

Only one county in the entire state of Washington is electing its chief administrator. It just so happens to be King County, home to Seattle and more than 2 million residents—in a race that features a staunch election denier, no less. Doug Basler has sowed doubts about Washington state’s election system since the 2020 election, alongside others on the far-right, and he has helped a lawsuit against its mail voting system.

Basler is a heavy underdog on Nov. 7 in his challenge against Julie Wise, the Director of King County Elections. This is a heavily Democratic county, though there will be no partisan label on the ballot, potentially blunting the effect of Basler’s Republican affiliation. Still, Cameron Joseph reports in Bolts that the spread of false election conspiracies—even when they are defeated at the ballot box—is fueling a threatening climate. “It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise told Bolts.

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

Bob Harvie was thrust on the national stage in late 2020 when Donald Trump, in an effort to find any angle to cling to the presidency, unsuccessfully sued Bucks County, a populous suburb of Philadelphia, demanding that thousands of mail ballots be thrown out. 

As one of the two Democrats on the three-member county commission, Harvie was responsible for the county’s voting procedures and he wanted people to vote safely during the pandemic. With his support, Bucks County installed ballot drop boxes and notified roughly 1,600 voters that they had made a clerical mistake on their mail ballot such as forgetting to date their envelopes, giving them the opportunity to correct it—a common procedure known as ballot curing.

“The Republican Party and the Trump campaign wanted things done a certain way, we didn’t do things the way they wanted to, so they sued us. Clearly we’d followed the law because we won all these suits,” recalls Harvie, who is running for reelection in two weeks. The race will determine what party controls Bucks County’s commission during the next presidential election.

Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019 for the first time in decades, one of five flips in eastern Pennsylvania counties with more than 2 million residents combined. The results gave Democrats near total control of the ring of counties around Philadelphia. Their new majorities approved relatively expansive voting procedures, and in late 2020 they effectively created a suburban firewall against Trump’s efforts to get officials in blue counties to throw out ballots and resist certifying the results. 

Pennsylvania leaves county officials with a lot of discretion to decide how to run elections. They have tremendous leeway in particular when it comes to deciding the modalities of voting by mail. The state provides little binding guidance on whether a county needs to have a ballot drop box, let alone how many drop boxes to have or how accessible they should be. County officials also decide whether to notify voters whose ballot risks being rejected because of a minor mistake. 

This has produced a disconcerting patchwork of policies. “You can have boards of elections that are 15 minutes apart and yet the rules are so different,” says Kadida Kenner, executive director of New PA Project, an organization that focuses on boosting voter registration and turnout. 

In the lead-up to the 2020 and 2022 elections, many counties adopted more restrictive rules, including not installing drop boxes and not letting voters correct mistakes on their envelopes. The decisions did not always fall neatly on partisan lines, and voting rights organizations have targeted Democratic boards for tossing out too many ballots, including in the city of Philadelphia. But, by and large, Republican politicians since 2020 have been more likely to oppose procedures that facilitate mail voting. Even Dauphin County (the bluest county under GOP control) has not allowed ballot curing, offering a glimpse into what the voter-rich suburban ring around Philadelphia would have looked like had Democrats not made major gains in 2019.

Harvie points to the rules in place in other parts of Pennsylvania to lay out the stakes of his county’s Nov. 7 elections. 

“If Republicans are in control of the board of elections in 2024,” he told Bolts, “I don’t have any doubt that a lot of the things we put in place will be gone.” 

If the county reversed its approach on curing, he says, officials would likely reject thousands of mail ballots without first reaching out to voters to say there was an issue with their ballot. “The dangerous part is that people won’t know that their votes aren’t counted,” he says. “You’re gonna think, ‘Oh, I guess I voted, I didn’t do anything wrong.’ You wouldn’t even know that you had been denied.”

Voters in other counties will also be deciding the shape of their county governments on Nov. 7, which means that they’ll also be choosing who will run next year’s elections in this critical swing state—and under what policy. 

Republicans could flip closely divided counties like Bucks, but they’ll also test Democratic gains in counties like Chester that have swung dramatically blue since 2019 after staying faithful to Republicans for decades in local elections. Democrats, meanwhile, have some opportunities to gain ground, for instance in Dauphin and Berks. 

The results will shape how easy it is for millions of Pennsylvanians to vote—especially by mail—and the odds that their ballot will be rejected. 

“If newly elected county governments in Pennsylvania remove drop boxes, if they remove the ability for voters to cure their ballots, they’ll make it even harder for eligible voters to have the votes counted,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that promotes wider access to voting. 

“That could impact tens or hundreds of thousands of voters in the 2024 election and change the result of the election,” Hensley-Robin added.

The results will also inform which counties are susceptible to not certify next year’s elections. Plenty of commissioner candidates who’ve amplified Trump’s false claims of widespread irregularities advanced past the GOP primaries, often in staunchly red counties, Bolts reported in May. 

Among them are Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera, the two Republican commissioners who run Berks County, a jurisdiction of more than 400,000 people located 50 miles west of Bucks County. Last year, they refused to certify their county’s election results because they wanted to exclude some valid mail ballots from their counts; a state court ultimately forced them to certify the results.

Leinbach and Rivera are now facing Democratic challengers Jesse Royer and Dante Santoni, who told Bolts in separate interviews that they’re worried about 2024: They think the GOP incumbents, if they remain in control, could once again placate election deniers next year and try to toss out results.

“The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” Santoni told Bolts. “When the election is over, we accept the results. We think that that distinguishes us from our opponents. We talk about a lot of issues—roads, economic development—but without democracy, all those issues don’t mean a whole lot.” 

Leinbach and Rivera did not reply to requests for comment. GOP commissioners are also running for reelection in Fayette and Lancaster counties after similarly stalling certification of the 2022 primaries.

Royer and Santoni, the Democratic challengers in Berks, also laid out how they would ease mail voting. Both want to notify voters if their ballots have an error; Berks County’s Republican commissioners defeated a motion earlier this year for the county to provide such information to voters. “We need to make sure that people who are trying to cast their ballots are given every opportunity to do so,” Royer said.

Both Democrats also want to increase the number of ballot drop boxes set up in the county; Royer pointed out that it’s critical to make them widely accessible given that the county has poor public transportation. Both also oppose the county’s current policy, unusual in this state, of stationing armed sheriff’s deputies at ballot boxes; they warn that this may intimidate some voters, a position that Common Cause and other civil rights groups share. 

Unlike in Berks County, voters in Bucks County currently do not have to interact with armed law enforcement to cast a ballot. Harvie, the Democratic commissioner, says he wants to keep it that way. 

Harvie also worries that Bucks County could go the way of Berks County in terms of objections to election certification. He stresses that the Bucks County Republican Party is chaired by Pat Poprik, who became a false presidential elector for Trump in December 2020 and has clout over local GOP politics. Conservatives have recently taken the county by storm with major upheavals to local public schools via book bans and restrictions on LGBTQ+ students, and Democrats are tying these far-right gains on local school boards to the commissioner race.

The Republican candidate who is vying to join and flip Bucks County’s commission, County Controller Pamela Van Blunk, did not reply to a request for comment.

Voting rights attorneys in Pennsylvania told Bolts that they are less anxious about counties not certifying results than they are about thousands of mail ballots being tossed, since state courts are likely to intervene in the former scenario. County officials are not meant to have discretion to reject valid results, says Marian Schneider, who works on voting rights policy at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. She says that their task is merely “ministerial,” but that the ACLU will be vigilant. 

Still, Hensley-Robin of Common Cause is worried that Trump, should he be the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2024, would seek to weaponize delays and confusion in a replay of 2020. “When we see individual counties delaying certification or messing with voting machines, that spreads distrust in the election system, and that builds misinformation, which can result in moving to overturn an election,” he says.

Another fake Trump elector, Sam DeMarco, is currently a county commissioner in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county. He holds an at-large seat that’s effectively reserved for the GOP, which makes it certain he will win a new term on Nov. 7. Should Republicans also win the unusually heated race for county executive, this would give them control of the county’s board of elections, which is made up of the county executive and the two at-large members. 

The Republican nominee for county executive, Joe Rockey, has distanced himself from Trump. But any small voting policy change in this populous county—where Biden won 150,000 more votes than Trump, double his statewide margin—would have important ramifications in 2024.

Pennsylvania in 2019 enacted Act 77, a bipartisan law that greatly expanded the availability of mail voting, but it did not set statewide guidelines for how counties should approach vital questions related to mail-in voting, including how to deal with clerical errors made by voters. Schneider regrets, for instance, that “there really is nothing in the election code that addresses what happens if a mistake has been made on the outer envelope.” 

State courts have stepped into this void since 2020, but in ways that have only compounded the importance of what county officials decide with regards to ballot curing. 

For one, Republicans have won legal battles ensuring that mail ballots with small errors will get tossed if they aren’t fixed in time; in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, the supreme court ordered officials not to count a ballot if the voter forgot to write a date, even if the ballot arrived on time. “There are new things that can disqualify you,” Hensley-Robin warns. Due to this higher standard, he says, thousands of ballots risk being tossed in 2024 that would not have been in 2020—unless voters get to cure them first.

Pennsylvanians are also electing a new state supreme court justice this fall, with the two candidates staking very different opinions on how permissive courts should be toward mail voting.

Moreover, courts have confirmed that there is no statewide rule regarding whether counties must help voters correct their mistakes. In 2022, they rejected a Republican lawsuit demanding that all counties stop the practice of ballot curing altogether. The decision was a relief for voting rights advocates since it meant boards could still choose to let voters cure their ballots, but it also entrenched the current status quo that  leaves the matter entirely to counties’ discretion.

Advocates for ballot access are deeply frustrated that the state has been reduced to this mosaic of disparate policies. Policies should not differ so starkly from one county to the next when it comes to the ease of mail voting, they say. “This patchwork from county to county really confuses voters and makes them unsure of the rules in the system,” says Hensley-Robin.

Kenner, of New PA Project, says this fragmentation also stands as a big obstacle for organizations like hers that are working on the ground to drive up turnout. 

“It gets very confusing for a statewide organization to be able to subscribe to the various rules that board of elections have in each county,” she told Bolts. “As we’re preparing to do our GOTV efforts, we have to make sure that all scripts are different for each county… It also makes it tough when we’re doing voter registration, and we’re dropping off completed voter registration forms to various boards of elections and they all have different rules.”

For Hensley-Robin, the remedy cannot just be persuading individual county commissioners throughout the state of Pennsylvania to ease ballot access. He is advocating for the state to adopt House Bill 847, which would impose new statewide mandates, for instance when it comes to guaranteeing that counties give all voters a chance to correct their ballots. 

“Ballots should not be disqualified for failure to meet a clerical or technical standard,” says Hensley-Robin. “If voters make a small mistake in terms of failing to date a ballot or put a signature or have a secrecy envelope, they should have an opportunity to fix those. There needs to be a requirement for all counties to notify voters actively within 24 hours of receipt about one of these defects so that they have an opportunity to cure it immediately.”

Without such mandates, the Nov. 7 elections have graver stakes than anyone wishes on them.

“Where you live shouldn’t determine whether you have an opportunity to have your vote counted,” he added.

The post Pennsylvanians Are About to Decide Who Will Oversee the 2024 Elections appeared first on Bolts.

After coasting to reelection for decades with barely any opposition, District Attorney Stephen Zappala lost the May Democratic primary against Matt Dugan, the county’s chief public defender. But Zappala is now running as a Republican in a rematch against Dugan.

Meanwhile, the county government agreed to a controversial contract this fall to reopen a youth detention center, even though the center’s fate had been a major issue in the open race for county executive. Local critics fault Rich Fitzgerald, the term-limited outgoing executive and a moderate Democrat, for tying his successor’s hands through the contract, which will span the next county executive’s entire term. Sara Innamorato, a progressive state representative, won the Democratic nomination to replace him in May, beating two centrist opponents who unequivocally favored reopening the center. 

Innamorato now faces Republican Joe Rockey, who, like Zappala in the DA race, is looking to stall criminal justice reforms. While Democrats typically dominate local politics and Joe Biden won Allegheny County by 20 percentage points in 2020, the GOP is hoping law-and-order messaging can deliver its candidates long awaited wins this fall. Recent polls released by the campaigns found tight margins in both races.

But champions of criminal justice reform have already made major strides in the region. Bethany Hallam, a progressive Democrat on the Allegheny County Council, points to other left-leaning candidates who have won recent elections in the area, including Ed Gainey, who became Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor in 2022, and Summer Lee, who won a congressional seat that covers the broader region in 2022 while calling for cuts to jail and prison spending. 

Gainey and Lee are now supporting Dugan and Innamorato, as are other prominent Democrats like U.S. Senator John Fetterman. Dugan and Innamorato have frequently appeared together at events this year. “We are very aware of the moment that we’re in right now,” Hallam told Bolts. 

She added, “If progressives can win these two, we can show what we can do when we are finally in a position to implement our policies.”

This county of more than one million is very segregated along racial lines, and Black residents are vastly more likely than white residents to be arrested and sentenced to prison. Many areas see virtually no incarceration while some neighborhoods, typically within Pittsburgh, have astronomically high imprisonment rates. 

In the run-up to the May primary, progressives worked on winning over the county’s suburban areas, which have less experience of incarceration and which have buoyed Zappala in the past. The last time he ran for re-election, in 2019, the DA received under 10 percent in some of the precincts that most acutely feel the weight of the local criminal system but nearly swept precincts along the outer ring of the county.

This year, Dugan and Innamorato triumphed within the city of Pittsburgh, but they also performed strongly enough in the rest of the county to secure the Democratic nominations. 

Rob Perkins, president of the progressive Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice, told Bolts on the night of this year’s primary election that the Dugan and Innamorato wins tell him “that more people from a broader swath of communities are starting to grasp that the criminal justice system is unfair, full of waste, and too often inhumane.” 

Hallam hopes that wins in November by Dugan and Innamorato will align the county government with Pittsburgh’s more progressive municipal leadership. The county council on which Hallam sits has of late displayed real appetite for more progressive policy-making, only to run into Fitzgerald’s veto pen; he sought to block council votes to raise the minimum wage and to ban fracking in most county parks. The city’s leadership is decidedly more progressive; Gainey has supported minimum wage hikes and fracking bans, for instance. 

Hallam believes that this tension has resulted in missed opportunities to fund programs meant to target root causes of crime. “We have a $1 billion Department of Human Services budget in the county, and we have a city that could really use some of those services to be provided, but it’s been such a head-butting, antagonistic relationship between the county and city,” she said. “It’s going to be transformative to finally have a collaboration.”

Zappala, who flipped parties after the primary, is betting on a reverse dynamic, fueling suburban antagonism toward the urban core to overcome the county’s partisan lean and secure a seventh term in November. 

A recent television ad by Zappala paints an apocalyptic picture of what Pittsburgh would look like under Dugan’s leadership, using dark surveillance footage from other cities—gunmen at a gas station in Philadelphia and a carjacking in San Francisco.

Rockey, the Republican candidate in the county executive race, is using a similar strategy. “This is our home, not a laboratory for progressive experiments,” Rockey says in a recent TV spot in which he touted that he is endorsed by local police and jail-staff unions.

But local advocates of criminal justice reform say Zappala and Rockey are shifting the blame. They attribute Allegheny County’s struggles with public safety to the “tough-on-crime” approach the county has pursued for decades, in large part under Zappala’s leadership. 

Richard Garland, a formerly incarcerated man who runs a program in Pittsburgh for people newly released from prison, says the county needs to invest more in the wellbeing of young people, particularly in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. And he assailed the local jail for failing to prepare people for what happens after they’re released. 

“I’m so frustrated,” he told Bolts. “When I go into the penitentiary it’s full of babies. Babies who don’t have any programs to go to, who are bored. And we expect these things to change? Do we expect society to change overnight?”

Zappala has in the past rejected arguments like Garland’s that strengthening public spending beyond law enforcement is relevant to improving public safety, while Dugan has said that tackling a wider range of economic issues could help disrupt gun violence. 

Over his six terms in office, Zappala has aggressively prosecuted low-level drug possession cases, and his critics point to the wide racial disparities in the cases prosecuted by his office. Zappala has said these disparities reflect who commits crimes in the community, not any policy choices he’s made. Dugan has promised to take the county in a different direction, including by seeking to reduce incarceration over low-level offenses and decrease the county’s use of cash bail and lengthy probation terms. 

He also pledged that he would set up a position in his office to review the cases prosecuted by Zappala for possible overcharging and innocence claims. The Allegheny County DA’s office currently does not have a conviction integrity unit. 

In their debate earlier this month, Zappala mocked a similar initiative set up by DA Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. Krasner’s unit has uncovered dozens of wrongful convictions since 2018. “How’s the conviction integrity unit working out for Philadelphia?” asked Zappala during the debate. “The conviction integrity unit in Philadelphia has exonerated over 30 people,” Dugan responded. 

After losing in the primary, Zappala’s ideas have found a cozy home in GOP politics. No Republican filed to run for DA, and party leaders organized a write-in effort to hand him the GOP nomination—a maneuver that comes with a relatively low threshold; Zappala accepted it after losing the Democratic primary. The DA has since aligned himself with GOP campaign firms—including one that worked with former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. The chairman of the Allegheny County GOP told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of Zappala, “I think we have similar views on law and order.”

When they debated, Dugan accused Zappala of airing “right-wing GOP attack ads,” saying the incumbent’s tactics are a sign of desperation. Zappala attacked Dugan for receiving outside funding from George Soros, the billionaire who has supported reform candidates around the country. Zappala has the endorsement of Andrew Yang’s Forward Party, which has also endorsed Rockey in the county executive race.

Similarly to Dugan, Innamorato has pledged to tap into county coffers to better fund services that may reduce crime, such as behavioral health care and free recreational programs for kids. Ahead of her competitive primary this spring, she said this goal would be her north star when it comes to settling the heated local debates over youth detention. The local youth jail, the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, shuttered in scandal two years ago, and local politicians and organizers have fought over whether—and how—to reopen it.  

Innamorato did not take a definitive position in the runup to the primary on whether she would reopen Shuman, but her victory over candidates who were unambiguously in its favor created question marks over the future of the lock-up.

But this fall, Fitzgerald and local courts entered into a five-year contract with a private operator to reopen and run the Shuman Center. 

Innamorato and Rockey, the candidates running to replace him, have both criticized the contract. They have each disagreed with privatizing the detention center; and they’ve both said that the length of the contract will limit the options of the next executive. But they’ve both also said that they favor at least temporarily reopening Shuman; at minimum, they say, it’s a way to get kids out of the county’s adult jail, where they’ve often been warehoused since Shuman’s closing.

Innamorato and Rockey did not provide comment for this article. Fitzgerald declined to comment through a spokesperson on the contract. He also declined to endorse a successor.

The county council is now suing Fitzgerald over his decision, asserting that he overstepped his authority by making such an impactful move without the consent of the council. 

Reporting by local public radio station WESA confirms that Fitzgerald’s move will tie the hands of the next executive. The contract allows the county few options for termination, and it provides for little oversight beyond that conducted by the county controller, who is currently reviewing the contract and who has power to audit the facility.

Allegheny County’s controller, Corey O’Connor, assumed that position in 2022 when then-Governor Tom Wolf appointed him to fill a vacancy, and is now running for a full term this fall against Republican Bob Howard. O’Connor has used his first years in office to highlight the failings of the local criminal legal system, including by releasing an audit that underscored how thoroughly the county jail upends the lives of entire families. The audit blamed Allegheny County for doing very little in the way of outreach to the children of the adults it incarcerates, further destabilizing households. O’Connor’s office found nearly 12,000 children largely abandoned by the county in this way between January of 2021 and September of 2022.  

O’Connor, who has endorsed Dugan and Innamorato, told Bolts that he thinks the elections this year will further illustrate the county’s growing comfort with criminal justice reforms.

“Places that were predominantly Republican in the suburbs are starting to turn blue, and they’re turning blue not just in countywide races but council races, school board races,” he said. “It’s all about people organizing and getting people out to vote.”

The post In Pittsburgh Region, Criminal Justice Reformers Face Off Against Old Guard appeared first on Bolts.