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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. How will city elections impact policing? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dyer is a road patrol deputy-turned social worker who campaigned on a reform vision that includes trying to steer people away from the justice system rather than draw them into it. Her win in November is a culmination of prior wins by a coalition of reformers in the county that also brought progressives into the prosecutor’s office and courts. 

Dyer has worked with these reformers to lay out plans to reduce unnecessary police encounters and arrests by limiting officers from making stops for certain low-level violations. She has pledged to address the stark racial disparities in traffic enforcement by ending quotas for traffic stops, and says arrests are the wrong tools for dealing with substance abuse and the opioid crisis: Her approach rejects the war on drugs and aims to steer people towards support rather than criminal punishment.

“Looking at the disparities involving drug arrests, there was a general understanding that we don’t want officers wasting their time,” Dyer told Bolts in an interview. “There is a frustration when officers are nickel and diming or getting involved in low-level things, and a frustration with pretext stops in general was resounding countywide.”

Dyer’s platform appealed broadly to voters in the liberal college town of Ann Arbor, as well as the surrounding rural areas where even many voters with more conservative values are fed up with the kind of policing that cycles people through the legal system without addressing their needs. 

But to effectively carry out her plans, Dyer will also need allies in the justice system. She has at least one in Eli Savit, who was just reelected as Washtenaw’s Prosecuting Attorney after running unopposed. Savit first won office in 2020 at the height of the racial justice movement that swept through the country following the police killing of George Floyd. The movement helped give rise to a brand of progressive prosecutors including Savit, who embraced a less punitive approach that broke away from his tough-on-crime predecessor. His office took aim at the issue of racial profiling by announcing he would drop the charges in situations where officers use minor traffic violations as an excuse to search for drugs or other contraband. A slew of other policies offered leniency towards juveniles arrested on minor offenses, and declined charges for consensual sex work and certain low-level drug crimes — but those reforms can only make an impact after an arrest has already been made. 

Now with Dyer as the county’s top cop and Savit as its lead prosecutor, they hope to move these reforms forward by working collaboratively on policies that were previously siloed in different parts of the justice system. 

“What you see in Washtenaw is a lot of different partners in conjunction with the community are largely working towards the same goals and from the same playbook,” Savit said. “It reflects our community values. Ultimately, what people in Washtenaw want is for us to work together to get people on the right track, rather than cycling them through the justice system over and over again in an ineffective fashion.”

In November of 2020, Savit’s win was hailed as a success for the progressive prosecutor movement that for at least a decade has sought to reform local DA offices across the country. His policies gave reformers in Washtenaw an inroad for curbing the harm wrought on by excessive criminal punishment by deflecting some low-level arrests. 

Savit regards his policy on pretextual stops — where minor traffic violations are used as an excuse to search cars for contraband — as a success. His office initially declined several of those cases, Savit told Bolts. But soon, police agencies across the county largely stopped sending those kinds of cases to his office. The approach later gained support in Ann Arbor, the county’s largest city, where the city council unanimously voted last year to limit police from stopping drivers for minor violations like cracked windshields or broken taillights that do not pose any risk to traffic safety. 

Now with Dyer in office as well, organizers hope to stop even more of those arrests from happening in the first place. 

“Our racial disparities in low level traffic stops are through the roof at the sheriff’s office,” Dyer told Bolts. “Regardless if the prosecutor decides to charge a case, the harm is still caused at the forefront. Avoiding those stops when possible, when it’s not a safety-related issue, is really important. There are so many instances where somebody has been pulled over, pulled out their car and searched. The police find nothing. They let them go, but the harm stays with that person.”

Like Dyer, Savit also embraced a legal strategy for addressing drugs that is focused on harm reduction and rehabilitation rather than punishment. His office decriminalized the possession and distribution of controlled medications like methadone and buprenorphine that are used to treat opioid addiction and curb fentanyl use. Like with the traffic stop arrests, very few of those cases now come across Savit’s desk. The remaining arrests for illegal possession of methadone or buprenorphine mostly come from people incarcerated in nearby prisons, and Savit’s office typically drops those cases, he said. Even though prosecutors rarely need to decline charges now, it is critical to have a public policy in place so the fear of criminal penalties will not deter people from accessing life saving medications, he said. 

“Why on earth would we want to be discouraging somebody from using a medicine that we know is an alternative to using a dangerous drug that could kill them? We want less overdose deaths, not more. ” Savit told Bolts.

But a policy of non-enforcement is only effective if the entire criminal legal system is aligned across prosecutors and police, which isn’t the case for most places in the state. As Michigan has scaled up harm reduction initiatives in recent years—funded in part by payouts from pharmaceutical companies acquired through opioid settlements—the enforcement around controlled methadone and buprenorphine has been a patchwork across the state and even within Washtenaw County. 

Dyer’s position—that criminal enforcement and arrests are the wrong way to address addiction issues—is rooted in her background as a social worker and therapist. She has advocated for unarmed community responders and public health outreach workers to deal with opioids, rather than police. And she plans to end internal quotas that encourage officers to make stops, search people for drugs, and cite or arrest them for minor drug violations.

Having a sheriff who’s onboard with harm reduction tactics helps establish a uniform approach to managing the opioid crisis, said Jonathan Laye, program director for Supportive Connections, a social service group aimed at steering people away from the justice system.

“The county is definitely starting to go in the right direction when it comes to prioritizing treatment or engagement rather than locking people up over petty stuff. The question is really getting people in the right places who understand the difference between a symptom and a crime,” Laye said.

Even when police don’t make arrests for drug paraphernalia, those items are sometimes still used by officers as probable cause to justify a search, said Cindy Bodewes, president of the Washtenaw Regional Organizing Coalition, a grassroots group pushing for reforms in the county. She hopes Dyer will bridge the “disconnect between the prosecutor’s strategy and arrest strategy,” Bodewes said.

“That’s why it is so important to have a law enforcement policy in place in order to have harm reduction in a community where they don’t have to be looking over their shoulder, afraid of the police taking action, regardless of whether they can be charged or not,” Dyer said.

Even when prosecutors signal that they will not pursue certain cases, changing the culture and behavior of police departments can be more difficult. Police leaders don’t always know what is happening on the ground, and are sometimes unaware that officers need to be brought up to speed on policy changes, Bodewes said. That is why it is important for grassroots organizations and community members to have a way to “report directly to the sheriff,” she said.

Dyer says her experience as a rank-and-file deputy showed her the extent to which officers are often slow to adapt to new policing strategies, especially when changes are not written into department policy and backed with additional training. 

She is forming community advisory committees on issues like traffic stops, jail visitation and mental health to bolster transparency and accountability by allowing the public to help shape department policy. Savit formed similar committees after first winning office to develop his reforms, which also helped prosecutors develop a restorative justice process that diverts people from criminal punishments. Dyer aims to create another group of diverse community voices to make policy recommendations directly to her office. It’s another step, she says, to ensure that her advisors are not just an echo chamber of police brass: critics will have access to the inner workings of the department.hold their elected officials accountable. 

“Having a community that is educated around what we’re doing, our operations, our policies, can be a really powerful ally to make sure that what I think is happening at the top is what’s actually happening at the bottom,” Dyer said.

Dyer’s and Savits’ victories last month were an exception to what was largely a nationwide turn away from reform politics. 

In Chicago, retiring State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who championed reforms like the abolition of cash bail statewide and the development of the nation’s first restorative justice community court, will be replaced by tough-on-crime Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke, who has promised to roll back some of Foxx’s policies. In Los Angeles and Alameda Counties, progressive prosecutors George Gascon and Pamela Price were unseated amid complaints that their lenience was to blame for crime, which has largely declined since the pandemic, and social issues like opioids and homelessness. On the national stage, the Democratic party’s national platform abandoned issues like police violence and mass incarceration that were at the core of past campaigns. 

For many observers, this election signaled a waning in the strength of the criminal justice reform movement that came into full force just four years ago. 

But criminal justice reform has managed to remain on the agenda in Michigan. In October, the state enacted an overhaul of the juvenile justice system to eliminate most of the fines and fees that saddled young people with debt and penalized them for being unable to pay. Widespread dissatisfaction with the juvenile justice system helped stoke an appetite for continued change in Washtenaw, according to some of Dyer’s supporters. She wasn’t the only progressive candidate running for sheriff in Washtenaw. She narrowly won the primary against Derrick Jackson, the current director of community engagement at the sheriff’s office who works closely with grassroots reform groups and has a track record of boosting diversion efforts. In many communities, Dyer’s message resonated more deeply in many Washtenaw communities because her vision for reform was more bold, said Carolyn Madden, co-chair of Friends of Restorative Justice. 

“It was a matter of being a bit more progressive, a bit more out there, a bit more bold. And that is what we need in our criminal justice system right now—some boldness—and Alyshia seems to want to make some real change,” Madden said. 

Madden’s organization has already worked with Savit to help develop his office’s restorative justice process to repair the harm caused by a crime without “heaping on punishment,” Madden said. The program puts charges on hold for 18 months while the perpetrator of a crime works with the victim and community-based mediators to repair the harms they caused and address the underlying issues that led to their actions. Prosecutors drop the case if there are no new violations at the end of the period—though offenses that pose a serious risk to public safety or involve domestic or sexual abuse are not eligible for restorative justice. She hopes Dyer’s expertise in social work will help expand restorative justice practices in Washtenaw and improve opportunities for rehabilitation both in the community and in the jail.

“When police work very closely with the community, they know the people and they can go about addressing issues with different kinds of programs. Even if you’re not going to arrest them, particularly young people, you have to help them. You have to give them other things, especially if it’s a result of young people being confused or impoverished,” Madden said.

The county is already piloting a program to that effect: the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion and Deflection (LEADD) initiative, which was spearheaded in part by Jackson’s community engagement team within the sheriff’s office. Unlike typical diversion programs, where the court drops charges once a person meets certain conditions like completing drug treatment, LEADD allows county officers to connect someone to a case manager to get the support they need in lieu of making an arrest in the first place.

“The goal is to provide an alternative to arrest or citations for individuals who have unmet basic needs that stem from things like mental illness, substance abuse, and severe poverty and homelessness. It can increase the number of people getting the services they need and decrease the number of people in contact with the criminal justice apparatus,” said Hailey Richards, the program coordinator for LEADD.

Many of Dyer’s supporters hope she will continue to build upon the LEADD program, which is currently being tested in Ypsilanti Township, and expand it across the rest of the county. The pre-arrest diversion model “is a less harmful way police can offer someone assistance, and it can really help change people’s lives,” Dyer said. But there remains a need for community-based alternatives for responding to many issues that armed law enforcement officers are not best suited to deal with. Dyer says she also plans to support these by using a portion of the county’s budget dedicated to mental health and public safety initiatives.

“We as a country have dumped everything on law enforcement. But officers are not doctors, are not social workers, they’re not therapists, and we keep expecting them to be. I talk to officers who say they don’t like to go on low-level calls or calls involving mental health when they’re not trained to understand how to handle it,” Dyer said.

 “We have a unique opportunity to really start building safety net responder programs that avoid the legal system.”

The post A Michigan Sheriff and Prosecutor Join Forces to Implement Progressive Policy appeared first on Bolts.

U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement detains an average of 37,000 people per night, often partnering with sheriffs who hold immigrants in their local facilities in exchange for a profit. For over a century, the U.S. government has relied on local jails to detain immigrants, creating a vast network of incarceration that operates with minimal oversight. Other detention centers, run by private companies, have also proliferated. The incoming Trump administration is likely to tap into this network.

We suspected that you have questions about this system, so we asked you to reach out and let us know as part of our series “Ask Bolts.”

To answer them, we turned to historian Brianna Nofil, an assistant professor at William & Mary who traces these developments in her new book, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration.

The growth in the detention of migrants, she argues, has fueled the broader expansion of the carceral state. From the detention of Chinese migrants in New York in the early 1900s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in the South in the 1980s, her research explains how federal authorities and local law enforcement have helped each other create a patchwork of policies that incentivizes incarceration. 

Nofil answered ten of your questions, exploring the legacy of the internment of Japanese Americans, the detention of Haitian refugees in the 1980s, and other pivotal historical moments that normalized and entrenched mass detention as a central feature of U.S. immigration policy. Many queries we received revolved around instances of pushback against this history and the lessons those hold for opponents today; Nofil tackles some of those questions too.

What historical moments changed public opinion and “normalized” immigration detention? — @behrbones, on BlueSky

For as long as migrant detention has occurred, Americans have raised questions about its morality and legality. Often this happened in the small towns that rented jail space to the immigration service. In Malone, New York, a border community that detained hundreds of Chinese migrants between 1900 and 1904, for example, the local newspaper described the incarceration of migrants as “a shame upon civilized government.” Still, detention has always been most politically popular when it targets people seen as too poor, too radical, too sick, and above all, too racially different to be citizens. 

In 1981, the Reagan administration began debating building federal detention centers in response to rising numbers of refugees from Haiti arriving in South Florida—the first major investment in permanent migrant detention infrastructure. But Reagan’s Department of Justice had hesitations. They wrote in an internal memo that the “appearance of ‘concentration camps’ which, at the present time, would be filled largely by blacks, may be publicly unacceptable.” There has always been uncertainty with whether Americans would tolerate migrant detention, or whether incarceration without trial was a bridge too far in American jurisprudence.

Mass migration from Haiti—and fear and demonization of Black refugees, of HIV-AIDS, of poverty—was a transformative moment for the normalization of detention. The Reagan administration successfully argued that Haitians were not legitimate asylum seekers and that detention was necessary to deter migrants from coming to the U.S. in the first place. It also marked a pivotal moment for how Americans think about refugees: for many policymakers and citizens, the migrants of the 1980s weren’t the “good” post-war refugees who patiently waited in Europe until the U.S. sent for them; these were people from the Caribbean and Latin America who were showing up in the U.S. and claiming asylum. The Reagan administration was terrified of what this change in asylum practice meant, and detention aided in transforming asylum seekers into another form of “illegal immigrant” in the eyes of the American public.

Why did sheriffs become such huge players in detaining immigrants if the feds are the ones arresting people? What’s stopping ICE from just detaining people on its own? — adapted by Bolts staff from a comment on sheriffs shared by Janice, from Ohio

A persistent obstacle for the immigration service has been finding physical space to detain people. At the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. had detention beds at major ports of entry, such as Ellis Island in New York City and Angel Island in San Francisco. But if agents apprehended a migrant away from major cities, the immigration service had little detention space of its own. This became a particular issue as more migrants began using the U.S. land borders as an entry point to thwart restrictive immigration laws. In order to detain people in most of the country, the immigration service brokered deals with sheriffs to detain migrants awaiting hearings and deportations in local jails, in exchange for a nightly rate paid to the county. 

Many sheriffs saw these arrangements as highly desirable—an easy way to pump federal money into their communities and turn the local jail into a revenue-producing institution. Some sheriffs had strong political and ideological commitments to deportation and immigration restriction; others saw it as simply a favor to the feds. As communities overbuilt jail space in the 1980s and 1990s, working with the immigration service became a way to keep rural jails filled and financially afloat. And revenue from migrant incarceration was often reinvested into prison expansion and law enforcement.

Jails, and the sheriffs who oversaw them, gave the immigration service a detention footprint in virtually every American community. When things went wrong at privately-run and federal facilities, jails served as the safety valve—a place where the immigration service could transfer migrants to deter protests, respond to legal interventions, and counter criticism. In recent years, sheriffs have become even more essential in deportation, via programs like 287(g) that deputize local law enforcement to carry out certain functions of federal immigration officials.

Japanese immigrants & US citizens were rounded up & placed in internment camps during WW2. What laws or court precedents were the authorization for this action, and are these still relevant today? — Ginger, from Arizona

The FDR administration apprehended Japanese nationals under the wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law which Trump has promised to immediately invoke as the backbone of his deportation program. The law empowers the president to detain and deport non‑citizens when the nation is at war—or in the case of a presidentially proclaimed “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a foreign nation. The law has never been used when the U.S. is not at war. However, U.S. immigration law has long blurred the lines between migration and invasion: The pivotal 1899 Chinese Exclusion case that established federal control over immigration described migration control as a by-product of foreign affairs and immigration as an act of “foreign aggression and encroachment.” 

Japanese Americans were apprehended via an Executive Order, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944). Korematsu wasn’t overturned until 2018, during Trump v. Hawaii, which ruled on the legality of the ‘Muslim ban.’ Legal scholars have different interpretations about whether Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act in this way—but there’s good reason to believe the courts won’t stop him. 

The Migrant’s Jail looks at these legal precedents, but it also looks at the legacies of Japanese wartime incarceration in terms of built environment: The U.S. immigration service used existing relationships with sheriffs to aid in apprehending and jailing Japanese nationals, and after the war was over, repurposed Japanese detention barracks for the mass deportation drives of Mexican migrants in the 1950s. The immigration service has long described itself as pursuing a strategy of “flexible detention space”—this is an extreme example, but it shows how detention infrastructure could be reimagined for whichever project of racial control and removal the state deemed most pressing.

My understanding is that the Obama administration tried to get rid of for-profit prisons on a federal level. Has that work been completely undone? I’m thinking of this especially in light of the planned mass deportation (and presumably incarceration), and how private prisons and profits will play into this. — @thehoneytheif, on BlueSky

(Editor’s note: President Barack Obama’s executive order against private prisons, which was rescinded by President Donald Trump, did not apply to immigration lock-ups. But the question of how private companies feature into this detention landscape remains relevant.)

Presidents Obama and Biden both restricted the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) contracting for private prisons (and indeed, the BOP ended their last private prison contract in 2022) while leaving the door open for ICE to continue using for-profit facilities. In 2023, 90 percent of people in ICE custody were held in for-profit detention centers—that’s a 10 percent increase from the Trump administration. The private prison business has boomed under Biden, and Trump stands to inherit a multi-billion dollar network of private sector detention sites. This will be supplemented by the continuing cooperation of sheriffs and local law enforcement in housing migrants in local jails, many of which are also operated by private prison companies. 

The federal government owns and operates very few of its own migrant detention sites today. The agency claims it’s faster and cheaper to outsource detention to the private sector. But another big reason for the embrace of private prisons is that it distances the federal government from accountability for detention practices; since the privatization boom of the 1980s, the immigration service has regularly shielded itself from criticism and attempted to insulate itself from legal liability by arguing that detention’s worst abuses are the faults of contractors, rather than the directives of the government itself.

Who will be making money off of this? — @sbec, on BlueSky

Everyone! The migrant detention system (like for-profit incarceration, more broadly) rewards those who can sustain human life at the lowest possible cost: Everything from food services to medical care to data management to transportation services between detention centers to deportation flights is making companies money. In 2019, employees of Wayfair staged a walkout to protest their company providing furniture to detention centers—a reminder that even beyond the obvious suspects, like prison private companies, there is enormous profit to be made by the private sector across the board from government contracting.

What sources do you use for data around ICE detention, and how concerned should we be about their accuracy over the next few years? — DSinger, from Illinois

Decades of scholars and activists have bemoaned the inadequacy of data and recordkeeping by immigration services. In 1923, the former president of the American Prison Association attempted to find out how many local jails detained migrants for the federal government, and was stunned to find that the federal government did not maintain this information. Similarly, in writing this book, I wasn’t able to find any data on how many migrants the U.S. detained annually prior to 1947—I’m fairly certain this data doesn’t exist. And because so much of detention is happening locally, and happening in ad hoc ways (in warehouses, in office buildings, in motels), the numbers we do have are likely imperfect.

Many of these problems persist, and one nonpartisan group of scholars describes the data released under the Biden administration as “inconsistent, error-ridden, and misleading.” A 2024 Government Accountability Office report suggested that the ICE’s methodology may be seriously undercounting the number of individuals detained in the U.S. And there’s plenty of other data ICE doesn’t collect at all: It’s extremely hard to find comprehensive information about all of ICE’s intergovernmental contracts, for example. The decentralization and outsourcing of detention makes the practice all the more difficult to monitor.

But there are resources that try to fill this void. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, based out of Syracuse University, does tremendous work in tracking immigration court backlogs, detainee transfers, and other enforcement metrics—much of which they acquire through FOIA. Austin Kocher’s substack is essential for dissection and analysis of immigration data; he also has a great list of additional data resources.

Do detained immigrants have access to the same rights in the justice system as legal residents who are arrested? — Bolts Lover, from Virginia

They do not. In the 1883 case of Fong Yue Ting v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that deportation, and by extension, detention, was not a punishment for a crime. This created one of the fundamental paradoxes of immigration detention—that it’s a civil or administrative form of imprisonment, rather than criminal punishment, even when it’s taking place in the exact same jail! In practice, this means that migrants in deportation proceedings have few due process protections: They are not entitled to legal representation, to a trial by jury, to a speedy trial. If apprehended within 100 miles of the border, migrants who entered the U.S. without authorization can be removed without a hearing. 

Access to legal aid is a particular issue for migrants in detention: Only 14 percent of detained immigrants go to court with lawyers, and migrants are twice as likely to obtain relief from deportation when they have legal representation. The U.S. has tried countless ways of distancing migrants from access to legal aid and accelerate deportations and removals, such as placing detention sites in rural communities and erratically transferring migrants across state lines. They have also tried to remove migrants from U.S. soil altogether, both through practices like interdicting migrants at sea, and through the creation of extraterritorial detention camps, like the one operated at Guantánamo Bay in the 1990s.

Despite these limits, migrants regardless of immigration status do have guaranteed rights under the Constitution. With raids likely to be a component of Trump’s deportation efforts, it’s critical that our neighbors know their rights, particularly when it comes to allowing ICE into their homes. ICE frequently misrepresents themselves as “police” during traffic stops and raids, or uses other ruses to access migrants, like claiming that they are investigating a crime or that they found a lost ID. ICE agents must have a signed judicial warrant from a judge to enter your home, not an administrative warrant signed by an ICE agent—and they rarely have a judicial warrant!

Have naturalized citizens or Americans born abroad been affected by these detention practices? Will they be now? — Gina, from North Carolina

Citizens have always gotten caught in the deportation machine: sometimes by design, sometimes by the machine’s imperfect (and categorically racist) methods of identifying, sorting, and adjudicating. There are countless mentions in newspapers and other archival records: For example, in 1929, the immigration service detained Emilio Martinez, a 15-year-old Mexican-American citizen, in Edinburg’s Hidalgo County Jail for three months on a charge of illegal entry. It took a small army of sympathetic lawyers, including famed South Texas lawmaker José Tomás Canales, to locate his birth certificate and secure his release. The U.S. also has a long history of denaturalization; historian Patrick Weil found that more than 22,000 Americans had their citizenship revoked away between 1906 and 1967, some on the basis of fraudulent documents or statements in their naturalization cases, but many others on the basis of purported political radicalism or “disloyal” conduct. 

Citizens certainly could become vulnerable. But far more vulnerable will be folks with legal status that could expire or be terminated with relatively little fanfare—for example, the approximately 1 million people who are currently shielded from deportation via Temporary Protected Status. “Legal” and “illegal” are not stable categories of belonging.

Are there historical examples of pushback that have restrained immigration detention? Or has it been a one-way ratchet? — @behrbones, on BlueSky

There have been significant legal victories against immigration detention. In 1982, for example, the Haitian Refugee Center challenged the mandatory detention of Haitian asylum seekers on the grounds that the Reagan administration had made the policy through improper channels and that it almost exclusively impacted Haitians. The judge ordered the release of 1,900 Haitians from detention. 

However, the federal government’s power over immigration is so sweeping that these legal victories have often forced the immigration service to formalize policies, rather than significantly stunting detention’s growth. In the aftermath of Louis v. Nelson, the courts conceded that the Reagan administration could simply create these same detention policies through proper administrative channels and continue the practice. After a lot of grumbling, the federal government did just that. 

Outside of the courts, some of the most successful pushback to detention has been via community organizing. Making the abuses and atrocities of migrant incarceration visible has been central to restraining detention. In the 1950s, when the U.S. formally disavowed detention except in “exceptional” cases, it was due in part to public outrage about migrants being detained for years on Ellis Island while awaiting investigations. Groups like the ACLU portrayed these lengthy detentions (mostly impacting Europeans) as evidence of an out-of-control Department of Justice, and an American form of gulag or concentration camp—ideologically and morally indefensible. They published political cartoons, memoirs of detainees, countless op-eds, and generally put names and faces to the suffering.

What options do local governments have to resist detention efforts? — MB, from New Mexico | How can progressive governors push back against Trump’s agenda? (While New Jersey has enacted laws barring the law enforcement and county governments collaborating with ICE, there are all these ways ICE still gets law enforcement collaboration.) — Satenik, from New Jersey

ICE acquires the majority of its detention space through intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs), a contract between the federal government and a county or city indicating that the locality will provide detention services. In some cases, this means migrants are held in the local jail. In other cases, localities subcontract with private prison companies. Using localities as a middleman allows ICE to acquire beds quickly and circumvent the more cumbersome federal procurement process. It also means revenue for localities: To this day, ICE does not track the amount of money localities collect from private prison companies when they subcontract detention services.

Much of the organizing of recent years has focused on pressuring localities to end IGSAs and get ICE out of local jails. It has been remarkably effective: New Jersey, California, Washington, Nevada, and Illinois have all passed laws that limit or bar migrant incarceration. But these laws have been controversial. In 2023, the courts sided with private prison company CoreCivic and the Biden administration in a lawsuit challenging the New Jersey detention ban. The judge called the ban “a dagger aimed at the heart of the federal government’s immigration enforcement mission and operations.” 

Many of these federal-local relationships flourish in the shadows—people simply don’t know all of the ways their cities and counties are aiding in deportations. 

Sanctuary policies—policies of non-cooperation with ICE—aren’t a silver bullet. ICE and the federal government have resources to work around them and coerce localities into cooperation, such as cutting funding to local law enforcement who refuse to aid in deportations. (This will also likely be challenged in court.) However, sanctuary policies do throw sand in the gears of the deportation system: They can delay removals, create time-consuming litigation, and make it more difficult for ICE to identify targets for deportation. Aside from defensive maneuvers, local governments can do more to ensure equitable access to social services and legal aid: The American Immigration Council has a list of model legislation for protecting migrants’ rights on the local level.

Questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity.

The post The Past and Present of Immigration Detention: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, Republican sheriff Bill Waybourn secured his win over Patrick Moses, a reverend and retired federal law enforcement official, with 54 to 46 percent of the vote. The race had been dominated by the high number of jail deaths during Waybourn’s tenure, with at least 65 people dying since he came to office in 2017, compared to 25 deaths in the jail in the eight years that preceded him. Local advocates and family members have protested outside the jail and filled county commissioners meetings in recent years to demand action from elected officials and basic information about how their loved ones died. 

Waybourn’s local critics have long accused the Trump-aligned sheriff of neglecting his duties at home in pursuit of right-wing celebrity. A campaign ad from Waybourn this cycle touted that he is “enforcing deportations, working with ICE, and building a wall around Tarrant County.” He spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally after the 2020 election and last year helped form an “election integrity task force” with other far-right county leaders, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Tarrant County. This year, he received an award from the Claremont Institute, an extremist organization tied to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in 2020. At a rally for Ted Cruz this week, Waybourn told the crowd that Election Day was “our D-Day, we need to be loaded up and ready to go, locked and loaded and ready to go.” 

Waybourn’s win was part of a rightward shift in Tarrant County, statewide, and nationally. The most populous GOP-controlled county in the U.S. narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but lurched right again with the election in 2022 of a far-right county executive who has reshaped local government. Bud Kennedy, a longtime columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, wrote on Wednesday that Waybourn, who won a larger share of votes in the county than Trump or Cruz, “had it easy,” saying that the Tarrant County Democratic Party “​continues to exist on paper but rarely in public.”

Crisis conditions at the Tarrant County jail began to dominate local headlines under Waybourn, who first won office in 2016. The county has been forced to pay out millions of dollars in recent years to settle lawsuits alleging horrific treatment of vulnerable people in his jail—including a pregnant woman who gave birth alone in a cell to a baby who would later die, a man with seizure disorder who died in his cell and wasn’t found for hours because guards lied about doing mandatory cell checks, and a woman with severe mental illness who died of apparent dehydration after months in the jail.  

Last month, Bolts reported that the sheriff has also been flouting a state law requiring independent law enforcement investigations into all deaths in custody, instead having the Fort Worth Police Department simply review investigations done by the sheriff’s office’s own staff into more than 20 deaths over the last three years. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state agency charged with regulating county jails, was not aware of the violation until informed by Bolts’ reporting, and has since told the sheriff’s office they must seek independent law enforcement investigations. 

Waybourn, who was defiant on the issue of rising jail deaths ahead of the election and has insisted he’s following state law, has previously tried to erode state oversight of jail deaths. As Bolts reported last year, Waybourn has previously pushed for legislation to gut a law meant to ensure that Texas sheriffs don’t investigate themselves after jail deaths—a key reform in the Sandra Bland Act that state lawmakers passed in 2017.

Jail reform advocates say those independent investigations, which regularly show dehumanizing and dangerous treatment that can lead to preventable deaths, are critical and often the only window into what really happened after someone dies behind bars. 

While Texas jail regulators have put Waybourn on notice for violating state law, the jail commission has been largely deferential to local sheriffs in the past. The governor-appointed commission has minimal staff and a shoestring budget but is tasked with inspecting more than 200 jails across the sprawling state. A 2021 state audit found that the commission fails to hold jails accountable due to limited enforcement power.  

Waybourn did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but he has repeatedly blamed the high number of deaths on people coming into the jail already sick. In an election night interview, the sheriff told WFAA that most people “really died in the hospital,” saying, “I can’t raise people from the dead and I can’t keep people from having bad diets and 30 years of heroin use and all of a sudden their heart can’t take it anymore and there’s not much we can do about that.” 

While county commissioners could exert influence over the sheriff through budget decisions, that hasn’t really happened, Democratic Commissioner Alisa Simmons told Bolts last month. Simmons accused Republican members who hold a majority on the commissioners court of trying to shield Waybourn from more scrutiny after they abruptly canceled their regular meeting scheduled for Election Day—during which officials were slated to discuss topics related to jail conditions, including hiring attorneys for jailers named in a lawsuit filed by the family of a former Marine with schizophrenia who was killed by guards in April.

Local advocates say they’ll continue pushing for changes at the jail under another term with Waybourn as sheriff. “We are in this work not because we thought we would win elections, but because it’s the right thing to do,” said Ryon Price, a pastor with Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, who worked with other local activists to file a complaint with the Department of Justice last year requesting a federal investigation into conditions at Tarrant County Jail. “We never set out to put all of our eggs in the basket of electoral politics,” he told Bolts, pointing to recent changes that he says followed public pressure and advocacy, like the resignation of the jail chief in the wake of the former Marine’s death this spring, and the indictment of two of his jailers on murder charges. 

“Public officials are ultimately accountable to the public, but they are also always to be accountable to the rule of law,” Price said. “There are courts, there are rules of law, there are state laws, there are the basic human rights as declared in the UN charter. All of these things should still hold the sheriff accountable.”

The post A Scandal-Plagued Sheriff Wins Another Term in North Texas appeared first on Bolts.

I answered six of your questions in the first part of our mailbag two weeks ago, from the role of state auditors to the most pivotal referendums. Today, I tackle six more. 

Navigate to the question that most interests you here, or scroll down to explore them all at your leisure:

Which legislative chambers may flip in November?
Jump to our answer.

What happens in elections where no one is running?
Jump to our answer.

Which party will win more congressional delegations, in case that matters for the presidential election?
Jump to our answer.

What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake?
Jump to our answer.

I spent hours trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was fruitless. Shouldn’t every candidate have a website with their platform?!
Jump to our answer.

I can’t seem to get people to care about boards of canvassers. Can you explain the significance of the offices that play a role in elections?
Jump to our answer.

The election is now just days away—so explore our cheat sheet of more than 500 critical races, and our election guides to supreme court races and to local criminal justice races. Before you know it, we’ll have plenty more on the results in November.

What is the [state legislative] chamber with the best chance of switching to blue? (Arizona I assume, but is there another?) — @sidewalkslam, on BlueSky

You’re right that Democrats’ biggest target is Arizona: If they pick up two seats each in the Senate and House, they would secure full control of the state government—a first since 1966.

But that’s not all. 

There’s Wisconsin, most notably. The victory of a liberal justice in 2023 paved the way for a ruling that struck down GOP gerrymanders. Now, the legislative elections are taking place under radically different maps that give Democrats a chance to flip the chambers; that’s especially true in the Assembly, since only half of the state Senate is up this year.

The New Hampshire House ended in a near-draw two years ago; if Democrats flip it this year, they would end GOP control over the state no matter what happens in the governor’s race. This chamber often comes down to tiny margins: It has 400 seats—that’s a national high, by far—and 30 races went to a recount two years ago; six were decided by a margin under 10 votes. 

But the GOP is also looking for gains. In 2022, Democrats unexpectedly flipped four chambers, which sparked major policy swings. This fall, control of three of them hangs by a thread. In Pennsylvania’s House, Michigan’s House, and Minnesota’s Senate, losing a single seat would cost Democrats the majority. (Democrats’ fourth 2022 gain, Michigan’s Senate, is not on the ballot this fall.)  The GOP is also eying other chambers, most notably Alaska’s House and Minnesota’s House.

And don’t just look at which party wins more seats. Many states are on supermajority watch. Nevada Democrats might gain a two-thirds majority in the state Senate, to go along with the one they already have in the Assembly; this would allow them to override vetoes by the Republican governor. The GOP, meanwhile, hopes to keep new supermajorities in Nebraska and North Carolina: The defection of a single Democrat in each state handed Republicans that edge, and now they can’t afford to lose any seat.

North Carolina Democrats, in fact, want to avenge that defection directly: Tricia Cotham, the lawmaker who switched parties, paving the way for major conservative wins like new abortion restrictions, is running for reelection in the Charlotte suburbs. The GOP redrew legislative maps to help her, but this is one of the most expensive races of the year.

Hoping to go even more granular and learn about which specific districts will determine the majority in these chambers? Our Bolts cheat sheet provides you information, state by state.

What happens in elections where no one is running? In my county in South Carolina, we have no one running for Soil and Water District Commission, but there is an ability to write-in a candidate. — Noah, from South Carolina

It’s extremely common for elections to feature one candidate running unopposed. Prosecutor races are often elections in name only, with incumbents waltzing into office with no opponent. This fall, all five of Oregon’s supreme court races feature a sitting justice with no challenger. Democrats are already sure to run the Massachusetts legislature next year, and Republicans the Oklahoma legislature, because most seats in each state have been left uncontested. 

But what about elections where no one files at all? That’s far less common, but it’s by no means unheard of. They’re more likely to pop up for local offices that are under the radar, like municipal treasurers, school board members, or neighborhood councils. 

Elections for soil and water commissions, which are local bodies that are meant to protect natural resources, are a prime spot for this. You just asked about one South Carolina county, but there are actually a handful in your state where no one filed to run for these bodies. It’s a similar story in North Carolina and Oregon, two other states with soil and water districts. 

If no one files to run by the deadline for candidates to appear on the ballot, it’s still possible for someone to mount a write-in bid. But that’s not as simple as just getting a few friends to jot down your name. Many states require that someone come forward and formally register as a write-in contender, though what that means varies greatly. In South Carolina, where you live, there’s no form to file, though the state asks candidates to notify local authorities. In Wisconsin, you need to file a form at least a few days prior. In North Carolina, depending on the office, you may need to collect signatures and file a petition months before an election. 

For instance, in Dare County, North Carolina, no one filed to appear on the ballot for the soil and water commission job, but a resident is currently mounting a write-in campaign.

What if an election really has no winner? Say no one ran, and no write-in materialized. The next step, once again, depends on your local laws. In many cases, this gets treated like a regular vacancy that the governor, county board, or city council would fill via an appointment. Here, too, some states have idiosyncratic rules: If such a situation occurs in North Carolina, the incumbent office-holder may hold the seat for the entire term even if they didn’t run for reelection.

Is there a chance for Democrats to win more congressional *delegations* this cycle? I’m thinking about the situation where neither candidate gets 270 electoral votes. Can Democrats get the lead in 26 states? — @MeWritesGood on X

This question refers to a possible scenario in which neither Harris nor Trump reach a majority in the electoral college—whether because they tied at 269 each, or even because of a faithless elector. In such a case, the U.S. House would decide the election: Each state’s delegation gets one combined vote, and someone needs the support of 26 delegations to become president. The presidential election hasn’t been decided in this way since 1824.

The GOP currently controls 26 delegations and Democrats 22. Two are tied. But what matters is the next Congress, the one that’ll be elected on Nov. 5. So could things change?

To your question: It’s exceedingly difficult to come up with a plausible set of November results that get Democrats to 26. Even if they were to sweep all districts on Bolts’ cheat sheet of competitive U.S. House races, they would only get to 23 delegations. 

Democrats face many obstacles here. For one, the more sparsely populated states lean red, the same structural issue that skews the U.S. Senate to the GOP. Just like in the Senate, the blue bastion of D.C. has no congressional representation. Plus, while North Carolina’s delegation is currently tied, the GOP redrew the state map with an aggressive gerrymander that guarantees it will gain a clear edge. 

A more worthwhile question is: Could the GOP slip below 26? This would happen if delegations end up tied, effectively canceling out their votes entirely and preventing the House from choosing any winner. (In such a scenario, the Vice President-Elect, chosen by the U.S. Senate, becomes the acting president.) 

Even for this goal, Democrats need a lot to go right for them. Accounting for the GOP’s likely gain of North Carolina, they need to defend their vulnerable seats in Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and gain enough seats to erase the GOP’s majorities in two of these four state delegations: Arizona, Iowa, Montana, and Wisconsin. 

The basic issue here: You’d expect House Democrats to only pull off such a sweep if the election cycle is very favorable to them—if their base turns out much more, for instance, or if undecided voters swing their way. But if the presidential race is so tight that it’s been thrown to the House, that’s probably not what election night looks like down ballot.

What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake? — @sommersmurf on BlueSky

If you realize that you’re in the wrong polling place, poll workers may be able to identify where you should go, and you may still have time to head to the correct location. But things may not be so simple. Maybe poll workers say they don’t know where you’re supposed to vote, or you believe your name was removed from voter rolls incorrectly, or there’s just no more time. Some states are also prone to cut polling places at the last minute, creating confusion. 

At that point, you can ask to cast a provisional ballot. (This option exists in every state other than Idaho and Minnesota, both of which offer same-day registration, which mitigates this issue.) A provisional ballot is one that’s put aside pending verification of a voter’s eligibility. 

But what happens next varies greatly by state: If local officials end up confirming that you did cast a provisional ballot in the wrong polling place, there’s a big range in what they’ll do with it. 

Broadly speaking, they fall in two big categories. They could count your vote for all the races you were eligible for: If you went a neighborhood over, you may have cast a vote in the wrong city council race, but why should your vote for governor or president also be tossed? 

But some states don’t even allow such a partial count. They completely reject a provisional if a voter casts it in the wrong place. Nothing is salvaged. This approach of fully rejecting provisionals “makes no sense,” says Jon Sherman, an attorney with the Fair Election Center who has written on the issue. “It’s totally irrational to reject people’s federal and statewide choices when they would be eligible to vote in those races anywhere in the state.”

You can find a comprehensive breakdown on which side each state falls in on Ballotpedia.

To reduce these risks, many states have set up at-large voting centers: These are polling places that can accommodate people living anywhere in a county or a city. Chicago calls them “supersites.” Such centers are common during the early voting period; some places also set them up on Election Day. 

“(At-large) voting centers are a major boost for turnout, particularly for low-propensity voters,” says Sherman, pointing to the research into their effects. “They are more convenient locations, and bigger and more accessible.”

But like so much else about how we vote, these rules are caught up in restrictions and litigation that sometimes produce a strange mismash. 

Take Arizona. On Election Day, this state uses at-large county centers, and simultaneously it uses precincts, much smaller locations that each voter is assigned to. On Nov. 5, there will be 246 at-large locations dispersed across the sprawling Maricopa County where people can vote regardless of where they live in the county. But if they go to a precinct location, and get it wrong, the state shows no mercy: Republicans passed a law that requires officials to toss provisionals cast in the incorrect location in their entirety—no partial count. Democrats sued but lost in a landmark Supreme Court case in 2021. This year, the GOP tried to ban the at-large centers as well, blaming them with no evidence for voter fraud, but they fell short.

I live in a pretty rural town in Virginia. I spent almost 2 hours the other day trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was basically fruitless. By the end I was poring through their LinkedIn profiles and the Facebook accounts of their various relatives trying to learn ANYTHING. Shouldn’t every candidate have to have a website with their platform?! — @usetyourloafman on Threads

I’ve shared your experience as a voter—and also as a journalist covering races that touch the criminal legal system, like prosecutors and sheriffs. Many candidates running for these offices avoid sharing their policies. They also sometimes insist they shouldn’t have to answer policy questions because they’re just running to apply the law, a response that ignores the vast discretion they’ll inherit.

In a past election cycle, I reached out to dozens of candidates running for sheriff in Texas about whether they planned to assist ICE with immigration enforcement as part of the agency’s 278(g) program, which is a key policy question that sheriffs control. Few responded. One replied with, “I do not think it is appropriate for me to speak about specific program recommendations for the sheriff’s office until I am sheriff.” (This candidate lost, by the way.)

Journalists here play an important role in asking candidates about their views, and many newsrooms have created extensive guides to help people navigate their local ballots. 

Nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters also publish candidate questionnaires and organize forums—though candidates will often decline to participate. And advocacy organizations may also want to pin them down about their commitment.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that’s talking to candidates in a local sheriff’s race, talked to me recently about why it’s important to her to press local candidates for answers. “We’ll ask them to get their policies in writing,” she said. “That’s the only way you can hold a candidate accountable, is if they violated a policy. If you don’t have a policy, then there’s nothing to measure anything against.”

In my state, Michigan, commissioners choose boards of canvassers. When we almost refused to certify our 2020 elections, people were furious and asked, how did these canvassers get their jobs? Now, I can’t seem to get people to care. Can you explain the significance of this and other downballot offices that can have major effects on elections? Roles that may not be obvious for their importance but are very much so? — Stacey, from Michigan

“Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans two years ago. His efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, from telling the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him thousands of votes, to his team’s hope that local officials would delay certification to create what they called a “cloud of confusion,” relied on the complicity of people sitting on local and state boards.

This is why Bolts created a resource, “Who Counts Our Elections,” that details who processes, counts, and certifies results in each state, and how they come to be in office. Here readers can learn, in their state, what offices play what role in this process.

In Michigan counties, for instance, local commissioners appoint the members of the canvassing board. In Pennsylvania, elected commissioners double as a board of elections. In Florida, three local officials come together to act as a certifying board. There are also separate statewide offices to finalize the results in each. To make matters more complicated, the officials who handle elections in the runup to election night may be different than those who handle the count; we have compiled state-by-state information on who runs elections in a separate resource.

And many of these election officials are elected themselves. 

In 2022, election deniers tried to take over elections offices but largely lost. Still, some sitting officials have signaled an openness to stretching their role and helping the GOP. If they act on it, it’d be up to state officials and courts to intervene and keep the count running smoothly. 

And this fall, there are still more downballot races that may hand election systems to election deniers. This includes the statewide races in Oregon and Missouri, and local races in Arizona’s all-important Maricopa County (Phoenix) and across the state of Florida. 

The post Downballot Stakes: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

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

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

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

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

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

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

California | San Francisco prosecutor

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

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

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

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

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

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

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

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

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

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

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

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

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

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

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

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

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

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

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

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

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

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

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

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

New York | Albany County prosecutor

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

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

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

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

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

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

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

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

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

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

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

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

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

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

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

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

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

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

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

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

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

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

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

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

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

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

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

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

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

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

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

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

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later in the meeting, LaMonica Bratton, the woman’s mother, walked up and placed a red urn with a silver rose on the podium before introducing herself to the Tarrant County commissioners seated in front of her: “I’m Ms. Bratton, Chasity Bonner’s mother.” Then she tapped the urn. “This is Chasity Bonner.”

“Because you are failing at your job, this is where my baby is,” she said.

The procession of grief and anger during the commission’s early October meeting speaks to the spike in deaths at the jail under Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, and the rising public pressure and outcry over jail conditions as he faces reelection in November. Since Waybourn took office in January 2017, at least 65 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody, compared to 25 jail deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him. Most of the people held in the jail are pre-trial, meaning they have never been convicted of their alleged crime.

As Waybourn faces increased scrutiny from local advocates, his office also appears to be flouting a state law requiring sheriffs to commission outside law enforcement investigations into all deaths in their jails. After Bolts filed a public records request for those investigations with the Fort Worth Police Department, which the sheriff’s office has listed as the agency looking into more than 20 jail deaths over the past three years, a police spokesperson said there were no responsive records. When asked about the discrepancy, the spokesperson wrote in an email, “I’m told that the Tarrant County Sheriff Department investigates those.”  

Waybourn, who did not respond to requests for an interview or questions for this story, has said his office is working on improvements and blamed the deaths on people entering custody who are already sick or intoxicated, calling his jail the “largest psychiatric hospital in Tarrant County.” 

In recent years, Tarrant County has paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits alleging horrific treatment of vulnerable people in Waybourn’s jail. One case, the largest settlement in the county’s history, involved a pregnant woman with a slew of mental health disorders who deteriorated in the jail for months until she became non-verbal, and eventually gave birth to her daughter alone inside her cell. The baby died ten days later. This fall, the county settled another case with the family of a woman with severe mental illness who died of apparent dehydration after five months in jail, one of three people with mental illness who died of thirst in the jail in recent years. Another lawsuit filed this year that’s still pending says an intellectually disabled woman with epilepsy was refused proper treatment and seized repeatedly in an unpadded cell during her week and a half in jail. According to the lawsuit, the woman left the jail covered in bruises and had to be hospitalized for weeks on a ventilator in the ICU. 

Advocates for better jail conditions in Tarrant County have long accused Waybourn, a Republican, of neglecting his core duties at home as he cultivated his celebrity status in far-right politics. Waybourn has expanded his office’s involvement in immigration enforcement and has testified in Congress about border security despite his county being hundreds of miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Last year he helped form an “election integrity task force” following pressure from North Texas election deniers to increase investigations of voter fraud—even though local election administrators had been lauded for running secure elections. 

“He came in here to make his base happy, to be a law and order sheriff, to put his foot down on ‘illegal aliens.’ And in so doing, he has wrought havoc on this community,” said Pamela Young, executive director of United Fort Worth, a group that has protested Waybourn and called for his ouster for years over the allegations of brutality and neglect at his jail. “He is a regular guest on conservative talk radio, podcasts, TV,” said Young, noting he headlined a Stop the Steal rally in the wake of the 2020 election, and posed for a photo with Kyle Rittenhouse at a fundraiser last year. “Instead of making sure that the people in his jail are safe, making sure that his jail is not overcrowded, making sure that people in the jail are not getting beat,” she said. 

Young is part of a group of local organizers, faith leaders and families of people who died at the jail who have held protests outside the lockup in recent years and flooded county commission meetings to demand intervention from other officials. In early June, a sister of Anthony Johnson Jr., the former marine who was pepper-sprayed and killed by guards in April, was kicked out of a commissioners meeting by the far-right county executive after she confronted elected officials during the public comment period. Later that month, two of Johnson’s jailers were indicted on murder charges, and 15 are now named in a lawsuit filed by his family. During a July commission meeting, a Baptist pastor in Fort Worth who often speaks out about jail deaths was also kicked out for going eight seconds over his allotted three minutes, and banned from attending for a year. (He successfully appealed and has since returned to commission meetings.)  

Advocates point to a pattern of people with mental illness being jailed instead of taken to a medical facility, and then facing neglect and brutality behind bars. In May, many showed up to a commission meeting to urge for the release of Kai’Yere Campbell, an intellectually and developmentally disabled 21-year-old who had been arrested from his group home and spent six months in jail despite being deemed incompetent to stand trial. “Here is a laboratory demonstration of how people with mental health issues die in our jail,” one speaker told commissioners, describing how he deteriorated in lockup and lost significant weight. “If you just wait, if there’s no intervention, we will be here before long about the death of Kai’Yere Campbell.” He was released to a state-supported living center the following month. 

Last year, local advocates worked with the civil rights clinic at Texas A&M University’s law school to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice and ask for a federal investigation into the jail. “The Tarrant County jail is a danger to the Tarrant County community,” the complaint stated. “This system of violence, failure to provide medical care, and failure to adequately investigate is characteristic of a culture of secrecy and coverup.” 

During a county forum in January about conditions at the jail, Waybourn insisted that deaths in custody are appropriately investigated and displayed a photo showing stacks of documents—an image of papers that he said represented thorough inquiries into jail deaths. “If you’re talking about conspiracy to cover up, there’s probably 100 people who have written reports in that thing—it’s just impossible,” the sheriff said, pointing to the photo on the screen behind him. “And I don’t know, maybe you’re a conspiracy theorist. I’m not, I believe Oswald killed the president.” 

Patrick Moses, Waybourn’s Democratic challenger in the November election, confronted the sheriff when it was time for audience questions, asking why taxpayers were funding an “election integrity” unit without evidence of fraud. “You just mentioned to us, sheriff, that you dont chase conspiracy theories,” Moses said. “While neglecting the people that are dying in the jail, you’re part of this great conspiracy.”

Moses, a Fort Worth pastor and retired federal law enforcement officer, didn’t respond to an interview request for this story. He has pointed to reducing jail deaths as one of his top priorities.

Waybourn won an overwhelming 81 percent of the vote in 2016 when he first ran for sheriff in Tarrant County, the last urban stronghold for the Texas GOP. But politics in Tarrant County have seen a shift in recent elections, with a majority of the county’s voters choosing Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz in the 2018 election for U.S. Senate. In 2020, Donald Trump lost Tarrant County, the first time a Republican presidential candidate failed to carry it since 1964, while Waybourn won re-election that year by just 5 points.

As deaths in Waybourn’s jail have increased, the sheriff has pushed for legislation to erode a key element of the Sandra Bland Act, a reform law Texas passed in 2017 that was meant to bolster accountability. The law mandates independent law enforcement investigations into jail deaths, a requirement that Waybourn said was often time-consuming and unnecessary when he testified in 2022 at a state Senate committee for legislation to limit outside investigations. The resulting bill, which did not pass, would have absolved sheriffs of having to commission these third-party investigations whenever deaths are blamed on “natural causes or occurring in a manner that does not indicate an offense has been committed.” 

These independent investigations, meant to ensure that sheriffs don’t investigate themselves, regularly document dehumanizing conditions and treatment that can lead to preventable deaths, and provide important evidence of wrongdoing, including criminal activity, even in cases where the deaths were ruled “natural.” 

But even so, they still sometimes echo the same pro-police bias that such investigations are supposed to prevent. For example, when 38-year-old Robert Miller died in 2019 after Tarrant County jail guards pepper-sprayed him, the Texas Rangers, the detective arm of state police, were called to investigate. The Ranger who investigated Miller’s death, Clarence “Trace” McDonald, didn’t watch any surveillance video from the jail, instead asking a sheriff’s deputy to review it, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The report he filed also did not include mention of the inconsistencies in guards’ accounts, or note speaking with jail hospital staff or medical experts about Miller’s cause of death, which a medical examiner ruled was “natural,” due to sickle cell crisis—an explanation that outside experts later challenged. 

McDonald, who as a Ranger investigated at least 20 jail deaths under Waybourn, was hired by the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office in 2021. Since then, the sheriff has mostly picked the Fort Worth Police Department for outside investigations into jail deaths, according to reports the jail must file with the Texas Attorney General’s Office after every death. Yet when Bolts filed a request with Fort Worth police for records of all investigations into Tarrant County jail deaths, the department said it had none.  

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, which regulates county jails across the state, told Bolts that he wasn’t previously aware of the discrepancy and would look into the matter further. In at least some cases, he said, it appeared that the police department simply reviewed the investigation done by the sheriff’s office, rather than conducting their own. “That is not what is supposed to be occurring,” Wood said. “There’s supposed to be an outside law enforcement agency investigate deaths in custody. There’s nothing that prohibits the county from also conducting their own investigation. But the statute clearly states that it shall be an investigation—not simply a review, not a cover sheet on an investigation that Tarrant County did.”  

A legislative agency that audits state departments wrote in a 2021 report that the Texas jail commission largely fails to hold jails accountable due to unclear regulations and limited enforcement power. While sheriffs continue to run dangerous jails with little accountability or oversight, county commissions still have a role in operating local lockups, such as powers over funding and contracts for operating the facilities. 

Local county commissions in many large Texas counties have responded to jail overcrowding by approving multi million dollar contracts to ship people in jail custody to for-profit prisons. Over the past two years, Tarrant County commissioners approved more than $40 million to send people hundreds of miles away to a private prison in West Texas; last year, a man sent there from Tarrant County died of leukemia. But after North Texas public radio station KERA reported on state jail commission records showing neglect at the private prison, commissioners voted unanimously to end the contract early. The company that operated the West Texas prison shut down the facility on Sept. 30, the same day Tarrant County’s contract ended.  

As circumstances surrounding deaths inside the Tarrant County jail remain opaque, local advocates pushing for more transparency have looked to other county officials for help. Alisa Simmons, one of two Democrats on the five-member Tarrant County commission, organized the January town hall about deaths at the jail and has joined the calls for Waybourn to resign and for a federal inquiry into his jail. 

Simmons told Bolts that “the only people who can fire [Waybourn] are the voters,” but added that county commissioners could be doing more to force changes at the jail. “We need to, as a court, utilize the power of the purse strings and withhold funds from the sheriff’s office until conditions improve in the jail,” she said. Otherwise, “Tarrant county taxpayers are going to continue to pay a heavy price to subsidize that dehumanizing culture in our jail.”

The post North Texas Sheriff Running for Reelection Faces Grief and Anger Over Rising Jail Deaths  appeared first on Bolts.

Editor’s note (Aug. 9, 2024): Dar Leaf prevailed in the on Aug. 6 primary.

On a sunny afternoon in July, a crowd of roughly 100 gathered to listen to their local sheriff campaign for re-election in southwestern Michigan. A self-described “constitutional sheriff” with longstanding ties to militia groups, Dar Leaf has made a national name for himself in far-right circles with his fruitless investigation to uncover evidence for Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen.

But that wasn’t what he wanted to discuss at his rally. Having come under intense scrutiny in the last three years for his election investigation and militia affiliations, Leaf spoke to his supporters about his office’s more mundane work—upgraded vehicles and new training—and urged them to ignore the attacks he’s faced.

“Our eyes are forward, that’s why God put ‘em in front of our head,” he said to laughter and applause. “We’ve got to keep moving towards that finish line.”

Still, it’s his relentless effort to uncover voter fraud and his associations with far-right groups that has come to define him as he seeks to defeat three rivals in next week’s Republican primary.

Taking up Trump’s unfounded grievances, Leaf sent deputies to interrogate local election officials and tried to seize voting machines, which he claimed flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden. His activities fit in a broader network of far-right sheriffs who responded to Trump’s lies by wanting to police elections, and who may soon double down if the former president challenges the results of November’s elections.

Leaf’s skepticism about elections and convictions about the excesses of the federal government fit in comfortably in Barry County, a deeply red and rural county just north of Kalamazoo that voted for Trump over Biden in 2020 by a two to one margin.

But some Republicans want to turn the page. Two of his intraparty challengers in the Aug. 6 primary have highlighted his investigation into the 2020 election as a key point of contrast.

“The sheriff has propagated these lies,” says Joel Ibbotson, one of his three opponents. “I’m sick of that. I want it to end.”

A years-long investigation

When Trump falsely alleged a Democratic party plot to steal the 2020 election through widespread voter fraud, he found a sympathetic audience in Barry County and its sheriff.

With the guidance of Stefanie Lambert, an election-denying lawyer who now faces felony charges for allegedly improperly breaching Michigan voting machines, Leaf launched an investigation into how the election unfolded in his county. He sent deputies to question local elections clerks, who saw his hunt as a form of intimidation. He repeatedly requested authorization to seize voting machines, but was denied by federal and state courts.

Throughout the investigation, Leaf presented no evidence of irregularities, let alone of a plot to steal the election. He maintains that the investigation is ongoing, and told Bolts and The Guardian that he couldn’t elaborate on its status.

Scott Price, a local pastor who supports Leaf’s re-election campaign, said Leaf is giving voice to widespread concerns about election integrity. “We’re grateful that we have somebody that has the courage and and literally is willing to stand and take the heat for something that other people are saying didn’t even happen,” said Price.

But some within Leaf’s own party resisted the investigation.

Julie Nakfoor Pratt, the county’s Republican prosecutor, rejected Leaf’s inquiry into the 2020 election and denounced it as a waste of resources. In a lengthy statement before the county board of supervisors on Oct. 25, 2022, Nakfoor Pratt explained why she could not act on Leaf’s allegations, pointing to the importance of probable cause and exhaustive detective work in prosecuting cases. She recounted her office’s investigation into a grisly homicide case as an example of the kind of rigor necessary in investigative policing.

Without evidence, she said, a case couldn’t be prosecuted. “I will not put my signature on something if it’s not there,” said Nakfoor Pratt.

When his office approached her with a search warrant for voting equipment, “there was no probable cause,” Nakfoor Pratt said. “It wasn’t insufficient: there was none.” 

Earlier this year, Lambert, the lawyer, shared troves of private documents with Leaf that she claimed were signs of a conspiracy. She had obtained them during discovery while representing Patrick Byrne, a Trump ally, in a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which some conservatives have falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election. The documents show Serbian Dominion employees troubleshooting technical questions, but in a letter to U.S. representative Jim Jordan, Leaf wrote that they revealed something more nefarious.

“Serbian employees planned and conspired with premeditation to delete United States election data,” wrote Leaf, echoing a similar claim that Lambert made on the social media platform X.

A constitutional sheriff 

Since long before the 2020 election, Leaf has been involved with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an ultraconservative group that promotes the belief that sheriffs have the ultimate authority to interpret and enforce the constitution within their county. This philosophy came into focus for him during the Covid-19 pandemic when, angered by lockdown orders intended to mitigate the spread of the virus, Leaf refused to enforce social distancing rules.

In an interview, Leaf said he first learned about the constitutional sheriffs in 2010, when Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff and the founder of CSPOA, reached out.

“I think they were just calling sheriffs up, especially new sheriffs,” said Leaf, who was intrigued enough by their movement to attend a conference in Las Vegas. What he heard there, he said, “was a big wake-up call.”

Most important, Leaf said, was what he learned about Printz v United States, a supreme court case brought by Mack and Jay Printz, a Montana sheriff who argued that a provision of a federal gun violence prevention bill that required law enforcement agencies to conduct background checks was unconstitutional. They won. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not compel state agencies to enact such a measure.

“The case proved that local officials have the right, the power and the duty to stand against the far reaching inclusions by our own Federal Government,” Mack later wrote in his book.

The ideas behind the constitutional sheriffs movement are shared by a startling number of sheriffs.

Still, actual membership in CSPOA appears low. One study, produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, identified 69 sheriffs who publicly endorsed the CSPOA or claimed membership in the organization. A national CSPOA conference in Las Vegas this year drew around 100 attendees, among them Jan. 6 defendants, conspiracy theorists and right-wing influencers—but few actual sheriffs.

Leaf was in Vegas, though, telling attendees excitedly, “I’m getting goose-bumpy here.”

“You can’t get away from his name” 

Since assuming the office of sheriff two decades ago, Leaf has developed a passionate following in Barry County.

“Dar is the most well-known person in the community,” said Barry county resident Olivia Bennett, who described Leaf as a family friend. “You just can’t get away from his name.” Bennett’s father served in Leaf’s “posse”, a word he uses to describe a group of citizens who don’t work for the sheriff’s office but assist him in his duties.

“My dad would come home and say different things, like, ‘If terrorists come, they’re going to come from these small towns first,’ and I just thought it was stuff my dad said,” Bennett said. “When later, I heard Dar speaking about it, I realized, ‘Oh no, my dad got these beliefs from Dar himself.’”

“Dar really does make people feel scared and make it sound like he’s the only one who can really protect you,” Bennett added.

Leaf has long flexed his beliefs that sheriffs are guardians of order. “We’re not here to intimidate people,” he told local media in 2014. “This is still a badge, it’s not a swastika. We have to prepare for the worst. We have to prepare for things you don’t like talking about.”

Since joining the CSPOA, Leaf has strived to introduce his community to the group’s lofty ideas about sheriffs’ unique role in upholding the constitution. Leaf hosts bi-monthly study groups focusing on Christian faith and common law and leads a course on militias, titled Awaken the Sleeping Militia Clause, promising attendees willing to pay the $175 entry fee that they’ll “learn a militiaman’s duty” and earn a certificate of completion.

In one meeting, whose recording Bolts and the Guardian reviewed, Leaf expounds on Michigan’s new red flag law, which allows police to take firearms away from individuals who a judge has determined pose a threat to themselves or others. He describes it as illegitimate, implying that he has the authority to make that determination within his county.

“No, my people did not consent to that,” said Leaf. “It’s a jurisdictional thing.” 

During a separate meeting this spring, Leaf updated members on the CSPOA’s April conference in Las Vegas. He said he was especially pleased to hear from Richard Fleming, a doctor who pleaded guilty in 2009 to felony charges of mail and healthcare fraud and has made a name of himself since then as a proponent of the unsubstantiated theory that Covid-19 was created as a bioweapon.

Fleming’s claims, Leaf said, “are pretty much being ignored by the cabal that’s trying to take over the world.”

Lockdowns and militias

As Covid-19 spread across the country in March 2020, Leaf vowed to strike back against stay-at-home orders that he viewed as an example of governmental overreach.

During that period, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer briefly prohibited the use of motor boats, permitting only kayaking and canoeing as a form of outdoor recreation. The order, which Whitmer later walked back, infuriated many residents of Barry County.

Leaf said he would not enforce the order. “The sheriff came out and said, ‘I don’t care if your boat has a motor on it or not. If you’re getting in a heated argument with your wife, go on the lake and go fishing, if that’s what it takes to cool off,’” said Ibbotson, who used to be an outspoken supporter of the sheriff and is now running as one of his primary challengers.

Leaf took part in a rally against Michigan’s stay-at-home orders, and called them tantamount to an “unlawful arrest.” Also at the event were members of a militia called the Wolverine Watchmen, a group that was later implicated in a plot to kidnap Whitmer.

When William and Michael Null, two brothers from Barry County who attended the event, were accused of taking part in the kidnapping plot, Leaf defended them. The group, he suggested, could have been planning to “arrest” the governor. “In Michigan, if it’s a felony, you can make a felony arrest,” he told a local news outlet. The Null brothers were later acquitted, during a trial that showcased how deeply involved FBI informants and agents had been in pushing the militia members’ rhetoric toward a kidnapping plot.

When asked about the controversy and about concerns that he may be too closely connected to militias, Leaf smiled and looked a little bewildered.

“Of course,” Leaf said. “There should be militias connected with every sheriff.”

Pushback from Republicans

Leaf’s growing embrace of far-right politics has ruffled residents, including some of his former supporters.

“When he had mentioned that the Null brothers were perhaps just trying to do a citizens’ arrest on the governor, that was the final straw for me,” said Ibbotson, who decided to challenge him in the Republican primary.

Ibbotson, who owns a logistics company, said he wants the office to drop the election issue. Election administration, he said, should be in the hands of the county and township clerks.

“My goal through this, even if I lose, is to make it unpopular to talk about election integrity, in the sense that the sheriff has propagated these lies,” said Ibbotson. “I’m sick of that. I want it to end.” Ibbotson, who says he has hired formerly incarcerated drivers to work in his business, added that he wants to work on reducing recidivism.

Leaf’s second challenger, Richelle Spencer, is a sergeant in the Barry County sheriff’s office, who has worked as a narcotics detective and in the K9 unit. She says she decided to run for sheriff despite her aversion to politics. She told Bolts and The Guardian that the unending election investigation and Leaf’s involvement in the CSPOA has sowed divisions.

“Everybody is ready for something different in the sheriff’s office—we’re ready for some stability, I can tell you that,” said Spencer.

“He goes away and does these speaking engagements and when he’s doing that, he’s not available to us,” she added, “and he’s not aware of what’s going on in his own community.”

A third challenger, Mark Noteboom, a deputy in the sheriff’s office, had a direct hand in Leaf’s investigation. He declined to share specifics about the investigation, but told Bolts and The Guardian that he felt “the clerks in Barry County did absolutely nothing wrong. They did everything they were supposed to do, and they did it the right way.” Noteboom added that as sheriff he would focus on improving conditions in the county jail and other local issues.

At the CSPOA event in March, Leaf addressed the gathering on the topic of his investigation in Barry County and the status of election integrity nationwide. His police work, Leaf said, had been hampered by Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat who has been investigating Lambert and others for allegedly improperly seizing and tampering with voting machines. Deputies in his office didn’t want to touch the case. 

“That was the first major stumbling block,” said Leaf. Local crime had also pulled him away from the investigation. “We had a missing person and we took quite a while, a lot of manpower, to go find. I had to put my light-duty deputy off to go find this missing person.”

There were so many leads, the investigation had become so expansive, and the end wasn’t even in sight more than two years after Leaf initiated the investigation. Still, he said, he has not given up. It was on him and other sympathetic minds to keep up with the search.

“Keep chuggin’,” he advised the room. “Keep charging the castle!”

The post He Kept Investigating the 2020 Election. Now This Michigan Sheriff Faces Voters Himself. appeared first on Bolts.

All Arizonans this fall could decide whether to boost the role of local police in border enforcement, as Republicans placed a measure on the statewide ballot that would empower cops to arrest people suspected of being undocumented. But the issue is also playing out locally this year, highlighting critical disagreements among law enforcement in Arizona over just how much to collaborate with federal border police.

A local election next week will help decide if the leadership of a populous border county will have any appetite to increase partnerships with the border patrol in coming years.

Operation Stonegarden, a federal grant program that gives local police the funds and equipment to patrol the border region for immigration enforcement, has become a dividing line among candidates in this year’s race for sheriff of Pima County, home to Tucson. While the incumbent sheriff, Chris Nanos, says he agrees with the county’s decision to leave the program several years ago, his opponent in the July 30 Democratic primary wants Pima County to rejoin Operation Stonegarden. 

Sandy Rosenthal, a former deputy with the Pima sheriff’s office and Nanos’ challenger next week, has sharply criticized the sheriff for leaving Stonegarden money on the table amid budget and staff shortages that have contributed to poor conditions at the jail. At a June candidate forum, Rosenthal endorsed the federal border partnership as a way to stem the flow of fentanyl into the community.

“It allows us to get more deputies out in the farther reaches of Pima County,” Rosenthal said during last month’s forum. “When you give up an area, when you give up a responsibility, bad things happen. The cartels, they enjoy what’s happening now. They don’t have to worry about any deputy sheriff being out along the border. There’s no coverage whatsoever.” Rosenthal did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts.

Nanos told Bolts that local law enforcement should not take up border enforcement duties since securing the border is primarily a federal function—a position the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed. Nanos also said the county didn’t benefit from the Stonegarden patrols, which typically occurred in remote areas that have little crime: The sheriff said that less than 1 percent of emergency calls his office receives come from the area along the border. Cartels, Nanos said, practically never smuggle fentanyl through the open desert, opting instead to use vehicles crossing ports of entry.

“That grant didn’t benefit the community at all. It benefitted border patrol because it gave them boots on the ground,” Nanos told Bolts. Officers on Stonegarden assignments, Nanos said, “didn’t work for the sheriff. They worked for border patrol. They were on border patrol radio. They answered to border patrol supervisors.”

Public officials often point to the border as a proxy for the everyday issues that Pima residents face, especially the drug crisis and crime, Nanos said. Stoked by voices from the far right on the national stage, residents across the political spectrum in Southern Arizona have echoed fears that migrants are responsible for a flood of fentanyl pouring across the Mexican border that has resulted in countless overdoses and deaths.

But extensive research indicates that immigrants commit less crime than U.S.-born people and that there’s no correlation between undocumented people and rising crime. As for drug smuggling, fentanyl rarely moves into the country through the open desert and is almost always smuggled in through legal ports of entry, with U.S. citizens accounting for 89 percent of convicted fentanyl traffickers, according to a report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Adelita Grijalva, the Democratic chair of Pima County’s Board of Supervisors who opposes Stonegarden grants, told Bolts she worries about what their return would mean for her constituents. More than a third of people in this county of more than one million residents are Hispanic, according to the 2020 census. 

“People of color, specifically Latinos, are going to be targeted because of the way we look,” Grijalva said. “There’s an assumption people shouldn’t be in our communities because of what we look like—what my family looks like—that we may or may not be citizens. So having our Pima County Sheriff pulling people over based on that suspicion is a huge concern.”

As immigration crackdowns escalated at both the state and federal levels, a decades-long immigrant rights’ movement in Arizona pressured local governments to end participation in the Stonegarden program. 

In 2010, then-Governor Jan Brewer signed what became known as the state’s “show me your papers” law. Under the law, police could arrest and charge immigrants with a state crime if they were not carrying their immigration documents. Critics said the law, portions of which were eventually struck down, gave local police free reign to target people based on their ethnicity and would lead to racial profiling.

The 2010 law made Arizona unlivable for many in the state without papers who struggled to find necessities like work, housing and medical care, said Tony Pineda, a staff member of the Southside Worker Center. The center formed in 2006 to give day laborers a safe place to find employment and negotiate wages after jobseekers ran into problems with border patrol and local police. But even with the center’s help getting legal support, housing assistance and other essentials, immigrant families in the area struggled under what was the country’s strictest immigration policy at the time, Pineda said.

“It was something we suffered a lot from. At that time, I was undocumented as well. There was a big impact on the city for immigrants, and I saw it harm the members of the Worker Center,” Pineda said.

This organizing against Brewer’s signature law laid the groundwork for the fights to come. Neighborhood groups across Tucson and immigrant rights organizations became more active and built stronger connections with each other to unite against the restrictions, Pineda said, eventually pushing the city of Tucson to sue the state to block the law. The Southside Worker Center later joined groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to challenge the “show me your papers” law in court.

Another massive mobilization in support of immigrant rights came around 2018 after the federal government adopted a zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border and incarcerated them in detention centers widely condemned for abusive conditions. Many in Pima County found the hardline border policies inhumane and cruel, Pineda said. As images of children locked in cages and stories of newborns ripped from their mothers’ arms spread across social media, voices grew louder against the family separations and the anti-immigrant sentiment at the policy’s root.

“It had a big impact on the community, even for people who are already established here, regardless of legal status,” Pineda said. “They also suffer because they have families too. It was something that took root in the entire city, and across Pima County.” 

As the unfolding family separation crisis became the face of federal immigration policy, attitudes in Pima County toward border authorities soured, said Isabel Garcia, co-founder of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos and the former Pima County Legal Defender. This heightened pressure on elected officials to separate their local police forces from border patrol missions, Garcia said.

“We were protesting all over. We had massive demonstrations in front of the federal courthouse. Everybody came out about the children,” Garcia said. “We were very inspired by the unity, more than anything. So they couldn’t lie to us anymore. We knew exactly what it entailed—that these police officers, when they checked in, had to become border patrol agents and follow the commands of border patrol.”

Garcia said that the Stonegarden program had a chilling effect on public trust in law enforcement, where people stopped reporting crimes and calling 911 for help out of fear that they or their loved ones would be arrested and deported.

These are complaints that immigrants’ rights activists have voiced against local partnerships with federal immigration enforcement elsewhere in the country. In neighboring Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio reshaped the department to act as an extension of immigration agencies during his long tenure from 1993 to 2017. His actions spurred a legal battle in 2007 that eventually led to a federal court ruling that the sheriff’s office had engaged in racial profiling and ordering the department to reform the discriminatory practices. 

Critics of the Stonegarden program in Pima County say it did little to benefit public safety and resulted in thousands of people being needlessly detained, interrogated and harassed by local cops over immigration status—especially Latino drivers.

“It was all just to check them for Border Patrol. We wound up with people getting arrested and deported at that point,” Garcia said. “Imagine all of these stops. If I get stopped, I’m still scared, and I’m a lawyer and a citizen. There is no justice for us anymore.”

In 2018, over objections from the Republican sheriff at the time, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted to end the county’s participation in Operation Stonegarden, which had given the county around $16 million over the prior 12 years. Board members who voted to not apply for the grants expressed concerns that the program banned using the grant funds for humanitarian relief and that targeting immigrants could chill people’s trust in local police.

Tucson, the county’s largest city, also withdrew its police department from the Stonegarden program in 2020 after federal officials denied the city’s requests to spend some of the grant money on humanitarian aid for migrants seeking asylum. The city’s police chief at the time told the Arizona Daily Star that the feds’ denial “really seemed like the end of the line” for the program, which the chief said was “not a great fit for the work we were doing.” On the other hand, the neighboring town of Marana still participates in Operation Stonegarden. Marana Police uses the funds to assign patrols in rural areas thought to be routes for smugglers and drug cartels, a police spokesperson said. 

While the members of the Pima County Board of Supervisors have changed since initially rejecting the federal money, there isn’t currently enough support to sign off on the Operation Stonegarden program even if the winner of the sheriff’s race applied for the grants, said Grijalva, the board chair. Democrats currently have a four-to-one majority on the board.

Still, all seats on the board are up for election this year, so the board’s position may change depending on the outcomes in November. A new sheriff who makes it a mission to ramp up immigration enforcement could also put more pressure on other county officials, especially if it coincides with changeover in the federal administration. 

The winner of next week’s Democratic primary between Nanos and Rosenthal will face one of three GOP candidates—Bill Phillips, Heather Lappin, Terry Frederick—in November. All three Republicans have expressed support for harsher practices on immigration. The Democratic nominee will be favored in the general election in this county that typically votes blue, but Republicans have had local success—including winning the sheriff’s office as recently as 2016.

Groups are also already gearing up for a fight to convince voters to reject Proposition 314, a measure that was put on the November ballot by Republican lawmakers that would empower state and local law enforcement to arrest people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. (Opponents of the measure are trying to knock the measure off the ballot, and litigation is ongoing as of publication.) Both Nanos and Rosenthal oppose the ballot measure.

Grijalva is confident that, in Pima County at least, voters will want to keep in place officials who oppose scaling up enforcement. 

“The positions on Stonegarden, for a lot of people, that’s been their deciding factor on who they are going to vote for,” she told Bolts. “Pima county continues to be a place that is humanitarian, that wants justice, and wants our community to be safe.”

Correction (July 26): An earlier version of this story misstated that Grijalva has endorsed Nanos’ reelection bid; she has not. 

The post In an Arizona Border County, Rifts Over How Much to Help the Feds Patrol the Border appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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