Davis, a tall white man with wispy brown hair and a chest-length gray beard, is serving 31-35 years in North Carolina for a truck accident that killed an elderly couple and severely injured their adult daughter in 2007. Late one evening, Davis’ flatbed Ford F-350 veered off the road and T-boned the family’s smaller Chevy S-10 pickup. Following the crash, Davis registered a 0.09 blood alcohol concentration at the hospital, above the legal limit of 0.08. This led to two consecutive convictions for second-degree murder, which makes up the bulk of his sentence.

Doctors diagnosed Davis with prostate cancer in 2019. Radiation treatment sent him into remission, but in 2022, the cancer returned, spreading to his ribs, collarbone, pelvis and lymph nodes.

“It’s stage four,” Davis said in a dayroom at Neuse Correctional, a medium-custody prison in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Davis also suffers from Type-2 diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis and hypertension. To hear, he has to cup his palm around his ear. To get around, he needs the help of a wheeled walker. His very existence appears labored and excruciating. “At this point, they’re not trying to cure me. I’m beyond that. They’re treating me until I die.”

Davis is just one of about 31,000 North Carolina prisoners who racked up a $357.4 million bill for health care in fiscal year 2021-2022, an expenditure that ballooned 51 percent over the past 10 years, according to NC Health News. Nationally, U.S. prisons spent $8.1 billion on prison health care in 2015 alone, as reported by Pew Trusts.

In an attempt to reduce the cost of prison health care in North Carolina, the GOP-run legislature in 2023 passed changes that make early release for medical reasons less stringent. Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who just left office at the end of December, signed it into law.

Under North Carolina’s medical release program, prison medical staff or representatives of a prisoner such as a family member or attorney can request that prison officials evaluate someone for medical release. If officials determine that someone meets the criteria, they can refer cases to the state’s governor-appointed parole commission, which makes the final decision. 

The changes lowered the age at which prisoners can be released for medical reasons from 65 to 55. To qualify, the prisoner must be so terminally ill, disabled or geriatric that they are medically incapacitated and determined by officials to pose little to no risk to public safety. People serving time for murder, sex offenses, and other violent crimes still cannot apply.

Because of the second-degree murder convictions that resulted from his truck accident, Davis is not permitted to seek medical release in North Carolina. So he will remain in prison, incurring exorbitant fees for doctors visits and medication at taxpayers’ expense. Despite the disqualifications, Davis wishes he could be considered for medical release. “Because I’m dying,” he said.

Other states have medical release programs, and most codify variations of the same guidelines. All exclude people condemned to death row. On paper, New York allows infirm people convicted of anything besides murder to apply for release if they have served at least half of their sentence, yet prison officials routinely deny hearings for them to make their case. In Wisconsin, people with terminal illness whose sentences allow for parole can seek release after serving 10 years. Florida reserves the right to re-incarcerate someone previously released for medical reasons if doctors determine that their physical condition has improved.

The increase in life sentences that followed a wave of so-called tough-on-crime policies in the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in a graying of the U.S. prison population, leading to swelling medical costs that states are now struggling to address. As reported in the New York Times, the number of people aged 55 or older in state prisons increased by 400 percent between 1993 and 2013. That group will make up one-third of the nation’s prison population by 2030. Since 1976, the Supreme Court has considered the denial of health care to sick prisoners a violation of the 8th Amendment, regardless of whether they are serving six months or condemned to death row. 

In North Carolina, too, around 17 percent of state prisoners are over 55. Those older people already cost the state four times what it spends on younger individuals, according to research published in the National Library of Medicine. 

Sandra Hardee, Secretary of NC-CURE, helped push lawmakers to expand North Carolina’s medical release law in 2023, lobbying alongside other groups like the North Carolina Justice Center and Conservatives for Criminal Justice Reform.

Hardee said the money that lawmakers envisioned saving in the long run by expanding medical release was key to them approving the new measures. “Before the new law passed,” Hardee said, “Health care for some inmates was costing $1 million a year.” 

According to reports from the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction (DAC), the number of people prisons have referred for medical release has dropped significantly in recent years. In 2021, prisons referred 39 cases to the parole commission, which ultimately granted medical release for 29 people. In 2022, prisons only referred 10 people to the parole commission, which granted medical release to just seven people. In 2023, prisons referred only eight people to the parole commission; three were granted medical and one person was denied, while four others died in prison awaiting a decision. 

DAC has yet to release its report covering the first year of expanded eligibility.

Although Hardee is pleased lawmakers expanded who is eligible for medical release, she says there are still barriers to actually releasing terminally ill people who qualify.

As it stands, no individual or board is tasked with identifying eligible prisoners for medical release, meaning people must find a way to apply on their own. If their family cannot afford legal counsel or don’t have other outside help, the prisoner must handwrite the paperwork themselves. Some prisoners may be too sick to physically file a request on their own.

“Right now, there are about 1,000 people that could be qualified by age and crime,” Hardee said. “If they were released, it would be a step in the right direction, but there is no way to identify them.”

Yvette Garcia Missri, executive director of the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke University’s law school, helped lead the coalition lobbying for the 2023 changes to medical release. Even with expanded eligibility, Garcia Missri says that doesn’t mean all people who qualify are granted release. She said prison officials have seemed to focus on releasing “terminally ill” people, but not those who fit other categories such as “geriatric or permanently ill.” 

“One of our goals is finding ways we can work with DAC to get full usage of the law so that everyone is included,” Garcia Missri said. Part of this goal means defining key terms within the law, such as “medically incapacitated.” “Currently this term is left for DAC interpretation, which could be exclusionary,” Garcia Missri said. If people are not considered medically incapacitated beyond survival, they may not be released early. She hopes that offering clear definitions of the law’s requirements will make it less limiting, reducing the number of people excluded.

Aside from the challenges of seeking release, the new law will only benefit a fraction of the prison population. Its limitations exclude younger prisoners, even those with enormous medical needs.

In 2015, 22-year-old Michael Helms was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract that causes intense cramping and diarrhea. Convicted as a teenager, Helms was a few years into a 28-year sentence for second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

“[Crohn’s] is not harmless,” Helms said while sitting in the yard at Nash Correctional, a medium-custody prison in Nashville, North Carolina. “I’m lucky they put me on the right meds. If not, bacteria could have escaped my intestine to cause sepsis.”

This year, Fox News labeled sepsis a top killer behind heart disease and cancer, taking the lives of “350,000 American adults each year.” 

Helms is too young, and, by the standards of the new law, still too healthy and his murder conviction too serious to make him eligible for medical release.

For treatment, prison nurses administer Helms one shot of Humira bi-weekly, but it’s not cheap. At nearly $4,000 a month, Helms’ treatment has already cost taxpayers about $600,000 since his diagnosis nine years ago. His treatment will cost another $720,000 before his projected release in 2040, totaling $1.3 million throughout his incarceration. That figure is added to the $133 it costs to incarcerate one person per day in the state, as noted by the DAC.

Now 31, Helms is healthy and focused on positive personal change. If he had been convicted 30 years ago, his clean prison record would have helped him earn parole so he could eventually get out and help pay his own medical bills. But North Carolina eliminated parole in 1994 by implementing the Structured Sentencing Act, a sentencing structure that imposes an 85 percent mandatory minimum on all active prison sentences. 

A report published on JSTOR credits mandatory minimum sentencing as responsible for a spike in the national prison population. Earlier this year, the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission projected that, on average, people imprisoned under the Structured Sentencing Act “will serve 104% of their minimum active sentences,” keeping prisons full of people who will cost more to care for as they age.

James Davis wasn’t sentenced to die in prison. He has a release date. If he were younger and healthier, he’d most likely live to 2039, when he’s eligible for release. Or if the judge had sentenced him concurrently, meaning his sentences would run together and not consecutively, he would be released in 2025 after finishing his longest sentence. Instead, Davis must remain in prison until he dies.

Although Davis is dying from cancer, he knows that he is ineligible for medical release. He won’t sue the state to challenge the new law’s exclusionary rules. His own guilt is partly the reason.

“Two people died, you know, and it’s my fault,” he said, slouching over his walker. “I been here 16 years. I lost my dad, my wife, my brother; I lost a lot of people I loved, so I understand the pain I caused,” he said, lowering his head in thought. When he raised it again, his old eyes glistened with tears. “I wish I had died in the accident. Not them.”

*Correction 1/10: A previous version of this story misstated changes to the medical release law.

The post Terminally Ill People Languish in North Carolina Prisons, Even After Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

“The importance of people being able to vote and not be disenfranchised is extraordinarily important,” Alan Hirsch, the Democratic chair of the state elections board, said Wednesday as the board shot down Griffin’s bid. “It’s a fundamental constitutional right. It’s what makes our democracy run.”

Democrats have a majority on this board because North Carolina law has, since 1901, empowered whomever is governor—at the moment, that’s Democrat Roy Cooper—to appoint all five members of the state elections board, with no more than three members per board allowed from either major party. The governor also appoints the chair of each of the 100 counties’ elections boards. In practice, this has meant that whichever party controls the governor’s office also enjoys majorities on these boards. Josh Stein, a Democrat, won the governor’s race to replace the retiring Cooper on Nov. 5, so the Democratic Party was set to retain this edge over the next four years.

Two hours after the state elections board voted, just before 5 p.m., GOP lawmakers did their best to erase that advantage and hand their party control in the future: The legislature passed Senate Bill 382, which strips the governor of his power to appoint people to state and county election boards. 

SB 382 transfers that power to the incoming state auditor, Republican Dave Boliek. This means that Boliek will decide who sits on election boards instead of Stein, effectively flipping the partisan majorities on the state’s 101 election boards to the GOP through 2028.

“The voters showed their will to elect Josh Stein governor because they know what the governor does and they want him to be the guy that does that,” said Graig Meyer, a Democratic state Senator who represents Chapel Hill. “To take it away and give it to their new favorite Republican elected official is just direct disdain for the voters’ will.” 

The legislature passed this bill shortly after the statewide elections held on Nov. 5, but Cooper vetoed it in late November. Republicans have supermajorities in each legislative chamber thanks to gerrymandering, and they voted, on party lines, to override the veto. The GOP rushed this reform during the lame-duck session because it is poised to lose its supermajority in the upcoming legislature.

Protesters swarmed the General Assembly as the override pended over the last two weeks, shouting from the House gallery as that chamber issued the final vote on the matter Wednesday afternoon.

SB 382 is ostensibly a Hurricane Helene relief bill, and Republican leaders often tried to sell it that way. Right before the House override vote on Wednesday, a GOP state representative, Dudley Greene, spent almost 20 minutes on the chamber floor tearfully lamenting Helene’s vast destruction—and making no case for elections changes. 

But only about a dozen pages of the bill, out of 132, directly concern hurricane relief, leading Cooper to deem it a “sham.” In some moments of candor, Republicans made clear their intent: “This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket,” House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican, said on Wednesday in an interview with Steve Bannon, the far-right media mogul and former Donald Trump strategist. Moore is moving up to the U.S. House in January thanks to a brand new congressional gerrymander he helped engineer.

“It’s not about hurricane relief,” Karen Ziegler, lead organizer for Democracy Out Loud, who was among those protesters shouting from the gallery at lawmakers over SB 382, told Bolts. “They really badly want this MAGA wishlist that’s in the bill, which is completely gob-smacking, and which is completely about voter suppression.”

The new law is full of major changes meant to weaken the powers of incoming Democratic officials. It removes the governor’s authority to fill judicial vacancies. It bans  the attorney general—a Democrat for the next four years—from participating in any lawsuits that would unwind any action taken by the legislature. And it strips the lieutenant governor, who’ll also be a Democrat through 2028, of her role overseeing a state council on energy policy. The law also eliminates two local court seats that have been held of late by judges who have struck down GOP election laws.

This broad power grab looms particularly large over election administration. The state elections board is responsible for certifying election results, adjudicating campaign complaints (like Griffin’s) and supervising the boards of election in each of the state’s 100 counties. 

The county boards also have broad authority, determining, for example, the number and location of early voting sites. When these county boards cannot reach an agreement on those plans, the state election board makes the final call.

Republicans in North Carolina have pushed to scale back early voting, and county boards in the state often disagree on how widely to make it available. They’ve split in some places on whether to set up voting on Sundays, which is a day used by many Black voters. In populous Union County, for instance, the board in 2022 sought six early voting sites across two Sundays over an alternative plan that would have enabled no Sunday voting at all. Other county boards had similar disagreements. 

Recent research in North Carolina has shown that early voting is the most popular method in the state, and that restricting it would disproportionately harm people of color and suppress Democratic support. County election boards also supervise voter registration and count ballots. 

In addition to shifting the partisan control of election boards, SB 382 shortens the amount of time voters have to request absentee ballots, gives counties less time to county ballots, and restricts the number of days county election systems have to reach out to voters who have cast provisional ballots and need to resolve questions about their eligibility in order to be counted. The state has allowed nine days for that operation, but the new law brings it down to three days. More than 65,000 North Carolinians—Black voters and Democrats, disproprotionately—were forced to cast provisional ballots this year, according to the Wilmington StarNews. 

Jeff Loperfido, chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, warns that the new three-day deadline for ballot curing will make it harder for voters to be counted. 

“Every additional barrier you put up runs the risk of disenfranchising voters,” he told Bolts. “North Carolina has a history, with Jim Crow laws and numerous cases of intentional racial discrimination related to the ballot box. These things have a legacy and impact and it puts an onus on the voter to try to do everything right to try to navigate the process.”

Loperfido also predicted that the GOP majorities on the state and county election boards would pursue other changes that restrict people’s access to voting, for instance by cutting funding to local elections departments that need resources to resolve voter issues. 

“There’s a lot of leeway in election administration here, over what it costs to run elections, how clean you want your voter rolls to be, and having the ability to scrutinize more heavily when it’s advantageous to your preferred outcome is probably beneficial to your political party,” he said. 

Republicans in North Carolina have tried to take power over state elections for years. In 2018, lawmakers put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot to remove the governor’s power to appoint election board members and instead hand it to the legislature, but the measure failed overwhelmingly. In 2023, the legislature passed SB 749 to require an even number of Democrats and Republicans on each elections board—a change that was likely to produce partisan gridlock and ultimately hamper voter access.

The governor sued to block that 2023 legislation, and it remains caught up in court, never having gone into effect.

Kym Meyer, an attorney who has argued before the state supreme court on past voting rights issues, predicted that SB 382, the new law that Republicans passed this week, will also wind up in court. “It will be immediately challenged,” she told Bolts. She also predicted that the lawsuit over the 2023 law will be promptly mooted. (Editor’s note: Just hours after publication of this story, Cooper and Stein, the governor-elect, filed a lawsuit against a section of SB 382 that strips the governor’s ability to appoint the head of the Highway Patrol. Litigation against other provisions may still come in the future.)

But Meyer, who is now litigation director for the Southern Environmental Law Center and who is married to Graig Meyer, the state senator, was among a half-dozen voting rights advocates who said they aren’t optimistic about what could come next in court: Republicans have a 5-2 majority on the state supreme court, which is itself, in part, a product of GOP legislative efforts to help Republicans win elections to that court. The court has followed up by blessing GOP priorities, including by blessing gerrymanders that favor Republicans electorally and restricting rights restoration for people on probation and parole. It may also end up deciding last month’s supreme court race, as Griffin’s camp has indicated it may appeal Wednesday’s rejection from the state elections board.

Several voting rights advocates specifically called out as cynical the legislature’s decision, in SB 382, to have the state auditor make board appointments. No other state auditor in the country would have the kind of power over election administration that’s outlined in SB 382. Democrats on Nov. 5 won several statewide offices besides the governorship, including attorney general and secretary of state; the auditor’s is arguably the highest-profile office that will be held by the GOP.  

It’s no coincidence, said Bob Hall, the former longtime director of the voting rights organization Democracy North Carolina, that the legislature proposed this reform right after voters flipped the auditor’s office red for the first time in 15 years. It shows, he feels, that Republicans are willing to find an advantage wherever they can.

“They are picking an executive-branch position—any executive branch position—to try to sidestep the part of the constitution that seems to vest administrative duty over boards of elections to the executive branch,” Hall said. “It is extreme, and it’s very aggressive.” 

Boliek, the incoming auditor, said during his campaign that he wants to investigate voter rolls and reform voting equipment in the state, echoing conservatives who have cast doubt on election integrity. 

Republican state Representative Destin Hall, who is set to succeed Moore as House speaker, defended the bill as falling squarely within the legislature’s prerogatives on Wednesday, saying on the House floor, “The reality is, in this state the constitution gives this body the ability to make certain decisions, and the folks elected this body just as they did Governor-Elect Stein coming in. And that’s what we’ve done in this bill.”

It’s a reminder for voting rights advocates that Republicans will, as Speaker Moore told Steve Bannon, continue to do what they can to mold the democratic process in their favor.

Said Kym Meyer, the attorney who has argued voting rights cases in state court, “At this point they’ve come up with five or six different ways to take power. This is the latest, and if in four years there’s a new auditor and it’s a Democrat, they’ll just do something different.”

The post GOP Grabs Control of North Carolina Election Boards, Rushing to Negate November Losses appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans grew their legislative ranks in 20 states, erasing Democratic majorities in two critical chambers in Michigan and Minnesota and soaring in a trio of New England states. But Democrats did the same in 11 states. They coalesced with centrist Republicans to flip the Alaska House away from GOP control, broke the GOP’s ability to override vetoes in North Carolina, and scored double-digit swings in Montana and Wisconsin.

Overall, Republicans gained 57 seats out of the roughly 6,000 races on the ballot, Bolts has determined in its third annual review of each state’s legislative elections. 

In 2022, the GOP gained 20 legislative seats, a meager result that deflated their expectations for a Democratic president’s midterms. (Several cycles in the 2010s saw swings that numbered in the hundreds of seats.) Democrats then gained five seats in 2023. 

These legislative results fit a broader pattern of short coattails for Trump: The GOP did not surge downballot as it did in the presidential race. The party secured full control of Congress but Democrats added a seat in the U.S. House and salvaged four U.S. Senate seats in states Trump carried. Bolts also reported that results were also mixed in state supreme court elections.

Going forward, the GOP will enjoy a trifecta—one-party control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in 23 states, a number that did not change after last month’s elections. Democrats meanwhile will hold a trifecta in 15 states after losing one-party control in Michigan and Minnesota.

That leaves twelve states that will have split governments, though GOP lawmakers will have the votes to override the vetoes of a Democratic governor in two of these. 

This table details the make-up of each of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers, plus the city council in Washington, D.C., before and after the Nov. 5 elections.

A handful of districts’ results are still not final pending recounts and lawsuits later this month. (This affects seats in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, North Carolina, New York, and Washington.) Also, Bolts kept several methodological choices made in the 2022 analysis. Vacant seats are attributed to the party that held them most recently. For the purpose of quantifying a swing and being consistent, Bolts counted lawmakers who left their party since the last election but did not join or caucus with the other party as belonging to their original party. (This affects a handful of seats in New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.) Lawmakers who outright switched parties are counted as belonging to their new party. 

To dig deeper, here are five takeaways from the 2024 legislative elections.

1. In four states, a party lost the ability to unilaterally pass laws

Democrats in 2022 gained full control of the Michigan and Minnesota governments, huge prizes that they quickly used to adopt a slew of legislative priorities. Bolts covered the passage of voting rights legislation in both states, including an expansion of rights restoration in Minnesota and automatic voter registration for people who are released from prison in Michigan. 

These two trifectas are no more. 

The GOP gained just enough seats to cost Democrats the House in both states: Republicans won an outright majority in the Michigan House, but the Minnesota House ended up in a tie that will force a party-sharing agreement. Democrats will still hold the governorships and Senates in both states, but they won’t be able to pass ambitious legislation on party-line votes. 

Democrats also lost that power in Vermont, where heavy losses in both of the state’s chambers cost them their supermajorities. This means they will no longer be able to pass legislation by overriding vetoes from GOP Governor Phil Scott. Democrats had made liberal use of this ability in recent years, including by increasing property taxes this summer, an issue Scott then seized on to heavily campaign against Democrats. As Bolts reported last year, the Democratic legislature also greenlit requests by several towns to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

The GOP lost the power to legislate at will in just one state: North Carolina. 

While Republicans retained majorities thanks to their gerrymandered maps, Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state House. That means the GOP won’t be able to override the vetoes of Democrat Josh Stein, who won the governor’s race. 

North Carolina Republicans have responded to the impending loss of their veto-proof majority by ramming through a sprawling bill to gut the powers of the governor’s and change election rules during the outgoing legislature’s lame-duck session. The bill was vetoed by Governor Roy Cooper last week but the state Senate overrode his veto on Monday; the state House vote is still pending as of publication.

In no state did a party gain the ability to pass laws on its own: There is no new state trifecta, and there is no new supermajority for a party hoping to override the vetoes of a hostile governor.

This means that Democrats fell well short of their hopes of gaining control of Arizona for the first time since the 1960s, and of flipping New Hampshire. Instead, they lost ground in both states and also failed to break consequential GOP supermajorities in Kansas and Nebraska.

But in the days following the election, Alaska Democrats announced a new coalition with some moderate Republicans to grab control of the state House from GOP leaders. A similar mostly Democratic coalition has already been running the state Senate since the 2022 midterms.

2. In most states, the Nov. 5 elections preserved the status quo

In many places, the GOP’s great night at the top of the ticket did not trickle down to legislative elections. 

Take Pennsylvania. In 2022, Democrats easily won the elections for governor and for the U.S. Senate races; they also scored double-digits gains in the state House. This year, the GOP flipped the script for statewide races, winning the state’s electoral votes and defeating U.S. Senator Bob Casey. But not a single of Pennsylvania’s 203 House seats changed hands. Democrats defended their narrow majority, 102 to 101 seats.

Overall, 28 of the state chambers that held regular legislative elections this fall saw zero partisan change. That compares to 18 chambers that saw no partisan change in 2022. 

Just seven states experienced a partisan swing of at least five legislative seats this year. That’s compared to the 16 states that saw such a swing in 2022.

Four of the seven were in New England. The GOP made major gains in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Republicans cemented their majorities in New Hampshire, while in Maine they soared but fell short of flipping the state’s two chambers. And the starkest swing was in Vermont: By winning 25 additional seats, the GOP flipped roughly 14 percent of all the seats on the ballot.

That’s the national record for a swing this year. 

But in another New England state, Connecticut, Democrats grew their ranks in both chambers, adding five seats overall, a feat they’ve pulled off for at least the third consecutive cycle. Here, too, the result went counter Trump’s substantial gains at the presidential level.

The GOP gained five seats in Kansas. Democratic Governor Laura Kelly had campaigned to break the GOP’s supermajorities; instead, Republicans will have an easier time overriding her vetoes going forward. Some GOP moderates have occasionally sided with Democrats to sustain Kelly’s vetoes, for instance in April to narrowly defeat a ban on gender-affirming care. 

In the final two states that saw a large swing, Montana and Wisconsin, it was Democrats who gained. And in both cases, new legislative maps explain the swing, bringing us to our next takeaway.

3. Wisconsin and Montana showcase the importance of who controls redistricting

Following the 2020 decennial census, nearly all states used new legislative maps in 2022, and the results vividly illustrated how the choice between gerrymandering and independent commissions can transform state politics. The 2024 elections offered the same lesson.

In Wisconsin, aggressive gerrymanders locked in huge Republican majorities in both 2011 and 2021, but the GOP’s plan unraveled in the spring of 2023 when liberals flipped the state supreme court. The court struck down the GOP maps in late 2023, forcing fairer districts. As a result, Democrats gained 14 seats across both chambers in last month’s elections—the party’s biggest gain in any state. They narrowed the GOP majorities from 22-11 to 18-15 in the Senate, where only half of the seats were in play, and from 64-35 to 54-45 in the House. 

This will immediately affect governance in Wisconsin: Republicans last year had floated the idea of removing the new state supreme court justice who had secured liberals’ majority on the bench last year, but November’s legislative swings will make similar threats obsolete going forward since the party will no longer have the votes to back it up. 

In Montana, there was no judicial showdown that forced new maps. This was simply the first cycle of state legislative races since the state’s decennial redistricting. Still, the redistricting process last year saw a high-stakes decision: Over the objections of the GOP commissioners, the only nonpartisan member of Montana’s redistricting panel sided with the Democratic commissioners who wanted the new maps to better mirror the state’s overall partisan breakdown. 

Montana Democrats this fall gained 12 legislative seats, breaking GOP supermajorities in both legislative chambers. 

Montana conservatives had also hoped to end the liberal majority on the state supreme court that had struck down their legislative priorities, but they failed to meaningfully alter the court’s balance. And GOP lawmakers will no longer be able to advance constitutional amendments overriding the court rulings they disagree with: Such measures need a two-thirds majority in the legislature.

4. Even in states with little partisan change, the primaries may have changed the game

November settled the balance of power between the two major parties, but that’s only part of the story of 2024. In some states, this year’s legislative elections spell major changes within the ruling party, often due to primaries resolved months ago. 

In Texas, far-right Republicans gained ground during this spring’s primary elections. In total, 13 state representatives were defeated in GOP primaries or runoffs by challengers endorsed by Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of Trump who sought retribution against those lawmakers for voting in 2023 to impeach him over an avalanche of scandals. Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who forcefully defended his vote to impeach Paxton during his reelection campaign, barely escaped the AG’s revenge in a May runoff, however it’s unclear whether Phelan can survive a challenge for speaker in a state House that has moved further to the right.

The ultraconservative faction of the Wyoming Republican Party also increased its influence in the state’s primaries this summer. The state’s far-right Freedom Caucus won majorities in both legislative chambers for the first time, and won the leadership elections in late November.

No Democratic-run chamber underwent as big an upheaval. Still, a pair of progressive incumbents lost their reelection bids in Colorado in June, including Elisabeth Epps, an abolitionist activist who was elected to the state House in 2022; the results will cost criminal justice reformers key allies in a chamber where they’ve already struggled. 

Progressives gained ground in Delaware and New Mexico, though, by defeating a slew of centrist Democrats. The ousted incumbents include New Mexico Senator Daniel Ivey-Soto; Bolts reported in 2023 that voting rights advocates faulted Ivey-Soto for the failure of a legislation they’d championed. 

5. What lies ahead?

The Nov. 5 results could trigger further changes in early 2025. Three state senators won congressional races in Michigan and Virginia, and must now vacate their seats in tight chambers. 

In Michigan, Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet’s resignation will spark a special election in the competitive 35th Senate District. The chamber is currently split 20 to 18 seats for Democrats, so the GOP would gain an even tie if they flip the district. (Still, the Democratic lieutenant governor would be able to break any tied votes in the chamber.)

Similarly, in Virginia, Democrat Suhas Subramanyan and Republican John McGuire are moving to the U.S. House from the state Senate, which is currently split 21 to 19 in Democrats’ favor. The race to replace Subramanyan in District 32nd is more likely to be competitive, according to The Downballot, giving the GOP a chance to tie the chamber in a Jan. 7 special election; a tie would effectively hand Republicans the majority since the GOP lieutenant governor would have the power to break ties.

In mid-November, Democrats chose state Delegate Kannan Srinivasan to run in this race. This triggered another Jan. 7 special election, this time in District 26, Srinivasan’s blue-leaning House seat. Democrats’ control of the lower chamber is just as narrow—51 to 49—so the GOP will have an outside shot at tying the House as well.

Next year will only speed up from there. Other specials are already scheduled, though in chambers that aren’t as tight as in Michigan and Virginia. And in the fall, the entirety of the New Jersey Assembly and Virginia House will be on the ballot alongside the state’s governorships.

The piece has been corrected to reflect the latest results in Oregon, where Democrats ended up flipping a seat in the state House by flipping the 22nd District with late votes.

The post The GOP Came Out Ahead in Legislative Races, But Their Gains Were Modest and Uneven appeared first on Bolts.

All these officials were elected by voters in the 2022 midterms, a busy cycle that saw a coordinated (and largely unsuccessful) effort by followers of Donald Trump to take over election administration. Two years later, a new round of states are selecting their chief election officials.

Twelve states are deciding in November who will run their elections going forward. 

That role is directly on the ballot in seven states; in five others, voters will elect a governor or lawmakers who’ll then get to appoint their elections chief. 

In most of these states, this elections chief is the secretary of state; but in a few, there is another office that has that authority—for instance, in Utah, it’s the lieutenant governor.

Today Bolts is publishing a new guide that walks you through these elections in all 12 states.

In some of these states, including Missouri, Oregon, and Vermont, a candidate is once again running who has clearly embraced false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They’ve proposed taking drastic actions such as ending mail-in voting.

In other states, such as New Hampshire or Utah, the office is unlikely to fall into the hands of an election denier. But even these races can be critical to the shape of democracy. Secretaries of state or the equivalent official often design voter outreach programs, or set policies that can make voter registration easy or difficult. They can also champion new election legislation or maneuver to stall ballot initiatives. 

The exact roles that states attribute to their chief elections officials differ from state to state—for instance, some have a hand in election certification and others do not. To clarify this landscape, Bolts has published two databases. The first details, state by state, which offices prepare and administer an election (Who Runs our Elections?). The second details, state by state, which offices handle the counting, canvassing, and certification stages (Who Counts Our Elections?). 

Explore our state breakdown of the 2024 elections below.

Delaware (via the governor’s race)

In Delaware, voters do not elect a secretary of state; instead, the governor appoints a state election commissioner. And voters this fall are choosing a new governor between New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, a Democrat who is the heavy frontrunner in this blue state, and House Minority Leader Michael Ramone, a Republican. 

The two candidates have taken very different stances toward election reforms. As a legislator, Ramone fought Democratic efforts to expand the availability of mail voting, while Meyer supported those changes. Meyer also says he would promote voting among some groups who are traditionally marginalized, vowing in response to an ACLU questionnaire to seek automatic registration of people exiting incarceration, and by expanding ballot access in local jails.

Maine (via legislative races)

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, became a national figure in late 2023 when she took Trump’s name off of the state’s ballot, citing his support for an insurrection. (The U.S. Supreme Court later put Trump back on the ballot.) Whether the office changes hands next year depends on Maine’s legislative races: Lawmakers select a secretary of state every two years. 

If Democrats retain the legislature, they could keep Bellows in office; Bellows told Bolts that she will seek another term. But the GOP has an outside shot at flipping the legislature in November. The last time they did that, in 2010, they replaced the Democratic secretary of state with a Republican. Democrats took back control of the legislature, and the secretary of state’s office, in 2012.

Missouri (via the race for secretary of state)

The secretary of state’s office in Missouri could fall into the hands of an ultraconservative Republican who has unambiguously embraced Trump’s lies about fraud and who vows that this would guide his tenure. “We have to ensure that none of the electoral fraud that took place in 2020 and stole the election from President Trump happens here,” Denny Hoskins, a state senator, told local media after winning a crowded GOP primary last month.

Hoskins, who is the front-runner in November in this staunch red state, has designs for major changes to election administration. He wants to hand count ballots and effectively eliminate absentee voting in an effort, his website says, to “root out election fraud and protect our elections from Chinese/Russian interference.”

He now faces Barbara Phifer, a Democratic state representative who broadly opposes his plans. She is also emphasizing her support for direct democracy, warning against GOP proposals to make it harder to pass citizen-initiated ballot initiatives. Hoskins championed such an effort this year, saying he was worried about the progressive push for an abortion rights measure.

Montana (via the race for secretary of state)

Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, a Republican who is running for reelection, wants to make it harder for Montanans to vote. In 2021, her first year on the job, she strongly backed efforts by GOP lawmakers to toughen voter ID laws, end same-day registration, and make it more difficult to obtain an absentee ballot. Those policies were struck down earlier this year by the state’s liberal-leaning supreme court, and Jacobsen is now trying to get the conservative U.S. Supreme Court to revive them on appeal. 

Jacobsen has also used her authority to stall ballot initiatives, recently blocking some signatures on petitions for measures to strengthen abortion rights and bring about election reforms. 

Her Democratic opponent this November, Jesse James Mullen, says he is “appalled” by Jacobsen’s “efforts to disenfranchise Montanans.” Mullen, who owns a chain of local newspapers in Montana, opposes the GOP’s 2021 voting laws Jacobsen backed and criticizes Republicans for using false threats of voter fraud in Montana to justify new restrictions. Mullen will be an underdog in this red-leaning state that Trump is expected to decisively carry.

New Hampshire (via legislative races)

The secretary of state in New Hampshire is selected by lawmakers every two years, right after the state holds legislative elections. In the most recent such vote, in late 2022, Republican David Scanlan prevailed over a Democratic alternative. He benefited from the fact that the GOP narrowly controlled the state legislature but also got dozens of crossover votes from Democrats. That puts into question whether Democrats would oust Scanlan even if they take control of the legislature in November: In 2018, the most recent cycle in which Democrats won control of the legislature, just enough Democrats joined Republicans to reelect a secretary of state who had been supporting Republican restrictions on voter access.

Since becoming secretary of state in 2022, Scanlan has backed his party’s newest restrictions, including the proposal to require proof of citizenship when people want to register to vote.

North Carolina (via the governor’s race and/or legislative races)

While North Carolina is electing a secretary of state this year, this office has nothing to do with election administration. (For aficionados of secretary of state races, let the record reflect that longtime Democratic incumbent Elaine Marshall is seeking an eighth term against Republican Chad Brown, a county commissioner.) 

Instead, it’s the gubernatorial and legislative races that’ll determine who controls the appointed offices that oversee elections: the state board of elections, and the director of elections. 

But even then, it’s not clear who will have what power come 2025. Last year, in an ongoing effort to shrink the powers of their Democratic governor, North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers used their veto-proof majority to pass a new law stripping the governor of his influence over appointments and shifting more authority to the legislature. This was widely seen as a way to strip Democrats of their majority on the board and change the current director of elections, Karen Brinson Bell, who has questioned why the GOP is passing so many changes to election laws and has frustrated some conservatives who would like to see the state pursue fraud investigations more aggressively. 

The new law is currently caught up in court, however. The stakes of the battle over appointment powers are high: Democrats and Republicans have been clashing on a wide range of voting issues in the state, including same-day voter registration and voter ID laws.

Oregon (via the race for secretary of state)

Oregon has frequently led the way in expanding ballot access, including by pioneering universal mail voting and automatic voter registration. Democrat Tobias Read, currently state treasurer, says he is running for secretary of state this year to uphold that tradition. “Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” he told Bolts earlier this year, ahead of his primary victory.

Read’s Republican opponent, state Senator Dennis Linthicum, could hardly be more different, as Bolts reported in May. He is proposing to ban mail voting, despite the fact that most of the state votes by mail. He joined far-right lawmakers nationwide in 2020 to call for an audit of the 2020 presidential election based on unsubstantiated claims of fraud. And he has not committed to certifying election results, the role of a secretary of state.

Read is favored to win this race; Oregonians haven’t elected any Republican to statewide office since 2016. That would leave Linthicum without an office. He was barred from seeking another term in the state Senate because he participated in a prolonged GOP statehouse walkout in 2023.

Tennessee (via legislative races)

The secretary of state in Tennessee is not directly elected. Instead, the legislature chooses a secretary of state, who then names a state coordinator of elections—and that’s the person who state law designates as Tennessee’s chief elections official.

Republicans are massively favored to retain both chambers of the state legislature, making it very unlikely that election administration will take a different route. Secretary of State Tre Hargett has been in office since 2009, and he easily secured a new four-year term in 2021.

Mark Goins, the elections coordinator appointed by Hargett back in 2009, acted last year to drastically shut down people’s ability to regain their right to vote after a felony conviction, imposing new financial fees to even apply, and making success an extremely tall order. Hargett and Goins have backed restrictions on voter registration and mail voting, and have opposed Democratic proposals to boost turnout.

Vermont (via the race for secretary of state)

In a rematch of the 2022 race, Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a Democrat, faces H. Brooke Paige, a perennial Republican candidate who has fully embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. The Big Lie does not sell in blue Vermont: Copeland Hanzas won the 2022 election 61 percent to 33 percent. There’s no indication that 2024 will be any different. 

“It is highly worrisome to hear people echoing false claims and misinformation about the safety and security of our elections,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts two years ago. “It is a fundamental threat to our democracy, in that the purpose of these claims is to discourage people from participating in elections.” 

Copeland Hanzas has supported efforts by some Vermont municipalities to expand the franchise locally. Bolts has reported, for instance, on the organizing that led several cities to allow noncitizen residents to participate in local elections on Town Hall days. “We heard from these communities about why they thought it was important to be able to welcome people into the democratic franchise at the local level,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts on why she helped authorize those reforms while in the legislature.

Utah (via the race for lieutenant governor)

Utahns abolished their secretary of state’s office in 1976, transferring the authority to oversee elections to the lieutenant governor instead.

Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, is running for reelection this year. She barely survived the GOP primary against a conservative activist who had helped organized a ballot measure to restrict mail voting and voter access. During her first term, Henderson refused to leave a bipartisan election organization that’s come under conservative fire, saying she wouldn’t bow to “radical election deniers.”

In Utah’s general elections, lieutenant governors appear on a ticket with their running-mate as part of the governor’s race, so Henderson’s fate is tied to the race between Governor Spencer Cox and Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee Brian King, who is running on a ticket with Rebekah Cummings, a librarian at the University of Utah. In this staunchly red state, it’ll be an uphill climb for Democrats to land a statewide win.

Washington (via the race for secretary of state)

In 2022, a Democrat won the secretary of state’s office for the first time in a half-century. But that was in a special election, and Steve Hobbs now has to run for a full term against Republican Dale Whitaker, the former executive director of a conservative organization. 

Whitaker, who associated himself with “America First grassroots patriots” at his state party’s convention, has taken issue with some of the state’s election rules. He has made public comments against the availability of mail voting, despite running in a state where voters trust and widely use mail ballots. “I will fight for same-day in-person voting with paper ballots,” he said in April. Hobbs supports the mail voting system. Whitaker has also taken issue with Hobbs’ decision, as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed last year, to agree to a consent decree that removes a requirement that Washington residents wait 30 days to register to vote when they move to a new address. Whitaker, who said a “reasonable registration deadline” is important, did not reply to a request for comment on whether he supports the state’s same-day voter registration rules.

Hobbs received 48 percent in the August all-party primary, which is generally predictive of the November results, with another Democrat taking 10 percent. Whitaker received 37 percent, leaving him an underdog in November. 

West Virginia (via the race for secretary of state)

West Virginia’s outgoing secretary of state, Republican Mac Warner, says the CIA robbed Trump of victory in 2020 and attended a “Stop the Steal” rally late that year. He unsuccessfully ran for governor this year. The favorite to replace him as secretary of state? His brother Kris Warner, who also refuses to call the 2020 results legitimate.

Kris Warner is currently the director of the state’s Economic Development Authority. As he runs to become West Virginia’s next top elections official, he’s promising to purge voter rolls and figures to fit neatly within a state Republican Party that has deeply embraced election denial.

His Democratic opponent, local attorney Thornton Cooper, has said he was motivated to run because he views the Warner brothers as particular threats to democracy. But it’s become very difficult for Democrats to win in West Virginia, and Cooper doesn’t seem to be trying much. He has no functioning campaign website as of publication and, according to the state’s data, he has spent under $2,000 on this race.

What about the remaining states?

Of the 38 states that aren’t on this list, the vast majority will hold elections for secretary of state, or an equivalent office, in 2026. (Check out Bolts’ national primer from 2022 for more on how many of these states’ elections unfolded last time around.) But before that, the next milestone looms in 2025: New Jersey and Virginia will host wide open governor’s races, and the two winners will get to select their state’s secretaries of state.

The post Your Guide to All 12 States Choosing Their Next Elections Chief in November appeared first on Bolts.

Desperation defined my reentry to society as I struggled to find stability. Obtaining necessary items, like a state identification card through the Department of Motor Vehicles, proved nearly impossible because I’d left prison without a social security card, which I applied for after release. Weeks passed before it arrived at a friend’s house by mail, preventing me from working during that time. I relied on friends to feed me because I could not work to feed myself. After a string of poor decisions and a drug deal gone bad, I was arrested for murder—just 60 days post-release. A jury sentenced me to life without parole at the age of 24. I have always taken responsibility for my actions; however, I wouldn’t be here if I had been offered reentry assistance—shelter, clothes, and food—upon release from prison.

Thousands have left prison as hopelessly as I did in recent decades. According to reporting by NC Newsline, around 3,000 of the roughly 18,000 people who left North Carolina prisons in 2023 were homeless—that’s about one in six people. 

How many recidivists could have remained free if more schools had been available in prison, if they had left prison with a state ID, or if they had been guaranteed a place to sleep their first night out? People need help to survive after prison. I needed help. 

This year, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper took steps to fix this broken system that failed me years ago. On Jan. 29, Cooper issued an executive order directing the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction (DAC) to lead a coordinated effort with all state cabinet agencies to improve reentry services. 

“This is not only the right thing to do, this is the smart thing to do,” Cooper said in a press conference after signing the order. “Our state’s correctional facilities are a hidden source of talent: People with diverse experiences and skills who really want to change their lives.” 

Among the list of directives to state agencies, Cooper’s order tasked the Department of Health and Human Services with helping connect returning citizens to Medicaid, food assistance and other government services as they prepare for release. The order also directs the state Department of Transportation to increase availability of state ID cards to people preparing for release and expand work release and other employment opportunities to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. 

His order also directs the DAC to “increase access to and completion of educational programs in state correctional facilities” and help incarcerated people “communicate with justice system partners to resolve outstanding warrants, tickets, investigations, obstacles to driver’s license restoration, and other unresolved legal issues prior to release.” 

Cooper’s directive made North Carolina one of four states to join Reentry 2030, a national initiative spearheaded by The Council of State Governments Justice Center to improve access to resources for newly released people and remove barriers that lead to recidivism. Missouri, Alabama, and Nebraska have also adopted the initiative, which asks states to set specific goals to improve reentry. 

When Cooper issued his order in January, he listed a series of benchmarks that he wants North Carolina to hit by the end of the decade—such as increasing the number of incarcerated students earning high school and post-secondary degrees by 75 percent, and reducing the number of people released from prison into homelessness by 50 percent.

When I was released in 2000, reentry services in North Carolina had been stymied by the repeal of parole in 1994. The state’s new mandatory minimum sentencing scheme did not require post-release supervision. When a prison sentence ended, the state released most prisoners without ensuring they had means of survival, such as housing.

To address deficiencies in reentry, the North Carolina legislature passed The Justice Reinvestment Act in 2011, which mandated that people with felony convictions serve the final nine to twelve months of their prison sentence on post-release monitoring out in the community. However, unlike parole, this new post-release mechanism did not require a showing of rehabilitation before early release, nor did it incorporate more reentry services to curb recidivism; measures under the Justice Reinvestment Act only ensured that newly-released people would be monitored. 

Brian Scott, executive director of the North Carolina-based reentry nonprofit Our Journey, attended the signing of Cooper’s executive order at the governor’s mansion earlier this year. Scott, who was released in 2021 after serving 20 years in prison, applauded Cooper’s effort to improve reentry services. But he also raised concerns about how much it might actually change. 

The governor’s executive order, set to expire at the end of 2030, earmarks no new funding to improve reentry services, and could end if a new governor opposes it; Cooper, a Democrat who is term-limited from running again, will be replaced next year by whoever wins this November’s competitive governor election.

“It’s an executive order, not legislation, which means that while it reflects Governor Cooper’s priorities, it might not for the next governor who takes office in 2025,” Scott told me in a text message. “Until [Cooper] can get the North Carolina General Assembly to fund it, not everything can move forward. But this is still a very significant moment.”

Cooper’s order established a statewide reentry council composed of staffers from each cabinet agency who have been tasked with devising a plan on how to improve reentry. That plan, according to the order, should lay out strategies and metrics for agencies to improve economic mobility for people leaving prison, expand access to behavioral health and substance abuse services before and after release, and increase housing opportunities for formerly incarcerated people. 

The council is supposed to release its recommendations by the end of July. That will leave a short window for the governor’s office to move forward before the end of Cooper’s term. 

Kristie Puckett, senior project manager for Forward Justice, an advocacy group that advocates for racial and economic justice in the South, told me she believes that Cooper issued the order too late in his tenure. 

“It’s political,” Puckett said in a phone interview, noting that reform advocates have been asking for provisions in this year’s executive order for at least a decade. “He’s been in office for eight years. He could have directed his cabinet to do this long ago. That’s not progress. It can be repealed as quickly as he signed it … It moves the needle closer to where we need it, but we want real legislation that will last, not a temporary executive order.”

Cooper’s order expands on some steps the state has already taken to improve reentry in recent years. The statewide expansion of Medicaid in 2023 extended those services to newly-released people. Last year, the state DMV and prison system also started working together to issue state IDs to incarcerated people slated for release who expressed interest in obtaining them, however there remained limitations. It’s unclear what additional features of Cooper’s order can move forward or when without more funding. 

Puckett says the biggest benefit from the reentry order could wind up being data from studies that the new statewide reentry council is supposed to conduct on the current state of services for people leaving North Carolina prisons. “We want to know what programs are available. How do incarcerated people access them? How often? What is the white versus Black ratio for successful reentry programs? We can use that data to trace harmful and helpful trends,” Puckett said. 

If North Carolina had prioritized reentry assistance when I left prison in 2000, it is likely I wouldn’t be serving a life sentence today. No one wants to return to prison, but desperation after release can activate the revolving door by compelling someone to rely on crime for survival. A state sentencing commission report in 2022 estimated that 36 percent of people released from North Carolina prisons are re-incarcerated within two years. 

Even if it’s too late for me, Cooper acknowledged in his executive order that giving more people a fresh start after prison could improve public safety, saying that “successful reentry of formerly incarcerated people into their communities leads to a safer North Carolina by reducing crime and breaking the cycle of violence.”

The post On His Way Out, North Carolina Governor Expands Support for People Leaving Prison  appeared first on Bolts.

Every night one of his neighbors was scheduled to be executed by the state of North Carolina, Glen Edward “Ed” Chapman would look up at the window slit in his cell and say to the black sky, “I’ll see you again.”

Saying goodbye was hard. Chapman and his peers who were also condemned to die formed a small community within the prison system. And whenever the state executed someone, that community would shrink by one member.

“I was close to those guys on death row,” Chapman said. “They were like family.”

One of the people killed while Chapman was on death row was Ernest Basden, sentenced to death in 1993 in a murder-for-hire scheme. After he got to prison, Basden stopped using alcohol and drugs and found God. His family had traveled around the state to build public pressure to convince then-Governor Mike Easley to grant Basden clemency and spare his life.

They failed. One cold winter evening, Basden’s family huddled in the mailroom of Central Prison in Raleigh to say goodbye, able to freely talk with and touch him in the last hours of his life.

“My mom had not hugged him in 10 years,” said Kristin Stapleford, Basden’s niece.

Basden was executed in the early morning of Dec. 6, 2002.

More than 20 years later, Chapman is on the other side of the bars, having been exonerated and released from prison, and is now joining Basden’s family in again urging a North Carolina governor to spare the lives of the men and women sentenced to death.

“We promised him that we would not give up the fight, that we would fight to see the death penalty abolished in North Carolina,” Stapleford said.

Stapleford and Chapman are members of a coalition of more than 20 social and criminal justice organizations and religious leaders calling on Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to commute the sentences of the people on North Carolina’s death row to prison terms before he leaves office at the end of 2024. A Bolts and NC Newsline analysis shows there are currently 136 people on this death row—the fifth-largest number in the U.S.—whose lives would be spared if Cooper were to act. 

Commutation is one form of clemency, a broad power most U.S. governors have to change a person’s criminal conviction or prison sentence, most often due to individual circumstances of a person’s incarceration; whether they were convicted as a youth, for example. Former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, who held the office from 1961 to 1965, saw his clemency power as a form of grace.

“It falls to the governor to blend mercy with justice, as best he can, involving human as well as legal considerations, in the light of all circumstances after the passage of time, but before justice is allowed to overrun mercy in the name of the power of the state,” Sanford wrote in 1961, after shortening the sentences of 29 prisoners through executive clemency.

But what Cooper is being asked to do now is much broader.

This coalition of activists is calling on him to commute death sentences as an act of racial justice. In North Carolina—a state where people were legally enslaved for more than 100 years—just over 22 percent of residents are Black, but over half of those on death row are Black or African American, according to figures provided to Bolts and NC Newsline through a public records request. Of the dozen people who have been sentenced to death in North Carolina and later found innocent, 11 are people of color.

Advocates are now hoping Cooper will offer clemency for the 136 people on death row en masse, regardless of the circumstances of the crimes of which they are convicted, because of the injustices of the death penalty and North Carolina’s criminal legal system at large.

Granting clemency would not mean that the people on death row would be released from prison, nor would it mean the abolition of the death penalty going forward. The state constitution only grants the governor discretion to shorten a sentence as he sees fit. Cooper could, for instance, commute the sentences to life without the possibility of parole. Or, he could sentence them to life and leave the possibility of parole open. 

It’s similar to a petition made by advocates in Louisiana, who earlier this year asked Governor John Bel Edwards to commute the sentences of more than 50 people on that state’s death row. So far this mass request has been blocked by the Louisiana Board of Pardons. 

While North Carolina governors frequently granted clemency in the late 1970s until 2000, commutations became rare starting in 2001.

Executions have slowed as well—North Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, and North Carolina’s district attorneys pursue the death penalty at a much lower rate than in years past. But with Republicans controlling the state supreme court and holding supermajorities in the House and Senate, many anti-death penalty advocates are concerned that they could restart, especially if a Republican moves into the executive mansion.

The death penalty has been raised as a talking point in early debates among Republican gubernatorial candidates and has been an issue in previous elections as well. In 2017, top Republican legislators demanded Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat now running for governor, resume executions after four prisoners at Pasquotank Correctional Institution were charged with killing four employees in a failed escape attempt. 

Two of those four men have since been sentenced to death.

A new governor couldn’t simply sign a slip of paper and reopen the execution chamber since the courts are the reason for the pause in executions. There are ongoing legal battles over the application of the Racial Justice Act, landmark legislation that gave people an opportunity to get off death row if they could prove racial discrimination had played a role in their death sentence. Democrats passed that bill in 2009, Republicans repealed it in 2013. Then, when Democrats controlled the state supreme court in 2020, it struck down the retroactive repeal of the law, allowing the claims that had already been filed to continue to play out through the present day. 

But conservatives now control the state supreme court, and advocates worry they could revisit that ruling, clearing a path to resume executions. There are also still legal questions about North Carolina’s protocols for using lethal injection drugs to carry out executions, though advocates worry North Carolina Republicans could find a way around that, as they have tried to in South Carolina and Alabama. 

Republican control of the other branches of state government has given those opposed to the death penalty a sense of urgency. At a recent rally, Kristie Puckett, the senior project manager of Forward Justice, told a crowd of around 200 supporters that Cooper was their last hope because of North Carolina’s current political climate.

“We can’t trust our legislature. We can’t trust the courts,” she said. “And so we are forced to rely on Governor Cooper.”

The coalition has staged marches, written letters and met with the governor’s staff. They’ve held film screenings on the “Racist Roots” of North Carolina’s death penalty and handed out postcards so residents can write Cooper directly. Soon, they’ll post billboards and travel to communities across the state to build support for the campaign as it enters its final year before Cooper leaves office.

“Our commutations campaign is very focused on 2024 because we have a sense of urgency that executions could resume, as they did in the federal system,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “I am concerned that the political climate of our state has become more entrenched in policies and practices that would lead to executions resuming.”

Cooper, who has had a mixed record on commutations, has been pressured for years by criminal justice reformers, many of whom have gathered outside the governor’s mansion annually calling on him to use his clemency powers. Cooper didn’t grant any commutation until March 2022—two years into his second term—shortening the prison terms of three people who committed crimes when they were children. In December 2022, after three weeks of protests outside his home, Cooper commuted the sentences of six more people.

So far, Cooper has made no public comment on the 136 currently on death row. In 2017, after the murders at the prison in Pasquotank, a spokesperson for the governor said Cooper supported the death penalty and had a “long history of upholding it” during his 16 years as attorney general. The governor’s spokesperson did not answer recent questions from Bolts and NC Newsline on whether he still supports the death penalty or if he was considering commuting North Carolina’s death sentences.

Puckett credited the annual campaign for getting Cooper to issue commutations last year. She doesn’t think he would have exercised clemency otherwise.

“That’s the only reason he’s doing something: because he’s forced to do something,” she said.

A lasting legacy

The North Carolina governor’s office is weak by design but clemency is one area where the executive branch has broad authority to commute prison sentences without approval from a parole board.

“This is a rare policy area where the governor has power, can exercise it, and doesn’t need to ask anyone else for permission,” said Christopher Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University (who has no relation to the governor).

Even so, it would be novel for a Democratic governor—especially in the South—to use their power to unilaterally empty their state’s death row. Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards, tried to grant the mass clemency request he received before he left office, but he was ultimately thwarted by the state board of pardons.

Cooper has already laid the groundwork for clemency on a systemic level. In June 2020, just after a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, the governor established a Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice that he asked to make recommendations for ending racial disparities in the criminal justice system. One of the subjects they tackled was the death penalty.

Ken Rose, who was a senior attorney at the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation for 35 years before retiring in 2017, gave a presentation to members of the task force in November 2020 showing two strikingly similar maps of the United States: One showing where Black people were lynched across the nation between 1883 and 1940, an another marking the execution of Black defendants between 1972 and 2020. 

Later that year, the task force published a report noting the death penalty has a “relationship with white supremacy.” They did not recommend abolishing capital punishment, but they did propose ways to narrow its use. 

The task force also identified commutation as a remedy to address injustice, suggesting officials examine commuting sentences of people sentenced to death before July 2001, when North Carolina had a “quasi-mandatory” death penalty law that forced prosecutors to seek a death sentence in capital cases. More than two thirds of the people on the state’s death row are there because of that law, according to Rose.

“You have a lot of people on death row, still on death row, who wouldn’t be there if DAs had a choice for pleading cases to life,” he said.

Following another recommendation of the task force, Cooper created the Juvenile Sentence Review Board in 2021, which reviewed the sentences of people who committed crimes as children and recommended suitable applicants for clemency. Of the nine commutations Cooper granted in 2022, five were based on recommendations from that board. In a press release, his office acknowledged science showing children’s brains are different than adults’, and that state and federal laws treat minors differently in sentencing in criminal cases.

“As people become adults, they can change, turn their lives around, and engage as productive members of society,” Cooper said in a press release.

Kerwin Pittman, one of the members of the task force, thinks Cooper’s own political ambitions could make him reticent to use clemency more broadly. At 66 years old, he is a relatively young politician and could have decades left in public office.

“To just issue a blanket clemency to everybody, or commute everybody, he may not feel that is in his best interest,” Pittman said. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to make a misstep that’s going to come back and bite him.”

But this reluctance is frustrating to advocates who see Cooper as wasting his authority to commute sentences as he sees fit. 

“Why do you work so hard and be so shrewd to get to the top just to piss the power away?” Puckett asked. 

The exonerees

More than 20 organizations from across the state and country are working with the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to persuade Cooper to use his clemency powers. Members of the European Union also came to Raleigh in November to meet with Cooper and Attorney General Stein to talk about the death penalty.

But it is exonerees like Alfred Rivera and Ed Chapman who are leading the charge—men who intimately know the hopelessness of death row but escaped it once they proved they should have never been convicted. 

Rivera is both a victim of violence and wrongful incarceration. After his father was killed in a robbery when Rivera was a toddler, his mother, left alone with five children to care for, started drinking. She died from cirrhosis of the liver seven years after her husband passed away. 

“This is the toll that it took on her,” Rivera said.

Two decades later, a jury sent Rivera to death row, convicting him for murder. But he was exonerated in two years, after the state supreme court ruled he should get a new trial because jurors hadn’t heard evidence suggesting he’d been framed. 

Chapman, meanwhile, spent 14 years on North Carolina’s death row before being exonerated in 2008 after a judge ordered a new trial and a district attorney dropped the charges. He had been sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit. There were serious issues with the investigation; police had withheld evidence, and a detective later faced perjury charges for lying on the stand.

Chapman struggled after he came home. He lost a job, isolated himself and used drugs and alcohol to cope. He moved to Florida, staying in a spate of recovery houses before sleeping on the streets for about a year. 

He felt guilty about how he was living, like he was wasting the second chance he’d been given. “I let those people down that fought for me,” he said.

The guilt, shame and remorse compelled Chapman to join the commutation campaign after he moved to Durham in 2022. Now he is fighting for a cause bigger than himself.

“I’m trying to be better than I was before,” he said.

On Aug. 19, 2023, almost 17 years to the day since North Carolina’s last execution, Chapman and the coalition met at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church and marched more than a mile to Central Prison to honor those executed there.

The crowd of roughly 200 held a vigil to remember the 43 people executed by the state since 1984. Dozens of people held signs with the names of those who were killed in the execution chamber within the prison behind them. They also called for an end to death row, chanting at cars driving past them on Western Boulevard.

It was the first time Chapman had been back at the prison since getting off death row. He got chills standing outside, knowing what it was like to live on the other side of the metal doors, behind the barbed wire. But he found strength standing beside death penalty abolition advocates and people like Rivera, those sentenced to death for something they didn’t do.

“I felt that the cause for me being there outweighed my anxiety,” Chapman said.

Innocent people like Chapman and Rivera are easy cases to make to the public. It is harder—and potentially poses a greater political risk—to show grace to those who did their crimes.

Rose has represented many people on death row. He’s found that those individuals can be caring and selfless, thoughtful and resilient. They can also struggle under the weight of the mental illness and the trauma they’ve endured. 

“I look at them differently because I’ve gotten to know them,” Rose said. “I think people can do really terrible things. I think people can do monstrous things. But I do not think that that makes them a monster.”

That is a sentiment shared by Lynda Simmons, another member of the commutations coalition. Simmons’ son Brian was murdered by a teenager named James Moore, in 2004. Simmons struggled for years with relentless waves of grief over Brian’s death. But in time, trying to make sense of a senseless act, she connected with Moore, who wound up serving 15 years for second-degree murder. The two traded letters, helping one another process the trauma and grief they’d both endured. 

As they were communicating through the mail, Simmons was also doing restorative justice work with people on death row. She’d share her story with the men at Central Prison, helping those sentenced to death connect with someone who had lost a loved one to an act of violence. There, working with men like Moore who had gone to prison when they were teenagers, she could see that Moore had done something terrible, but that action didn’t define his entire humanity. 

“Listening to them, I knew that when James murdered my son, that’s what he did,” Simmons said. “I believe with everything in me, that’s not who he was.”

Simmons has always been against the death penalty, but that belief was crystallized when she went to Moore’s sentencing hearing in 2005. When she walked into the courtroom and saw Brian and Moore’s friends and family on opposite sides, she saw the impact of the shooting echoing across generations and familial lines, lives irrevocably changed by a single violent act.

“I knew that they were victims, too,” Simmons said. “They didn’t shoot my son. And I don’t believe that they raised James to shoot my son.”

“I do believe that human beings are able to change,” she continued. “And when we execute people, we rob them of the chance to change.”

Politics vs. reality

Members of the North Carolina Republican Party have long campaigned on their support of the death penalty.

In 2010, the State Republican Party sent out a mailer slamming Majority Leader Hugh Holliman, a Democrat whose teenage daughter was raped and murdered, as a “Criminal Coddler” for helping pass the Racial Justice Act, legislation that offered people a chance to get off death row—but not, as the flier erroneously claimed, out of prison—if they could prove racial discrimination had affected their charging or sentencing. 

The front of the flier read: “Meet your new neighbors. You’re not going to like them very much.”

On the back were mugshots of two men sentenced to death: Wayne Laws and Henry McCollum. 

McCollum did eventually get out of prison, not because of the Racial Justice Act but because he was innocent, like Chapman and Rivera. 

Public support for the death penalty has declined since its peak in 1994, when 80 percent of Americans said they were in favor of capital punishment, and has been on the decline ever since. Now, just over half of Americans support the death penalty.

But in 2010, North Carolina’s politicking over capital punishment worked: Holliman lost the election, as did other Democrats targeted for their support of the Racial Justice Act. Rose said it was impossible to determine whether the misleading flier swung the elections, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a politically salient issue at the time.

“There was a lot of political use of the death penalty for a long, long time, in a way that arguably shaped elections,” said Rose.

Today, the exonerations of people like Rivera, Chapman and McCollum are eroding public support for the death penalty further, said Rose. But that doesn’t mean Republican politicians won’t bring it up when it is to their political benefit. It resurfaced in 2017 because of the prison escapes, and has been mentioned this election cycle. 

During the first Republican gubernatorial debate, one candidate called for resuming executions under the death penalty. Lawyer and businessman Bill Graham polled second in the governor’s race a few weeks after releasing an ad advocating for the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers. (He still trailed the Republican frontrunner, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, and 42 percent of respondents were undecided, but the director of the Meredith Poll told WRAL the ads seemed to be helping Graham.)

“As a prosecutor, I went after violent criminals,” Graham said in the ad. “As governor, I’ll put ‘em in jail or in the ground.”

The Republican-controlled state supreme court has also shown a willingness to overturn precedents set by previous Democratic majorities. Earlier this year they issued new rulings on partisan gerrymandering and the state’s voter ID law, reversing Supreme Court opinions written in 2022, when Democrats were in control.

“If you were an ordinary court and you were honoring precedent and you were trying to build on that precedent and navigate that precedent, then they have a long, long way to go before they restart executions,” Rose said. “But if what you wanted to do is resume executions and kill the people that are currently on death row, you could do that, but you’d have to ignore the precedent.”

But the politics of the death penalty are often divorced from reality. The most common outcome of a death sentence in North Carolina isn’t an execution, but a long process of appeals that leads to a reversal of a sentence, said Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a national expert on the death penalty.

“These things are reversed not because somebody put a paperclip on the wrong side of the paper,” Baumgartner said. “They’re reversed because evidence was withheld or because improper instructions were given to the jury, or, you know, something serious.”

Baumgartner maintains an internal database on capital punishment in North Carolina. According to his figures, 411 people have received death sentences since 1976; 190 of them, or 46 percent have been overturned.

Nationally, more than 8,500 people have been sentenced to death since 1972, Baumgartner said, wondering, “What are the odds that every one of them is guilty as charged?”

On death row, community

To live on North Carolina’s death row is to be constantly reminded of one’s mortality. The men housed on death row in Central Prison in Raleigh, can spend years, decades, entire generations together in their communal pod. Most of the people on death row have been there for 20 or 30 years. They grow old together; sometimes they die of natural causes. (There are two women on death row, incarcerated at a different prison.)

“Our memories of the dead become death row lore, significant to us, living on in our hearts and minds and dreams. We live together, die together, mourn together, and remember,” said Lyle May, who has been on death row since 1999.

That quote is included in “Bone Orchard: Reflections on Life Under Sentence of Death,” a book written by one of May’s peers, George Wilkerson, who was sentenced to death in 2006. The book, co-written with Robert Johnson, a professor of justice, law and criminology at American University, is a firsthand account of life on North Carolina’s death row. 

Most states keep those on death row in segregation, meaning the incarcerated are locked in their cells most of their days, for decades, until they win their appeals, die or are executed. But North Carolina’s death row is unusual in that it houses condemned people together. The consistent group setting makes people with death sentences in the state particularly suitable for commutation, Johnson argued, saying they have had time to develop social and emotional skills since they spend so much time out of their cells.

“You don’t get the feeling of a pressure cooker on North Carolina’s death row,” Johnson told Bolts and Newsline. “There’s the overshadowing threat of death, but there’s a lot of community.”

There are risks to the incarcerated if their death sentences are commuted. Breaking up the community established on death row, for one. There are also implications for their appeals. People on death row in North Carolina are entitled to attorneys in appellate proceedings. Plus, Johnson said he thinks people facing death sentences typically get more attention on their cases from criminal justice reformers and the media, compared to people serving life. 

“That is definitely a valid concern, them losing legal remedies if granted a commutation,” said Pittman, a member of the racial equity task force. “They could lose access to having automatic counsel in the appellate courts, as well as if somebody is on the row and somebody is innocent, they could lose access to their freedom through the court system.” 

Even still, Johnson said those on death row stand to gain much from clemency. They could have better access to rehabilitative programming.“We’d been told many times point-blank, ‘You are not here to be rehabilitated,’” Wilkerson writes in “Bone Orchard.”

Receiving clemency would also allow more opportunities for them to see their loved ones because of a less restrictive visitation policy, Johnson added.

And obviously, they won’t have a death sentence hanging over their heads. Only about 20 people have been added to death row since the last execution in the summer of 2006, according to the state’s roster. One of those is Wilkerson, who has been a part of the community since Dec. 20, 2006.

“We live shoulder-to-shoulder for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years,” he wrote in the book, “and gradually this me versus them mentality I’d walked in with, melted away, leaving only us.”

Two miles from Wilkerson’s cell, on a warm, wet December afternoon, members of the clemency campaign met in a parking lot across the street from the governor’s mansion. They sang, chanted and chatted about their support for emptying death row. Nickle said the theme of the day was “community, compassion and commutation.” 

Cooper has yet to say publicly whether he will commute the death sentences, or if he is even considering such a broad use of his clemency powers. He will leave office at the end of 2024, giving advocates about a year to build support for emptying North Carolina’s death row.

Chapman and Rivera stood in a corner laughing amongst themselves as two people sang “We Shall Overcome” to the crowd. After a few minutes, the exonerees went separate ways. Rivera stepped onto the sidewalk, glancing at the signs that listed the birth date and day of execution of 43 people killed by the State of North Carolina. 

The rallies are a surreal experience for Rivera. The names on the signs aren’t just words to him. When he sees or hears the names of people still facing a death sentence, those who haven’t yet been executed, he can still see their faces, and he wonders how they’ve changed in the 24 years he has been free.

“I knew these guys personally,” Rivera said. 

He feels a sense of survivor’s guilt for having gotten off death row. He still thinks about what it was like living there, “the horrible conditions,” having to reckon with “how I went from that to this,” as he gestures at the wide open parking lot, the community of supporters. 

“Is it fair that people are still suffering under those conditions?” he asked. “I think about that, me being free and at these events.”

The post Inside the Urgent Campaign to Commute North Carolina’s Entire Death Row appeared first on Bolts.

Some ties are merely anticlimactic: Think a 0-0 soccer match or a chess stalemate. The ties that would become possible under new legislation pushed forward by Republican leaders in North Carolina’s General Assembly could prove much more consequential.

For over 120 years, the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) has consisted of five members, all appointed by the governor, with no more than three from a given political party. County elections boards have the same partisan composition. Those bodies oversee just about every step of the democratic process, and their odd-numbered makeup means they must reach a decision in any vote they take.

State Republicans are close to upending that longstanding system. Senate Bill 749, which is nearing its final vote in the legislature, would instead give all of those boards an even number of members, expanding the state board to eight members while shrinking county boards to four. 

Because Democrats currently control the governor’s mansion, they also hold a majority on these election boards heading into the 2024 elections. This bill would deprive them of that edge; instead, all boards would be equally split between Republicans and Democrats. 

The bill would also shift power to appoint members of the state elections board from the governor to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate. The changes could lead to tie votes along party lines on both local and state election boards, and the bill is largely silent about how such deadlocks would be resolved.

With North Carolina again poised to be an important swing state in next year’s presidential race, the bill could complicate local election boards that oversee a wide swath of administrative decisions. 

From the appointment of precinct judges to the final certification of election results, there is no clear mechanism for what would happen after tie votes, which could in turn delay electoral processes, compromise ballot access for early voting, and potentially move decisions to the courts. SB 749 does say that, if an evenly divided state board cannot decide on an executive director, or if a county board cannot choose its chair, the General Assembly, currently in Republican hands, would step in. 

Republican lawmakers have criticized current NCSBE executive director Karen Brinson Bell for changes she approved to voting rules during the 2020 election. The new rules under SB 749 would allow them to seek her ouster if the state board deadlocks over her reappointment in 2025.

The bill passed the Republican-controlled Senate along party lines in June, and passed in a slightly modified form along party lines in the House on Sept. 19. It now awaits a final Senate vote.

Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has promised to veto the bill if it comes to his desk. In an Aug. 24 press release, he wrote, “The bill would change the structure of the state and county Boards of Elections in a backdoor maneuver to limit early voting and satisfy the Republican legislature’s quest for more power to decide contested elections.”

But Republicans hold a supermajority in both the House and Senate, meaning they have the votes to override Cooper’s veto. Both chambers adopted the bill by margins that fell short of a supermajority because many GOP lawmakers were absent the days of the vote. But not a single Republican crossed-over to oppose the bill, so the party remains on track to overturn a governor’s veto if and when the bill returns to the legislature.

None of SB 749’s three Republican primary co-sponsors in the state Senate—Deputy President Pro Tempore Ralph Hise, Majority Leader Paul Newton, and Sen. Warren Daniel—responded to multiple requests for comment on the bill.

During a Sept. 12 committee hearing on the bill in the House, Republican Representative Destin Hall argued that requiring bipartisan decisions from election boards would make North Carolina voters more confident that their state’s elections were being administered fairly. His Democratic colleagues, noting how the Republican-dominated legislature has often ignored minority input, were skeptical. 

“This is encouraging government not to work,” said House Democratic Leader Robert Reives.

Hall also said the possibility of intractable ties was a feature of the bill, not a bug.

“There’d be a stalemate, and by many ways, that’s by design,” Hall said of split election board votes. “No action would occur.”

North Carolina Republicans aren’t the only ones seeking to remake their state’s election administration bodies in a way that introduces the possibility of partisan gridlock. In 2016, Republicans in Wisconsin changed the state’s election governance from an odd-numbered nonpartisan board to an even-numbered board split between Democrats and Republicans. 

In the years since, the board has deadlocked on a number of issues, including most recently the reappointment of Megan Wolfe, a nonpartisan elections administrator who became a target for false conspiracies in the wake of the 2020 election. (The situation is now headed to the courts for resolution.)

But there’s no historical precedent for split decision-making boards in North Carolina, notes Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University. From the state supreme court to county commissions, he points out, the state’s institutions are set up with odd numbers of members to avoid ties.

“There’s a reason we do this by design every time. I really can’t think of any example where there’s been a true deadlock in this way,” Cooper says. 

If Republicans and Democrats on election boards refuse to compromise, it could theoretically impact decisions on everything from disputes over voter eligibility to the certification of election results. Patrick Ganon, a spokesperson for the state elections board, declined to comment on the pending legislation. But many of North Carolina’s voting rights groups have drawn attention to early voting as a part of the electoral process that could immediately suffer from indecision.

Early voting is North Carolina’s most popular method of casting a ballot, employed by over 53 percent of voters in the 2022 general election. Those voters tend to lean Democratic: In the state’s 2022 Senate race, in-person early voters favored Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley by five percentage points, even as she lost the election overall by more than three percentage points to Republican Ted Budd. 

Under current state law, each county’s board of elections must unanimously approve a plan for the number and location of early voting sites. It’s not unusual for all members not to agree, and in those cases, the contested plan goes to the NCSBE for consideration. In 2022, the state board approved 14 of these non-unanimous plans.

If the state board were restructured according to SB 749, however, one party’s members could unilaterally refuse to adopt a county’s contested early voting plan. State law then mandates that the county would only have one early voting site, located at its board of elections office.

A single early voting site might work in some of North Carolina’s smaller counties. Tyrrell County in the state’s northeast, for example, had a population of just 3,245 as of the 2020 census.

But in larger areas, “such an outcome would be catastrophic,” says Bryan Warner, spokesperson for the nonpartisan democracy watchdog Common Cause NC. “It would gut early voting, overwhelm election administrators, and could require county residents to travel long distances and stand in long lines to cast their ballot early.”  

Wake County, home to the capital of Raleigh, had well over 1.1 million residents in 2020, and it established 20 early voting sites for that year’s election. “In a major urban area, [having just one early voting site] would be an important issue,” says Gerry Cohen, a Democrat who serves on the Wake County Board of Elections and is former special counsel to the General Assembly.

A recent study in the Election Law Journal authored by Chris Cooper, Michael Bitzer of Catawba College, and investigative reporter Tyler Dukes found that changing or eliminating early voting sites reduces voter turnout. The effect was greater for voters of color, who in North Carolina are more likely to be Democrats.

“Particularly in a competitive two-party state like North Carolina that has experienced a number of close elections in recent years, it is not an exaggeration to say that administrative changes to a polling location could impact electoral outcomes,” the study concludes.

The consequences are less clear for deadlock in other parts of the election system. While North Carolina law specifies deadlines for county and state boards to complete tasks like canvassing (confirming preliminary vote totals) and certification, it generally doesn’t outline next steps if those processes are delayed. Neither does SB 749. “It’s the Underpants Gnomes theory of election administration,” Cooper quips, referencing a crew of South Park characters with notoriously incomplete plans.

Voting rights groups’ biggest fear is that a failure by election boards to certify results would allow the General Assembly to intervene. Melissa Price Kromm, director of N.C. Voters for Clean Elections, warned the House on Sept. 12 that gridlock from SB 749 would let the legislature resolve ties, “even deciding the outcome of elections.”

Cohen, the Wake County elections official, believes such worries are overblown. He says state law clearly requires elections boards to certify results if there are no issues of fact. If one party’s members chose not to approve the results, he says, a judge would order them to follow the law under penalty of contempt of court. 

Such an order occurred last year in Arizona after Republican officials refused to certify the midterm elections. And in North Carolina’s Surry County, two GOP members of the county elections board were removed by the NCSBE after voting not to certify a 2022 municipal election.  

But given the current political climate, in which unfounded theories of voter fraud continue to circulate, it’s unclear what some elections board members might claim as issues of fact to justify a certification delay. It’s also unclear what sort of hearing North Carolina’s judges would give those claims. 

The North Carolina state Supreme Court, which came under Republican control last year, has so far been willing to make controversial rulings that favor the GOP. Its members have voted to permit previously illegal partisan gerrymandering, rolled back voting rights for thousands of North Carolinians on probation or parole, and restored a Republican-passed 2018 voter ID law that had been struck down as racially discriminatory.

If passed, SB 749 would take effect in July of 2024, creating new state and county boards in the final months leading up to the presidential election. That would chop a year off the terms of county board members who were sworn in just two months ago, and three years off the terms of the state board members seated in May.

“We have to go through another appointment process again. It’s really disruptive,” says Cohen. “I don’t own my position on the board of elections, but in life, you expect some sort of certainty.”

The post North Carolina May Increase Odds of Gridlock with Even-Numbered Elections Boards appeared first on Bolts.

In 2018, fierce organizing by immigrants’ rights groups led to a sea change in North Carolina: sheriff candidates who promised to stop collaborating with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement won in five of the state’s most populous counties. All were Black Democrats. Soon, the new sheriffs in Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties severed their contracts with ICE, and those in Durham, Forsyth (Winston-Salem) and Buncombe (Asheville) counties announced they would no longer detain immigrants for ICE without a judicial warrant, sparking immediate releases. 

“It was very euphoric,” recalled Stefanía Arteaga, co-executive director of the Carolina Migrant Network, which was closely involved in the organizing efforts. She recalls the relief felt by some of her friends, “not having to be so fearful that a simple traffic stop could lead to a deportation.”

ICE responded with heavy retaliation. It conducted raids across North Carolina, sweeping up over 200 people in just a few days. It was “a time of total panic,” recalls Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of the immigrants’ rights group Siembra NC. 

The agency also built a PR campaign to turn voters against Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden, posting billboards around Charlotte with the mugshots of immigrants who had been released on bond after the sheriff’s department rejected ICE’s requests to keep jailing them. (McFadden secured re-election anyway last year.) And it beefed up its presence elsewhere in the state, recruiting a dozen rural counties into a new form of partnership that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to identify undocumented immigrants and detain them for the agency.

Now ICE is closing in on another long-held goal: a state law that would force sheriffs to do the agency’s bidding anywhere in North Carolina.

Thanks to their new supermajorities, Republicans likely have the votes to push through legislation that would preempt the new sheriffs’ policies. Prior iterations of this bill, which ICE helped craft, were vetoed by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, but the GOP recently gained the ability to override his vetoes and quickly pushed through long-stalled priorities like abortion restrictions. Immigrants rights’ advocates tell Bolts they are bracing for ICE’s bill to be next. 

House Bill 10, titled “Require Sheriffs to Cooperate with ICE,” would force sheriffs to proactively contact ICE to check the status of anyone booked into their jail for a felony or class A1 misdemeanor. 

The bill would also mandate that sheriffs honor so-called immigration detainers—-administrative requests by ICE to keep someone in jail beyond their scheduled release, without a warrant, in order to give federal agents time to pick them up. 

One of its chief sponsors, Republican Representative Destin Hall, says the bill is meant to target “woke sheriffs.” He promised in a video that it would “put a stop” to their “sanctuary” approach. 

Up until now, sheriffs have enjoyed the discretion to disregard detention requests from ICE. After 2018, the newly elected sheriffs said that jailing someone under these circumstances violates their constitutional rights, since detainers are not backed by a judicial warrant. 

“We have a person fax over a document not viewed, not authorized, not verified by a judicial official, a judge, or federal magistrate,” McFadden told Bolts to explain why he stopped honoring detainers.

Elsewhere, some federal courts have ruled that ICE detainers violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable seizures. Colorado, California, and Illinois have outlawed them altogether. Still, McFadden and others may soon face a mandate to jail people based on them.

Passage of HB 10 could significantly alter the landscape of immigration detention in North Carolina given the volume of detainer requests ICE has historically made there. According to an immigration database managed by Syracuse University, the agency sent over 64,000 detainers to North Carolina jails between 2005 and 2021. 

“These detentions have huge negative consequences,” said Marín Baena. “All of a sudden a family is left in crisis. Oftentimes there are kids that get left behind—people are just scrambling to try to figure out how to pay rent for the next few months. It has a huge economic impact and it has a huge psychological impact on the people in our communities.” 

Because of the 2008 federal data-sharing program called “Secure Communities,” which automatically sends fingerprints of anyone booked into a jail through a federal database, ICE maintains a virtual presence in jails across the country regardless of their sheriffs’ approach to  immigration. But when sheriffs actively cooperate with ICE, it can increase the agency’s reach exponentially. 

Sheriffs represent a critical link for ICE because they oversee jails, which gives them a captive population to mine on ICE’s behalf. And zealous local officials like Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, who was the first in the state to sign on to the new partnership with ICE in 2020 and recently launched a statewide campaign for lieutenant governor, have gone out of their way to further fuse civil immigration law and the criminal legal system.

Proponents of HB 10 like Page defend this entanglement with rhetoric that conflates immigration and crime and casts immigration enforcement as a matter of public safety.

“I feel that assisting I.C.E by serving I.C.E federal arrest warrants and subsequently transferring criminal illegal aliens directly into their custody will make our communities safer,” Page said in 2020.  At a recent hearing for HB 10, he testified, “I truly believe the best way to make our communities safer is to remove any criminal elements.” Page has joined forces with other far-right sheriffs crowdfund donations to build a wall alongside the U.S. border and protest President Biden’s immigration policies. These efforts are often affiliated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national organization that is labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center; Page has traveled with FAIR and spoken at their events. 

Page, now the face of support for HB 10 among North Carolina sheriffs, declined an interview request, and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment for this story. 

Immigrants’ rights organizers warn that stepping up local collaboration with ICE will instill fear in North Carolina’s immigrant communities. “I’ve actually had clients who have told me that they didn’t go to the hospital when they had their first child because they were really worried,” said Adriel Orozco, an immigration attorney formerly with the North Carolina Justice Center who’s currently assisting the groups against HB 10.

Immigrants who land in local jails are typically still legally innocent and only held pretrial, often for minor reasons. North Carolina, for instance, does not allow undocumented people to apply for driver’s license, so someone could face a series of cascading ramifications—arrest, warrantless detention, transfer to a detention center in Georgia, since North Carolina has none of its own, and threat of removal—all for the alleged infraction of driving without a license. 

“The way that the bill is written puts anyone that’s charged at risk of being held for ICE,” said Arteaga. That includes not only people accused of serious crimes, whom HB 10’s supporters tend to focus on when discussing the bill, but also those who have been booked on minor infractions —and even people who may have been stopped for pretextual reasons because of the language they speak or the color of their skin.

“Racial profiling is utilized to intentionally place people into removal proceedings—because sometimes law enforcement knows that all it takes is an arrest,” Arteaga said. In Alamance County, for instance, the U.S Department of Justice  found racial profiling so extreme that the federal government stepped in to end a contract the county had with ICE in 2012; sheriff’s deputies, according to a federal civil rights investigation, were between 4 and 10 times more likely to stop Latinx drivers for traffic violations than white drivers. The county entered a new agreement with ICE during the Trump administration.

This year, 11 sheriffs wrote a public letter opposing HB 10 and denouncing immigration detainers, echoing the point that requiring local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE would make communities less safe, not more. “Multiple studies show that mandatory immigration enforcement makes people less likely to trust government authorities without improving public safety,” the group wrote. 

One of the sheriffs who signed the letter, Wake County’s Willie Rowe, is new to the office. He ousted a first-term Democratic incumbent last year in a primary before beating Republican Donnie Harrison, the longtime former sheriff who had forged a close relationship with ICE and whose possible return had alarmed local immigrants’ rights advocates.

McFadden also signed the letter. “Imagine people are being victimized in our city, our community, and [are] afraid to report it to law enforcement with the fear of ICE and deportation,” he told Bolts about his decision to no longer honor detainers. “For me, it was a very easy decision.”

The letter also warns of the “constitutional violations” and “Fourth Amendment concerns” that warrantless detention raises.

The group of 11 sheriffs represents over 40 percent of the state’s population. But the state’s influential sheriff association has not spoken up against HB 10. 

The association opposed an earlier iteration of the legislation in 2019, then switched to supporting it once lawmakers removed a provision allowing civilians to file a civil suit against sheriffs who don’t cooperate with ICE. The association said it had no formal position on the proposal’s 2022 iteration, though its sponsors claimed the association supported it. 

The association, which did not respond to requests for comment, has taken no position this year, and many sheriffs are staying quiet on HB 10.

Ten of the 11 sheriffs who signed the letter against HB 10 are Black, which stems largely from the turnover in the 2018 elections. “I think there’s a serious tension [within] the sheriffs’ association around this perceived loss of power by white sheriffs,” Arteaga says. 

For Felicia Arriaga, a professor at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs and the author of the new book Behind Crimmigration, which chronicles the recent history of local collaboration with ICE in North Carolina, this helps explain why more sheriffs in North Carolina haven’t rallied to the defense of those who are being targeted by ICE.

“If there were white sheriffs who were eager and open about not honoring detainers—because there are a handful of white sheriffs who do not honor detainers, at least in conversation with community members, that’s what they say—I think the conversation would be very different,” she told Bolts. 

McFadden, who is Black, echoes the point. “When the eight African American sheriffs took over the largest counties in North Carolina, it became a threat to the good ol’ boy system,” he told Bolts. 

The governor of North Carolina vetoed the bill’s prior incarnations when they came across his desk in 2019 and 2022, and Republicans lacked the votes to force it through. But the landscape is different this year. The GOP gained seats in both chambers in November, clinching a veto-proof majority in the Senate. They then secured a veto-proof majority in the House this spring thanks to Democrat Tricia Cotham’s defection to the Republican caucus.

HB 10 passed the House in March by a veto-proof majority. Every Republican lawmaker who voted supported it, as did three Democrats: Cotham, Michael Ray, and Cecil Brockman. 

It has since lingered in a Senate committee as Republicans prioritize these other issues and marking up the budget, but advocates tell Bolts they expect it to move forward.

“The votes are not in our favor. At all,” said Arteaga. 

In anticipation of the bill’s passage, the Carolina Migrant Network is switching course to consider litigation against it. The group is also reviving its immigration bond network in order to connect detained immigrants with lawyers and get them released on bond so that people aren’t sent to ICE detention centers out of state. 

They are also searching for ways to reduce arrests so that fewer people are booked in jail in the first place. This would interrupt the jail-to-deportation pipeline at an earlier stage in the process, Arteaga said. That could mean focusing attention away from sheriffs, whose hands would be more tightly bound by HB 10, and onto police chiefs and mayors who can choose to respond to infractions by issuing tickets rather than booking people into jail. 

Orozco noted that Democratic municipalities around the state could respond to HB10 by implementing local laws protecting immigrant communities. “Durham actually has a program to fund legal services for immigrants and an immigration court … so that’s a service other larger more populated counties could do,” he told Bolts. 

But, he added, there are already state laws on the books limiting what localities can do, such as the 2006 law cracking down on the issuance of drivers’ licenses to undocumented people. And if HB10, which its sponsor has referred to as a “test case,” becomes law, there’s no telling what other protections the legislature might seek to curtail. 

“One of the biggest fears,” Orozco said, “is that anytime there is a really great progressive or more inclusive policy for the immigrant community—that the legislature is just going to come back and figure out a way to restrict the ability for counties and cities to do that.”

To Marín Baena, HB 10 is just one piece in state Republicans’ larger agenda to transform North Carolina into a place that excludes entire groups of people from living safely and freely. 

“There’s a pattern here,” she said, pointing to other legislation like the recent 12-week abortion ban. “Who gets to call this state home and feel like they live here and don’t have to be afraid of hiding who they are?” 

The post North Carolina GOP Is Cracking Down on the Black Sheriffs Who Stood Up to ICE appeared first on Bolts.

This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and NC Policy Watch.

They packed the courtroom early, filling so many seats that a line stretched out the door of the building in downtown Raleigh that houses the North Carolina Supreme Court. In years past, many of the onlookers had been in handcuffs, jails and prison cells. Now, they wanted access to the ballot box. 

Those in line were told the courtroom was full shortly before oral arguments began. The overflow crowd walked down the street to First Baptist Church to watch the hearing streamed live in a basketball gym. Below the projection screen was a sign with a simple demand: “Unlock Our Vote.”

The state supreme court on Thursday held a hearing on whether North Carolinians should have the right to vote while on probation or parole. The case, CSI vs. Moore, is a challenge to North Carolina’s felony disenfranchisement law, which bars people from voting if they are incarcerated and if they are on some form of supervision over a felony conviction. 

Last year, a Superior Court in Wake County issued a landmark ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, effectively restoring the right to vote of 56,000 people in the run-up to the 2022 midterms.

The ruling kicked off a rush among civil rights organizers in North Carolina to tell those “second-chance voters” that they had regained their access to the ballot box, NC Policy Watch and Bolts reported in November. Some of them got to vote in November thanks to the ruling, which made North Carolina one of 24 states where anyone not incarcerated can vote.

But the 2022 midterms upended the political context in North Carolina by flipping the partisan majority of the state supreme court. Republicans picked up two seats, shifting the court to a 5-2 Republican majority and significantly diminishing the odds of major civil rights litigation like this lawsuit. 

The partisan shift loomed large at Thursday’s hearings. The two new Republican associate justices, Trey Allen and Richard Dietz, each signaled their skepticism toward the lower court ruling that expanded rights restoration. 

“The trial court seems to have imposed a remedy that’s beyond the authority of a court because the courts can’t grant the restoration of voting rights to felons,” said Allen. “The Constitution expressly provides that those rights can only be restored in the manner prescribed by law, and the authority to adopt such a law rests with the General Assembly, not with any court.”

“It seems that our constitutional doctrine is pretty clear, that in North Carolina, we don’t try to get into the minds of legislators,” said Dietz, pushing back against the idea that courts should remedy constitutional violations directly. “We declare something unconstitutional and then tell that other branch of government, ‘You need to try again. You enacted a law and it was unconstitutional. Enact one that is not unconstitutional.’”

Their GOP colleagues hinted that they largely shared this attitude. Should they rule to overturn the Superior Court, it could roll back last year’s voting rights expansion.

Kristie Puckett-Williams, an ACLU of North Carolina organizer and a field captain for Unlock Our Vote, said after the hearing that she thought the Republican justices seemed ready to uphold the state’s felony disenfranchisement law and overturn the lower court.

“The central debate is about who has the right to vote,” Puckett-Williams told Bolts and NC Policy Watch. And the justices during the hearing, she said, “foreshadowed that they are okay with us rolling back to a time in our history where poll taxes and literacy tests were common and standard.”

“I left feeling like they had an agenda.” she added.

Chris Shenton, a fellow at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a North Carolina-based organization that advocates for civil rights, said he couldn’t be sure what way the ruling would go. “I think the plaintiffs made a compelling argument that what was going on here is the same thing that happens with these statutes all over the country,” he said. “These laws were passed to disenfranchise Black voters in particular.”

It is not clear when the state supreme court will issue its ruling.

The supreme court is set to hear many other cases that touch on racial justice and civil rights this term. Next Wednesday the court will hear oral arguments in four separate cases involving alleged racial discrimination in jury selection, known as Batson violations. And, with the court’s rightward shift, many criminal justice advocates are concerned the high court will revert to its past practice and not find any Batson violations in cases that it hears.

Other voting rights issues could be at stake, too. Earlier this year, Republicans petitioned the supreme court to throw out last year’s opinions on a voter ID law and redistricting—written by the Democratic majority—and grant new hearings. In those cases, the majority had ruled against laws that, even if they appear race-neutral, have “profoundly discriminatory effects.”

The question at the core of Thursday’s hearing was whether North Carolina’s felony disenfranchisement statute should be struck down because it is racist.

The 65-page order, written last year by Superior Court Judges Lisa C. Bell and Keith O. Gregory, described felony disenfranchisement in North Carolina as a means by which white supremacists in North Carolina suppressed Black citizens’ political power, a tool that still disproportionately affects Black voters. The law, Gregory and Bell wrote, “continues to carry over and reflect the same racist goals that drove the original 19th century enactment.”

 In 2020, Black residents made up 22 percent of North Carolina’s voting-age population, but 45 percent of those disenfranchised because they were on parole or probation over a felony, according to a study conducted by The Sentencing Project. 

Pete Patterson, the attorney representing Republican legislators, argued in Thursday’s hearing that the felony disenfranchisement statute was race-neutral. 

The 1840 law that excluded people from the franchise if they had a felony conviction “couldn’t have been motivated by racial discrimination,” he said, since this occurred before Black people were allowed to vote in North Carolina.

The legislature in the 1970s relaxed those restrictions, restoring the voting rights of individuals convicted of felonies so long as they completed their terms of probation or parole, a reform Patterson called a “signature achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.” 

Stanton Jones, an attorney for the plaintiffs, defended the Superior Court’s findings. The statute in question might not explicitly mention race, he said, but it still disproportionately affects Black North Carolinians, given disparate outcomes in the criminal justice system involving people of color.

“It is intentionally designed to discriminate against African Americans, the trial court found,” Jones said. “This specific, intentional racial discrimination here was disenfranchising the class of voters, people who have felony convictions but are not incarcerated and living in the community. That was the racist design going back to 1877.”

Jones denounced the argument, made before the trial court, that the law is race-neutral since it treats Black and white residents who have felony convictions in the same manner. “That rationale would justify a poll tax or a literacy test,” Jones said. “A literacy test disenfranchises 100 percent of white people and Black people who can’t pass the literacy tests.”

Another core argument for Patterson was that the plaintiffs’ case is moot because the North Carolina constitution explicitly authorizes felony disenfranchisement—a point that at least one of the new GOP justices seemed to agree with. 

“This court would be creating tension if it says that felons have a fundamental right to vote, because there’s a provision in the constitution that says explicitly that they do not,” Patterson said.

Pointing to Article VI of the state constitution, he said people convicted of felonies did not have the right to vote “unless and until their rights are restored in the manner provided by law.”

Jones rebutted Patterson’s take on Article VI, stating that it “does not give the legislature a special license to intentionally discriminate against African Americans.” The Article authorizes laws pertaining to disenfranchisement and re-enfranchisement, he said, but those laws must comply with another part of the constitution: the Equal Protection Clause. He was joined by Associate Justice Anita Earls, one of two Democrats on the high court, in mentioning the Equal Protection Clause, which has been used to support voting rights claims.

Allen, the new GOP justice, pushed back. “I think we all agree that means that felons don’t have the right to vote merely upon their release from prison or incarceration,” Allen said. “As I understand the constitutional provision, the default is no felon voting, except in the ‘manner prescribed by law.’ Where’s the law that prescribes that felons can vote, or may vote, simply upon being released from incarceration?” 

Associate Justice Phil Berger, Jr., echoed Allen’s point, evoking “a specific class of individuals, without regard to race, who have no right to vote under the constitution.” Berger is the son of the Senate’s Republican leader Phil Berger, who is among the defendants in this case. He declined to recuse himself.

But Daryl Atkinson, another attorney for the plaintiffs, echoed Jones’s appeal for the supreme court to protect North Carolinians’ fundamental rights. 

He stressed that barring people on supervision from voting has meant that people have had to pay off fines and fines, tying the right to vote to how much money someone has.

“Basically what’s undergirding opposing counsels’ arguments is that, people convicted of felonies, you can do any manner of things to them to discriminate against them, and it wouldn’t violate the constitution,” he said. “Your honor, that can’t be the way.” 

“Folks must still have some constitutional protections under the North Carolina constitution,” he added.

The video feed at First Baptist Church shut off as the justices stood, signaling that the court was in recess. The plaintiffs and their attorneys would soon join the overflow crowd at First Baptist for lunch. They would celebrate all that they had accomplished since the lawsuit began in 2019—even if their hard-fought gains may soon be lost.

Corey Purdie, the founder and director of Wash Away Unemployment, an organization that helps people released from prison transition to life in the free world, told NC Policy Watch and Bolts that those in the courtroom came bearing a message. 

“It’s showing that we care,” he said, “that people are present, that people are concerned, that people matter.”

The post North Carolina Supreme Court Signals It May Roll Back Voting Rights for Thousands appeared first on Bolts.

This was not the election that politicians and pundits expected.

Defying the historical trends of midterms, Democrats held the U.S Senate and have a chance to expand their majority if they win a runoff in Georgia next month. Republicans are on the brink of capturing the U.S. House but their still-uncertain majority will be far tighter than they envisioned.

Democrats did even better in state-level fights. They defended or flipped most of the cycle’s competitive governorships, seized at least three legislative chambers, and defeated all election deniers who were running to take over election administration in battleground states. They also seized control of four state governments—Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota—which should yield major policy ramifications next year. 

The result is most historic in Michigan, which will experience its first period under Democratic governance since the early 1980s, and where voters also approved enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution.

Republicans did score important wins, notably flipping control of North Carolina’s supreme court and Nevada’s governorship. But they have gained no state government as of now, and they have lost control of the state government in Arizona for the first time since 2009.

Bolts has updated its cheat sheet of more than 500 elections to watch with results that are known, so you can keep track of all these developments in one place.

But we are most focused at Bolts on the politics of criminal justice and voting rights, two areas where local officials wield tremendous powers but are often overlooked. Since Tuesday, the Bolts team has extensively reported on how the elections will affect political power on those issues. 

This post lays out all our findings—on prosecution, policing, immigration, voting rights, the politics of courts, and more.

— Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief

In secretary of state races, election deniers (mostly) lose

Ever since his failure to cling to power in 2020, Donald Trump hoped to install allies into the offices that run and certify elections in 2022. But voters last week repudiated the candidates who were signaling that they may override the wishes of the electorate.

All election deniers who ran for secretary of state in battleground states lost on Tuesday, blocking major avenues for the former president to manipulate the next election.

Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee in Nevada, came closest, losing by only two percentage points. Mark Finchem, an Arizona lawmaker who has championed proposals to decertify his own state’s presidential results, lost by a slightly wider margin. In Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, incumbent Democrats crushed election deniers by margins ranging from 9 to 14 percentage points. And in Pennsylvania, voters resoundingly rejected a far-right candidate for governor who had promised to appoint a like-minded secretary of state, with the risk of throwing the election process into chaos.

Still, Republicans who ran on the Big Lie did not end up empty handed on Tuesday. A nationwide Bolts analysis found 12 election deniers who were running for secretary of state. Four of them won in red states: Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

Read more from Camille Squires and Daniel Nichanian in Bolts about how the Big Lie fared on Tuesday. 

Criminal justice reformers make inroads

Republicans bet that they would score gains in the midterms by attacking criminal justice reformers. But that strategy repeatedly failed last week, most notably in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, where Democratic nominee John Fetterman prevailed after relentless attacks over his record of promoting clemency for people incarcerated for life.

Reformers also made inroads in local races and are poised to take over new prosecutor offices.

Mary Moriarty, a career public defender who has clashed with the local police and prosecutors, will be the next prosecutor of Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis. After a campaign that encapsulated the local conflicts over policing and prosecution since George Floyd’s murder, she easily prevailed against a former judge who had argued that reform rhetoric was threatening public safety.​

Moriarty made the opposite case, impugning the effects on safety of decades of tough-on-crime policies. “I thought, people who really value public safety, and a fair and just system need to step up during this time of turmoil and really present options that aren’t the same old things we’ve had for decades, which haven’t kept us safer,” she told Bolts and Mother Jones in October.

Other candidates who emphasized a reform message also prevailed. Kimberly Graham, who represents abused and neglected children in court, won in Polk County (Des Moines), Iowa’s most populous county. Kelly Higgins, a defense attorney, won the DA race in fast-growing Hays County, Texas, after promising a “sea change;” he told Bolts that he was moved toward more progressive positions by a group of activists organizing in Central Texas. They join Memphis’s new DA, who ousted a tough-on-crime incumbent in August, in growing reform ranks. In Dallas and San Antonio, Democratic DAs who have come under GOP fire for their policies and have promised to not prosecute abortion beat tough-on-crime challengers.

In King County, home to Seattle, voters chose Leesa Manion over a candidate who wanted to bring more punitive practices to the county. Manion, who has cast herself as a cautious reformer rather than embrace progressive priorities, helped roll out reforms as chief of staff of the retiring prosecutor.

Reform candidates lost important races, though, in counties where they were challenging incumbent prosecutors. They fell short in Maricopa County, Arizona, Pinellas and Pasco counties, Florida, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, and Douglas County, Nebraska. In Maricopa, the nation’s fourth most populous county, Republican Rachel Mitchell defeated a Democratic challenger who promised to never prosecute abortion and to work to lower incarceration. In Plymouth, the defeat of a civil rights attorney adds to other losses by state progressives in September’s Democratic primaries.

One of the year’s most important DA races remains undecided, as candidates are separated by less than one percentage point with tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted in Alameda County (Oakland). 

Debates over police accountability shake up local elections

Running for DA in Oklahoma County, Republican Kevin Calvey vowed to drop the charges filed by the outgoing DA against five Oklahoma City police officers who shot and killed 15-year Stavian Rodriguez outside a convenience store. “I would have shot him myself,” he said during a primary forum. Calvey lost last week to Democrat Vicki Behenna.

The local Fraternal Order of Police in Marion County, Indiana, targeted chief prosecutor Ryan Mears this year and endorsed a Republican candidate who wanted to ramp up low-level arrests and prosecutions. Mears prevailed last week.

And in Los Angeles, Kenneth Mejia captured the office of controller after an unconventional campaign that highlighted the magnitude of police spending in the city, including putting up billboards visualizing the size of the LAPD budget compared to other city services. Throughout the Los Angeles region, many candidates backed by police groups were trailing as of the latest count, including Rick Caruso in the Los Angeles mayoral race (against Karen Bass) and Suzie Price in the Long Beach mayoral race (against Rex Richardson).

In San Francisco, though, interim DA Brooke Jenkins, who replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin over the summer, prevailed against challengers who have criticized her handling of police accountability. Bolts reported two weeks ago that Boudin’s ouster has disrupted the prosecution of police officers who killed civilians, alarming victims’ families.

Ballot measures revamp voting rules

Ballot measures around the country resulted in expansive changes to election rules through reforms that are meant to increase turnout or make results more representative. 

The biggest expansion of ballot access came with Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. It will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, where voters authorized the legislature to set up early voting.

Oakland, California revamped campaign finance by adopting a democracy vouchers program. In future local elections, the city will provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to candidates of their choice.

In at least seven localities, including the state of Nevada, voters approved ranked-choice voting, which could durably shake up political dynamics. The measure in Nevada must be passed a second time by voters in 2024 to go into effect.

Read more from Camille Squires in Bolts about the ballot measures and referendums that touched on democracy.

Measures to protect abortion triumph

Voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont on Tuesday adopted constitutional amendments that enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions. The result in Michigan will have the most immediate effects since, unlike California and Vermont, Michigan has a statutory ban on abortion on the books. Prosecutors were already preparing for questions about whether they will prosecute abortion cases.

Pro-choice advocates also scored victories in referendums that were organized by anti-abortion forces in Kentucky and Montana.

An analysis published by Bolts in July found that a dozen state supreme courts have ruled that their states’ constitution shields abortion access, a critical protection in the face of the federal judiciary’s refusal to protect reproductive rights. But until Tuesday, no state constitution explicitly declared such a right; judges in those states relied on provisions that talked about a right to privacy or about due process. California, Michigan, and Vermont are the first three states to add provisions into their constitution that explicitly codify the right to an abortion. 

Read more from Quinn Yeargain in Bolts about how abortion fared on the ballot, and the new state constitutional landscape after the midterms.

Wins and losses for state referendums to legalize weed and psychedelics 

Drug policy reformers saw mixed results last week. Voters in Maryland and Missouri supported proposals to legalize marijuana for recreational use, joining the 19 U.S. states that have already done so. 

However, similar proposals in Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota all were shot down by voters.

Also, ten years to the week since Colorado and Oregon became the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana, Colorado voters are poised to approve a measure that removes criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. Oregon went first on this front with a measure decriminalizing those substances in 2020, though several conservative counties chose to opt-out last week. 

Read more from Alex Burness in Bolts about how drug policy fared on Tuesday.

Conservatives largely fail to oust sitting judges, but soar in two states

Mitch McConnell lost big last week, and not just because he failed to become the U.S. Senate Majority Leader. Back home in Kentucky, a local judge that has long drawn the right’s ire survived despite his opponent’s significant financial support from national conservatives, including McConnell’s PAC. 

Conservatives also lost in a series of efforts to oust sitting supreme court justices in Arkansas, Michigan, Montana, and New Mexico.

The Arkansas and Montana races were ostensibly nonpartisan, but two justices secured additional terms by beating candidates with deep ties to the GOP; the result in Arkansas is the right’s second loss of the year since they failed to oust another justice in May. In New Mexico, two Democratic justices won—at least one against a candidate who echoed election conspiracies—enabling the party to retain a large majority on the court. 

Democrats also retained their 4-3 edge on the Michigan supreme court; this was one of the biggest prizes of the night, with criminal justice, abortion, and voting cases hanging on the balance. They also maintained control of the hotly-disputed Illinois supreme court, one of the few that could have changed hands last week; they even expanded their majority by sweeping both seats on the ballot.

But GOP wins in two states will have vast consequences going forward.

North Carolina Republicans swept two seats and vaulted into a new majority on the high court. The results will have huge implications for redistricting, as the state must draw new maps before the 2024 elections, as well as for other civil rights cases. Bolts and NC Policy Watch reported two weeks ago on a pending case that will decide whether people on probation and parole in the state can vote.

Ohio Republicans swept all three supreme court seats that were on the ballot. All were technically already in GOP hands, and the party maintains its 4-3 edge. But the departure of Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who hit the mandatory retirement age, will significantly alter the court’s dynamics as she has repeatedly sided with Democratic justices in redistricting cases.

Elsewhere on state supreme courts, things went as expected. Republicans prevailed in red Alabama and Texas; all justices were retained in Florida and Kansas, where abortion rights may have been at play; and in seven states judicial candidates ran unopposed. Bolts previewed all of the cycle’s supreme court elections earlier this year.

In sheriff races, voters oust the “Trump of LA” and the “Arpaio of the “East”

Massachusetts reformers were jubilant following the defeat of Thomas Hodgson, a far-right sheriff whose 25-year reign in Bristol County has been marked by extreme medical neglect, mounting jail suicides, and staunchly anti-immigrant policies. 

“Today is a great day!” Kellie Pearson, the former partner of Michael Ray, who committed suicide in a Bristol County jail, told Bolts on Wednesday. “People are becoming more educated about the state of our jails and they are ready for a change.” A Massachusetts watchdog dubbed Hodgson the “Arpaio of the East” in September.

On the other side of the country, Angelenos fired Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose office faces a mountain of allegations of abuse and retaliation—enough to fill a book, Bolts reported in May. Villanueva, the “Trump of LA” and a determined foe of the county’s reform DA George Gascón, conceded on Tuesday while trailing challenger Robert Luna 60 to 40 percent. Still, many local progressives are pressing for independent oversight rather than rely on internal change given the dark history of the department.

But change was not on the horizon in other counties led by sheriffs who have courted investigations. In Columbus County, North Carolina, a sheriff who reportedly unleashed racist tirades and resigned last month to avoid judicial removal won a new term. In Klickitat County, Washington, a far-right sheriff who has threatened to arrest state officials appears to have survived by about one percentage point; but a candidate with a similar outlook in the state’s Clark County appears to have narrowly lost. In Frederick County, Maryland, a longtime sheriff who is similarly embedded in far-right networks leads by 6 percentage points as of publication, with some ballots remaining.

Immigration hardliners lose critical sheriff elections

Immigrants’ rights advocates cheered landmark wins last week in counties that have a history of closely working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify and detain immigrants. 

Barnstable County, home to Cape Cod, stood out as the only county in New England to contract into ICE’s 287(g) program, which enables sheriff’s deputies to act like federal immigration agents. But voters elected a new sheriff who promises to “rip up” the county’s contract. In neighboring Bristol County, voters ousted Thomas Hodgson, a  sheriff with a history of draconian anti-immigrant policies. (See above.)

In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, longtime sheriff Donnie Harrison failed in his comeback effort and lost to Democrat Willie Rowe. While in office, he joined the 287(g) program and frequently demonized immigrants but abruptly changed his stance on collaborating with ICE when asked by Bolts in August. Advocates took his flip as a sign that protecting immigrants remains a potent issue. In Doña Ana County, New Mexico, a border county that is home to Las Cruces, Democratic Sheriff Kim Stewart easily prevailed over a Republican challenger who was advocating for a tighter relationship with federal agents. 

Voters also approved a ballot measure in Arizona to provide in-state tuition to students regardless of their legal status, and in Massachusetts to enable undocumented immigrants to access drivers’ licenses.

Still, several of the nation’s notorious anti-immigrant sheriffs likely survived in more rural areas, including in Alamance County, North Carolina, and in Frederick County, Maryland.

Read more in Bolts on the results in sheriff’s races that matter to immigration.

And also don’t miss…

Alabama and Ohio each adopted ballot measures pertaining to bail that could expand pretrial detention. Alabama also voted to introduce new restrictions on their governor’s ability to grant reprieve for a death sentence.

Wisconsin re-elected its Democratic attorney general over a GOP challenger who threatened to ramp up prosecutions over elections.

Montana voted to require police to obtain search warrants before searching electronic data.

Dallas Republicans lost their last seat on the county’s commissioner court, in a proxy battle over whether to pursue criminal justice reforms.

Four states voted to remove the so-called slavery loophole from their constitutions, which permitted forced and unpaid labor as punishment for crimes; advocates have hoped this may help their legal fight against forced prison labor. 

South Dakota expanded their Medicaid program, after a decade of GOP politicians refusing to expand the program as provided by Obamacare. In June, state voters rejected a separate measure that the GOP rushed onto the ballot that would have increased this measure needed.

In Los Angeles, voters appear to have approved ballot measures that will strengthen affordable housing.

And New York State approved a $4.2 billion bond to fund green infrastructure. 

The article was updated on Nov. 15 with the outcomes of elections in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The post Nine Midterm Stories You Should Not Miss on Criminal Justice and Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.