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.

Jentink-Bristol could’ve gotten off probation at 15 had she paid off her fines and fees. But her probation officer told her that she had to remain under supervision until she cleared her debt, which included the cost of her public defenders, stays in detention, and restitution to the victims of her crimes. Jentink-Bristol no longer had a relationship with her mother and couldn’t afford to pay. Her job at an ice cream shop for six hours a week making $10 an hour was just enough to buy her own food and necessities, with nothing left over for her debts. 

Remaining on probation for an extra two years came with consequences. She had to get the court to sign off on a robotics class she wanted to take that ended after her nightly curfew. She wasn’t allowed to attend public school with the kids she grew up with and instead had to go to a school for kids who had been arrested.

The experience left Jentink-Bristol feeling anxious, depressed, and confused. “I had my mom yelling at me to pay these fines and fees. I had the court yelling at me to pay these fines and fees. As a kid, you don’t know what the heck is going on,” Jentink-Bristol, now 19, told Bolts. 

She was finally able to pay off her debt after she was given a stipend for participating in a university program where she shared her story. Jentink-Bristol wanted to make sure that other kids didn’t have to go through the same problems. As part of the program, she teamed up with other children, advocates, and politicians to craft a series of bills to eliminate most fines and fees for juveniles in Michigan altogether. 

The bipartisan legislation that Jentink-Bristol helped inspire passed in December 2023 and was recently enacted, on Oct. 1. Under the legislation, children are still responsible for paying restitution to victims, but courts are no longer allowed to charge kids for costs related to their proceedings, such as the cost of court-appointed counsel or detention, two categories that account for the majority of court fees. 

The bills also apply retroactively, clearing any previous debt kids and their families accrued in the juvenile justice system and forbidding judges from jailing children because of court debt or refusing to participate in community service. 

With the enactment of the bill, Michigan became the latest of 17 states to abolish most fines and fees for kids, and one of 10 to do so since 2021. The move is part of a national shift to alleviate children and their families from being saddled with debt that is not only costly to families and their kids, but also local governments who rarely recoup the majority of the costs. Advocates say the state still has to do more work to create a fairer juvenile justice system, however, and are pushing legislation that would improve public defense for kids during the lame duck legislative session ending on Thursday. 

“It was very relieving because I do have younger sisters… say they get wrapped up in that [system], they won’t be going through as much pain in a struggle as I was,” said Jentink-Bristol. “If that had happened while I was going through it, it would have saved me so much pain and suffering.”

While the proposal to eliminate fines and fees for children was first introduced in 2021, it didn’t gain traction until the following year, when a statewide task force formed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer released a report on its investigation into the juvenile justice system. The task force found that youth were being charged attorney fees, which in turn resulted in them waiving their right to counsel or pleading out quickly to avoid bigger bills. As of 2019, the report found, kids and their families, who were also on the hook for the debt, owed a median of $850 dollars for reimbursement costs such as out-of-home placement, evaluation, and treatment; roughly one in ten kids paid more than $1,000, according to the report. 

The panel also noted that the system disproportionately targeted Black kids. They were detained at a rate of six times the rate of white youth, and Black children stayed an average of seven days longer, sticking them with costly fees for each day. Members of the task force unanimously recommended that the state eliminate all fees and court costs except for restitution and payments to a fund for crime victims. 

Jennifer Peacock, policy director at the Michigan Center for Youth Justice (MCYJ), told Bolts that many families were unable to pay for their kids’ court debt and faced consequences such as garnishments on their wages and tax returns. Judges could set a bench warrant for a kid’s arrest if they didn’t show up to a hearing about their payments. Often, as in Jentick-Bristol’s case, they couldn’t get off probation until they cleared their debt, said Peacock. 

“They’re going to stay in the system for longer, potentially deepening their involvement. Maybe they drop out of school to get a job. All of these things we see happen,” she said. “It’ll really harm the whole family unit.” 

Prior to the passage of the legislation, some counties in Michigan experimented with getting rid of most fines and fees kids face in the youth justice system. Among them was Macomb County, a Republican-leaning county neighboring Detroit that took action in 2021 after debating the consequences of its fine system on children. 

The county had charged families $11.7 million in fines and fees between 2017 and 2019, according to a report by MCJY. They were the highest numbers reported in the state. One father, for example, racked up $100,000 in debt because of his child’s arrest. The county was collecting very little of that debt, however. MCYJ researchers found that Macomb County was still waiting for $92 million in debt to be paid back. From 2015 to 2019, the county’s collection rate was just 7.2 percent. 

The impact on families was devastating. Youth justice researchers spoke with 21 families in Macomb County with an average of $87,000 in court debt. Among them, one parent said she had her state tax refund garnished for 10 years and still had $67,000 in debt after her son spent less than a year in detention more than a decade ago. The county offered options to help alleviate debt, such as a deferral for families who fall under the federal poverty guidelines, but the process to do so was often disjointed and arduous. 

Nicole Faulds, the county’s juvenile court administrator, told Bolts that county leaders recognized that the system needed an overhaul when MCYJ approached them with their findings. “I think to see the hard numbers was a good thing. I don’t think we really had a full understanding until we saw that,” said Faulds. “This really demonstrated that we aren’t collecting a lot of money, and it’s a hardship to the people that we deal with.”

A county judge in May 2021 abolished fines and fees for juveniles and discharged all outstanding debt kids and their families had accrued. County commissioners got on board after they saw the harm the bills had on families and weighed the high cost of collecting against the low collection rate, said Faulds.

Since then, Faulds said, the county’s juvenile justice division hasn’t faced any budget cuts because of the move away from fines and fees. She added that she’s noticed that more families are willing to work with the department now that money isn’t a factor. “We’re able to just provide services without having to have parents weigh the cost or be concerned about that down the road,” she said. “They’re not worried about every time they have to come to court that they’re going to have to pay for their child’s attorney if they have a court appointed attorney.” 

Faulds testified in the legislature last year in favor of scaling up her county’s reform statewide, and eliminating fines and fees for Michiganders in the youth justice system. 

Nationwide, state politicians have been increasingly open to abolishing fines and fees for kids. In 2023, Texas became the first southern state to get rid of all juvenile court fees. Arizona passed a bill the same year eliminating juvenile fees and created a process through which youth and their families could ask for forgiveness on outstanding debts. This year, Washington legislators greenlit a bill to waive remaining court debt after passing legislation in 2023 that abolished all fines and fees. And other campaigns are underway to pass legislation similar to Michigan’s, such as Pennsylvania.

Amy Borror, senior youth policy strategist at The Gault Center, a national youth justice advocacy organization, said that the issue caught the attention of criminal justice reform philanthropists who gave money to campaigns to end youth court debt. Once the issue was in front of lawmakers, Borror said they were receptive to passing legislation, largely because they hadn’t ever considered how much kids had to pay. 

“Lawmakers, the general public, are not aware that children were in juvenile court with, in some states, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt,” she said. “Once they learn that, policymakers often are very open to making changes. A lot of these kinds of issues happen without people even knowing that they’re going on.”

As Michigan advocates cheer the enactment of the legislation, they’re also pushing the passage of another reform to improve juvenile defense in the state. The bipartisan bill, House Bill 4630, would bring juvenile defense into the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission, a statewide agency that currently oversees public defense for adults. Under the commission’s umbrella, the agency would create standards for lawyers working on children’s cases aimed at ensuring that they’re consistently providing quality representation. 

Both legislative chambers have passed a version of the bill, the House in October and the Senate just last week. But they need to reconcile their versions by the end of the legislative session, which ends on Dec. 19. 

Currently, there are no statewide standards for juvenile indigent defense and each county is responsible for determining funding and how it assigns lawyers to those cases, meaning that sometimes kids are appointed lawyers who have no experience working with children, said Peacock of MCYJ. “This bill is just key to make sure that these young people are having some consistency,” she said. “When is counsel being appointed? How qualified are they in public defense? And also, are they even familiar with working with young people?”

Greg, a youth mentor who was formerly involved in the juvenile justice system, recounted to Bolts his own experience with public defenders when he was a kid. He was arrested for the first time at age 11 after he stole a bike from Kmart so he could fit in with the other kids in his neighborhood. He was detained for two weeks over the charge. He also had to pay for a court appointed lawyer, who Greg said pressured him to plead guilty. After his initial charge, he estimated that he picked up 15 more charges in the juvenile justice system as he kept committing crimes to bring in money for his family and to make a dent in his court bills, which amassed to more than $10,000. 

Now 30, Greg, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because he feared professional repercussions, told Bolts that his court appointed lawyers didn’t explain the legal process and its accompanying fees to him and his family. “They was asking me all these damn questions,” he recalls, “And all they were saying is guilty, guilty, guilty. Let’s plead out.”

“The 11 year old in me didn’t have a clue.”

The post How Michigan Stopped Saddling Children with Millions in Court Debt appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These two trifectas are no more. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. What lies ahead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The forum in downtown Flint, Michigan, on the warm early afternoon of Oct. 3, was in many ways a typical election-season scene. A handful of politicians—in this case, candidates for seats on the Michigan Supreme Court and Michigan Court of Appeals—had arrived, some flanked by young staffers, all toting stacks of glossy campaign flyers. One by one, the candidates stood at a lectern to deliver well-practiced stump speeches to several dozen voters who had gathered in a large room on makeshift bleachers and plastic chairs. They offered short biographies, argued that their work and life experiences qualified them for the bench, and asked the crowd to remember their names when voting. 

But, for all its familiar trappings, this event was quite a rarity, because it took place inside the county jail, with candidates appealing to an audience of incarcerated people. 

“You’re going to go back home one day,” Clerk Domonique Clemons, the top elections official in Genesee County, told the crowd at the start of the forum. “If you want roads that you can drive on, you want a community that has trash that gets picked up, you want a community with good schools—that all comes down to that one vote.”

More than half a million people in the U.S. are held in local jails on any given day, and, unlike people held in state prisons, most are awaiting trial and remain eligible to vote. Yet they are hardly ever included in the democratic process, let alone part of forums like this one.

People in jails are largely cut off from voter information. They seldom exercise the right to vote because actually casting a ballot from any of the roughly 3,000 jails across the country is usually an enormous struggle, if not practically impossible. This is due in major part to general indifference, and sometimes even outright resistance, from local officials and sheriffs who oversee county jails and control ballot access for people in custody. 

The candidate forum inside the Genesee County jail in Flint stood out in comparison. Outside advocates had worked for years to persuade local officials to boost civic engagement and voter registration for the more than 500 people detained there daily, and they’ve gotten Chris Swanson, the elected sheriff in Genesee County, to partner with them. In 2022, Swanson hired two formerly incarcerated organizers who circulate information about elections and voting to people detained inside, help them register and cast ballots, and plan candidate forums. 

Percy Glover, one of these organizers, had spent time after leaving prison volunteering to boost voter participation at the jail, until he was hired to do this work full-time. 

“Without us, people don’t know they can vote, don’t know who they’re voting for, and don’t understand what they’re voting for,” Glover, who was once himself detained in this jail, told me when I visited Flint last month. “My job is to make voting real.”

Oct. 3 marked at least the tenth forum inside the jail since 2021; prior events here have featured candidates for mayor, city council, school board, and Congress.

Ahead of the October forum, Swanson pulled visitors into a side room where he explained how civic engagement for those in custody connects to his broader goal: “We’ve been doing the same thing over and over, and we’ve seen generational incarceration, generational poverty, generational addictions,” the sheriff said. “What reduces crime? It’s not more money, more police, more harsh sentencing. It’s value. When you give people another path, they change the way they make decisions.” In 2020, Swanson’s jail also launched IGNITE, an education and job-training program that has spread to jails in at least a dozen other states, and counting.

Swanson says he wants to normalize election participation in the jail, and that this work stems from his belief that people there deserve access to the democratic process just like any other voters. “The right to vote—that is so powerful as your individual right of freedom, and I’m going to push that on every level,” Swanson told me. 

Still, there is much about Flint’s jail that undercuts Swanson’s rhetoric. 

Lots of people are detained here awaiting trial for very long periods—sometimes years. And in many ways, jail policies keep them isolated from the world beyond the facility’s walls; they cannot go outside, for instance. Swanson only began allowing limited in-person visits from some family members this past summer, following a damning lawsuit from civil rights groups that alleged county officials had conspired with a private telecom company to profit off ending in-person visitation and pivoting to costly video calls. 

In May, The New Yorker reported on Swanson’s policy of blocking visits from families. “They’re trying to break us,” one incarcerated source told the magazine. Another said they watched people locked up in Flint “break down into despair.”

Amani Sawari, an advocate for jail voting who lives outside of Detroit, who is also the editor of a quarterly political zine called Prisonality that she mails to thousands of incarcerated people around the country, told me the programs to encourage civic participation at the Genesee County jail are the “gold standard” for any groups or communities looking to build political power behind bars. 

But she said she also struggles to square the jail’s standout qualities with the casual cruelty of its conditions. 

“When it comes to programming, they have something to be proud of, and there’s Percy’s leadership, the forums,” Sawari said. “But when it comes to the food, the conditions, the bunks—it’s still jail. It’s still carceral. It just sucks.”

Glover acknowledges these complaints. “The design is very inhumane, like most jails. There’s absolutely no level of comfort. I mean, look around,” he said. But, he adds, he is focused on controlling what he can.

He estimates he’s helped 2,000 people vote from jail in the last few years, and I learned quickly how important Glover’s work has felt to people detained in Genesee County. In the jail lobby, before I took a tour of the facility, I encountered a father and daughter named Carl and Katarena Maddox, who had both been incarcerated at the jail and released earlier this year. They had returned that day to celebrate their graduation from a jail-based education program. Both told me they had attended a candidate forum while detained there.

Katarena, 24, voted for the first time in her life from jail this summer during Michigan’s primary election. “It was a memorable first,” she told me. “It made me feel as if I was part of the community, because nobody has ever introduced me to voting the way the Genesee County jail did.” 

Carl, 56, told me he’s been locked in this jail on and off since he was 18, and is now determined to stay free. He said that not once during his dozens of stints at the jail did staff ever mention voting—until last year, when Glover helped him register and cast a ballot for the first time in his life.

“Percy made us part of the process,” Carl said. That stuck with him: Carl said he’d attended a candidate rally in the area in September, as a free man, and that, the night before we met, he had made a point to watch J.D. Vance and Tim Walz debate on TV. “I’m seeing myself differently than I ever have. Voting, being in my community, is a big part of that,” he added.

Swanson, a Democrat, has ambitions to run for governor, and this month cruised to re-election. He was appointed to the post in 2019, made headlines in 2020 for marching with protesters after George Floyd’s murder, and then won his first election for the office later that year. That was the same year the jail launched IGNITE, which stands for Inmate Growth Naturally and Intentionally Through Education. Swanson and other jail leaders are evangelical about the program, which has been praised by a team of researchers at Harvard, Brown, and the University of Michigan who concluded in a paper this year that IGNITE and the “culture change” it’s brought about led to a sharp drop in recidivism and improved morale in the jail.

But it was difficult to reconcile that with my many observations that the jail remains, in many ways, just another embodiment of the callousness of mass incarceration. 

Detainees there are fed slop. The housing units seem just as uncomfortable as those in other jails I’ve visited, and one of them is so crowded that some people have to sleep in a common area, without the relative privacy of a cell.

The judge candidates were directly confronted with the realities of pretrial detention on Oct. 3, during the question-and-answer period that followed their speeches. One man in the back of the crowd asked the candidates how they’d ensure due process. He said he’d been in the jail for three years, awaiting trial. 

“I want to apologize to you,” responded Adrienne Young, a Michigan Court of Appeals judge and former public defender who would go on to narrowly win a new term on Nov. 5. “Three years waiting for an outcome and being separated from your family is an unimaginable loss for you and for your community.”

The vast majority of people in custody at this jail have not been convicted—that is, they’re detained despite still being presumed innocent—and the average length of stay as of this summer was more than 200 days, according to the jail’s staff. The situation is common across Michigan, and across the country, in large part due to a cash bail system that keeps people who cannot afford their freedom locked up. Some Michigan lawmakers want to reform this system during the upcoming lame-duck session.

After the forum, I caught up with the man who asked the question about due process. He told me that he is 42, and that he had never voted until Michigan’s primary election this year, when Glover helped him register and request a ballot. He said that the candidate forum was the first time in his life that anyone running for office had spoken to him. 

Here and all over the country, sheriffs are armed with broad discretion over access to ballots and information about elections. They typically get to decide whether to allow elections officials, or organizations or individual advocates, inside jails to assist people in registering to vote or obtaining a ballot. They control the flow of mail in and out of jails. They also control the flow of information relevant to voting, like ballot guides, local newspapers, and official campaign material. They decide whether to allow candidate events like the one I attended in Flint. 

And typically, in this state and elsewhere, jails have done little to facilitate democratic participation. When it comes to civic engagement, the Genesee County jail soars over a bar that could hardly be set lower: A 2021 statewide review by the Michigan nonprofit Voting Access for All Coalition found that only about a quarter of the state’s 83 counties reported having any policy in place to assist jailed people with voter registration. Anyone voting from a Michigan jail is necessarily doing so by absentee ballot, since jails there do not double as polling places, and the review found that less than half of counties reported any program to assist in that process.

“It was shocking,” Angela Davenport, executive director of the coalition that conducted this review, told me. “There’s no consistency at all.”

This matches Sawari’s experience. She told me that most officials across Michigan ignore the issue of voting rights for people in jail custody. Sawari said a small corps of advocates, herself included, has been trying to change this by going directly into jails and doing the work that the government will not. But, she said, sheriffs sometimes won’t let them in, and officials often seem totally uninterested in helping the people they detain act on their constitutional right to vote.

“We don’t expect the staff of a sheriff’s office to be voting experts,” she told me. “The problem is they feel like voting is a privilege, and that people in jail shouldn’t have access to that privilege.”

Sawari recounted a recent exchange with the top elections official in Macomb County, the third most populous county in Michigan. (The 2021 statewide survey by the Voting Access for All Coalition had found Macomb County had no programs in place to facilitate registration or voting.) “We were trying to get into that jail for years,” Sawari said. “They were unresponsive. So we contacted the county clerk, because they could help resolve a lot of registration issues if they were willing to go into the jail. The clerk, when we sat with him, was like, ‘There are people in the jail that can vote?’ He had no idea.”

Sawari added that the clerk still did not commit to making a greater effort to help people in jail vote, even after that conversation. (The Macomb County clerk’s office did not respond to multiple interview requests from Bolts.) 

“Jails become dark holes of civic engagement for folks confined, because there’s no pathway to activating their rights,” Sawari continued. “They’re just stuck, stuck in the walls.”

In this context, at least, Sawari and other advocates are glad they’ve made major progress in Genesee County. Sawari said, “Them raising the bar gives us something to point to for other jails that aren’t doing anything.”

Percy Glover’s first encounter with the Genesee County jail came in 1993, when he was in his early 20s and locked up on a second-degree murder charge—the tragic result, Glover says today, of what began as a simple neighborhood rivalry among poor, aimless, bored, short-sighted young people with access to weapons.

After prison, he went back to school and then worked a slew of jobs, eventually landing at the State Appellate Defender Office as an advocate who helped people accused of crimes with re-entry and family reunification. It was not until he was on that job, six years ago, when he got a call from someone he knew at The Advancement Project, a national nonprofit promoting racial justice, that he even learned people in jail could vote. 

The Advancement Project was poised to spearhead a jail-voting pilot program in Flint, Glover says, and it asked if he was interested in joining. He was, and soon after visited the jail—it was his first time in there since his incarceration—with the then-county clerk and a couple of others. They together helped more than 300 people register to vote, Glover says. He kept up that work for years on a volunteer basis, before joining the staff of the sheriff’s office. In early October, besides organizing the forum, Glover was busy hanging informational posters and distributing absentee ballot request forms, to then collect and submit them to elections officials.

He has also expanded his work beyond Genesee County, including by advocating for legislation last year that made Michigan the first state in the country to automatically register people to vote as they exit prison and regain their voting rights.

State laws concerning voting and democratic engagement for incarcerated people are generally extremely flimsy, where they exist at all. Only one state, Colorado, requires jails to establish polling places, and that law only passed this year, only requires a few hours of voting access per cycle, and only applies to certain elections. Glover hopes Michigan will consider a law similar to Colorado’s.

When I arrived in Flint a couple of days before the jail’s candidate forum, I encountered Glover outside the lockup wearing a sharp navy suit with a sheriff’s badge pin on the lapel, and a pair of immaculately clean black and white Jordans. 

He’s 56 and has lived here his whole life, save for the years he spent in state prison. He came up in the 70s and 80s, when, in key ways, Flint bore little resemblance to its current form. The city’s population, which verged on 200,000 when he was born, has today shrunk to under 80,000. Job loss and white flight have produced stark segregation: Flint is majority-Black and 65 percent non-white, while the rest of Genesee County is 85 percent white. Flint accounts for about a fifth of the county’s overall population, but more than half of the local jail population.

Glover remembers a childhood in a busy city with lots of auto workers, blocks of homes with real curb appeal, kids playing. He remembers that his grandparents lived at the confluence of three sections of housing that each had their own elementary school.

We took a drive around Flint, shortly before the judicial candidate forum at the jail, Glover narrating—“Empty, empty, empty”—as we passed vacant buildings along a wide street with almost no traffic. The three elementary schools by his grandparents’ place have all closed.

He told me he believed from a young age that he would do something great one day, and that he feels now, 50 years later, that he is fulfilling that dream through his work at the jail. 

Glover says his interest in civic engagement at the jail is fueled by all he did not have—all that many young people in Flint today also do not have—that might have kept him out of jail in the first place: “Somebody taking any time to care, to ask me what I was feeling, what I’m thinking. Somebody showing me a career opportunity: Have you ever thought about going to school? Exploration.”

IGNITE, the program inside the Flint jail, is optional for those held there, but very popular, in part because it comes with incentives: Participants can earn extra time on digital tablets, which they can use to watch media and communicate with loved ones. They get access to special activities, such as time in the jail’s music recording studio. They get to wear different clothes; rather than the standard-issue orange one-piece jumpsuit one gets when booked into this jail, those involved with IGNITE get to wear two-piece burgundy outfits. “If you do what we want you to do, you’ll get a reward for it,” Major Jason Gould, one of the sheriff’s top officials, told me. He said he did not realize, until IGNITE, how much it matters to wear two garments instead of one: “It makes a big difference when they go to the bathroom,” he said.

IGNITE participants meet five days a week, for an hour before lunch and for an hour before dinner, for classwork ranging from math to art history. They are given job training in a variety of fields, and can, through a local community college program, apply for employment that they can begin after release from jail. 

Peter Hull, a Brown University economist who co-authored the recent report on IGNITE, told me he approached the program skeptically. “My broad sense was that these programs rarely work very well, and that in fact there’s a long history of programs like this being tried and eventually scrapped,” Hull said. But his research team found that even one month in the IGNITE program was enough to make a participant 25 percent less likely to commit “misconduct,” defined by the jail as any of a number of acts of violence or disobedience, while in the jail, and 18 percent less likely to be sent back to jail within a year of being released.

“This wild thing happened,” Hull said, “where analysis after analysis was just showing the same thing. I beat up the numbers as hard as I could, and it really does seem like something is happening here.”

The day before the October candidate forum, Glover and Major Gould took me around the jail for a tour. We wandered the five-story building for about 90 minutes. 

The November election was still about a month out, and on this day Glover was hanging a bunch of posters, given to him by Sawari and other outside advocates, with information about voting eligibility and ballot access. Glover taped them on walls throughout the building and at doorways in cell blocks. “YOU CAN VOTE!” read one poster.

I watched him hang the first poster in the jail’s booking area. It was brightly colored and read, “Have a criminal record? In Michigan, yes, you can vote.” Alongside the posters hung advertisements placed in the jail by criminal defense attorneys. A few feet away from Glover, a group of men in orange jumpsuits, freshly returned from court, stood facing a wall, all shackled together. I saw two incarcerated men wearing white outfits, and Gould told me that these are “trustees” of the jail—a distinction that a few dozen people are given for good behavior and trustworthiness. These men were eating lunch, unrestrained.

“We depend on these guys, the trustees, because they’re doing all the work that, basically, the deputies don’t want to do: trash, serving food, sweeping floors,” Gould told me. “We couldn’t operate without them.” 

I asked if the trustees get paid for their work, and Gould said, “No. The pay is they don’t have to be in a cell all the time.”

Later, inside the housing units of the jail, people in orange jumpsuits (those not participating in IGNITE programs) and burgundy outfits (the IGNITE folks) surrounded Glover as he hung posters and chatted with them. Lunch hour was winding down, and I passed by a stack of discarded trays with food scraps. The meal looked disgusting: tired green beans and white bread and two dishes—one brownish and one milky-white—that I could not identify. Gould told me the food here used to be a lot worse.

Glover had already started collecting absentee ballots, work that would ramp up in the days to come. He’d also distributed nonpartisan voter guides from the League of Women Voters, containing basic information about what was on the ballot. 

A young man approached him to say he was excited about voting but that he didn’t know anything about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. “Who should I vote for?” the man asked, and Glover told him he couldn’t answer that question. Glover told me that kind of encounter is not unusual, hence the importance of the candidate forums. 

Inside the jail, I met Emmanuel Burks, a 28-year-old IGNITE participant. He voted in Michigan’s primary this year but otherwise had voted just once before in his life, during a past presidential election. “We don’t really have a voice in here. They feel like we’re just criminals. There’s an image about us,” he told me, but then added, of Glover, “he’s giving us a chance to open our voice, our mind, be heard.”

Gould said he’d show me the outdoor space, where people jailed here can get fresh air a few times a week. When we got there, though, I was struck by the fact that it is not really outdoors, but is rather a plain room with brick walls, half of a basketball court, one hoop, and two open-air, vertical, barred windows that let through some breeze. 

I mentioned to Gould that Glover’s work on civic engagement and IGNITE and the general culture change those programs are meant to signal did not erase the many ways in which the people locked inside here are kept isolated. How can the office pitch itself as so humane when the folks in its custody are unable to touch actual earth, or feel a raindrop—or, until recently, ever hug their own family members—sometimes for years on end?

Gould didn’t dispute the premise, but told me, “They’re not supposed to be here more than a year. That’s how it was designed.” 

In the jail’s one women’s unit, I met Windy Weatherford, who has been locked inside for two and a half years, awaiting trial. 

She was deemed such an excellent IGNITE participant that she was elevated to one of two special cells in the women’s unit that feature nicer linens and thicker mattresses than what the rest of the population gets. I learned that these relative luxuries were purchased through a donation made by NBA player and Flint native Kyle Kuzma. His name is posted in big block letters in the corner of the cell block. 

“We do have some nice orthopedic mattresses, and it helps,” Weatherford told me. “You feel like you’re sleeping on concrete on the other mattresses.” 

The next day, at the forum, Glover stood off to the side as the candidates for office each gave pitches. Some of them noted how unusual the event was.

“This does not happen for the people I formerly represented,” Adrienne Young, the public defender-turned-appellate judge, said. “I’m here because you matter, and you should vote because you matter.”

Afterward, I spoke with Kyra Harris Bolden, who was running in a hotly contested race to retain her seat on the Michigan Supreme Court. (Bolden would go on to win, helping solidify a liberal majority on the court.) She told me that candidates like her are typically steered by consultants toward a very different type of campaigning from what she was doing that day. “You get a list of registered voters and you target that population of people that you know are going to vote. Your absentee voters, your vote-in-every-single-election people,” she said. 

Bolden recently experienced how public institutions shun people involved in the criminal legal system. After joining the court at the start of 2023, she hired a formerly incarcerated man as a law clerk. but this gave way to a public outcry, led by one of Bolden’s fellow Democratic justices, who felt the clerk’s criminal record disqualified him from the job. The clerk resigned within days.

Bolden told me it was her second time participating in a forum at this jail, and that she’d been invited to zero others across all the rest of the jails in Michigan. 

I spoke also with Latoya Willis, who was running in a contested race for a seat on the Court of Appeals. (She was nominated by Democrats and lost to Republican nominee Matthew Ackerman.) “I’ve never been to an event like this,” Willis told me. “It’s a huge voting population who still has a voice, and an important voice, because they see up close and personal what these judges do.”

Without this forum, she wondered: “How many people would even know that they still have the right to vote while they’re here?”

The post The Michigan Jail that Candidates Keep Visiting 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.

The Michigan Supreme Court struck back on Wednesday, finding that the legislature’s scheme to bypass the citizen initiatives was unconstitutional.

Michigan workers will soon reap major benefits from the ruling. In February, the minimum wage will increase by $2, and employers will be required to provide paid sick leave for all employees.

But the decision also provides a robust affirmation of direct democracy. The court’s Democratic majority stepped in to protect a process that has come under heavy assault in Michigan and elsewhere. 

The legislature’s actions “violated the people’s constitutionally guaranteed right to propose and enact laws through the initiative process,” Justice Elizabeth Welch wrote for the majority.

This Michigan ruling came two weeks after the Utah supreme court created new safeguards for direct democracy. There, too, the ruling rebuffed Republicans who had gutted a suite of citizen initiatives; Utah lawmakers don’t have carte blanche to just override any ballot measure, the court ruled.

State courts historically have affirmed only narrow protections for ballot measures. But as GOP-run states have aggressively overturned initiatives, and made it harder to place them on the ballot in the first place, some jurists have turned to state constitutions and argued that they strongly protect access to democracy. Welch nodded to this argument in her Michigan decision, when she evoked “our Constitution’s commitment to ‘the democracy principle.’” Proposing laws is a “power that the people reserved to themselves,” she wrote; this power “must ‘be saved if possible’ from ‘evasion or parry by the legislature.’”

People watching from other states now hope that the back-to-back rulings in Michigan and Utah inspires other state courts to also push back on encroachments.

“Although state courts do not have to follow decisions from other states, they often look to such decisions for guidance,” Derek Clinger, an attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative who contributed to an amicus brief that argued against Michigan lawmakers in this case, wrote in an analysis of the case.  “[This opinion] may therefore persuade courts in other states to not allow technicalities or machinations to frustrate the people’s initiative and referendum powers.”

Within Michigan, though, the future of this new commitment to direct democracy is uncertain.

The supreme court split along party lines to issue this 4-3 decision. The four Democratic justices formed the majority and the three Republican justices dissented. 

But the court could flip this November when two seats are up for grabs. Democratic Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, who was appointed last year by Governor Gretchen Whitmer, is running to stay on the court. Voters will also fill the seat of a retiring Republican, Justice David Viviano.

The GOP would capture control of the court if it sweeps both seats this fall. And while there’s no guarantee how new justices would rule on a similar case in the future, the divide last week signals that a GOP majority would severely threaten this precedent.

When North Carolina’s supreme court flipped to the GOP in 2022, conservatives flexed their newfound power to quickly reverse precedents and steer a new course on democracy and voting rights cases.

Michigan Republicans will choose their two supreme court candidates at a convention in late August, and at least five people are hoping to grab these spots. (While parties choose their nominees for November, these candidates’ party affiliation does not show up on the ballot.) One contender, Matt DePerno, is a prominent purveyor of false conspiracy theories about rampant voter fraud. DePerno, the party’s failed attorney general nominee in 2022, pursued a legal case to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He was charged last year for tampering with election equipment. 

In recent years, major decisions by Michigan’s high court have often come down to a party-line split, raising the stakes of the November elections on issues beyond election law. In 2022, the court two years ago issued a string of 4-3 decisions that created new protections for youth from severe punishments. Just last week, the court found that the state cannot put people on the sexual offender registry for crimes that are nonsexual; that decision came in a 5-2 vote, with Justice Elizabeth Clement, a moderate Republican, joining her four Democratic colleagues.

The court has issued other recent decisions safeguarding ballot initiatives. Two years ago, Republicans on the State Board of Canvassers abruptly blocked two proposed constitutional amendments from making the ballot, flouting the recommendations of the Bureau of Elections that had determined that the measures had enough signatures. The court reinstated the amendments in a pair of 5-2 rulings that, again, saw Clement join four Democrats.

Clement stuck with the party in last week’s ruling, however. She wrote in a dissent that she did not think that the legislature’s actions were unconstitutional.

“There is certainly reason to be frustrated by the Legislature’s actions here: enacting laws proposed by initiative petition to avoid ballot approval only to substantially alter them in the same legislative session,” she wrote. “But nothing in Article 2, § 9 restricts the Legislature from doing so. And as tempting as it might be to step into the breach, this Court lacks the power to create restrictions out of whole cloth.”

This section of the Michigan constitution was drafted in 1913, and since then Michiganders have enjoyed the power to propose statutes of their own creation. Once organizers gather enough signatures to place a proposal on the ballot, the legislature has two basic options. It can either adopt the proposal as is, which means it becomes law without needing to go on the ballot. Or it can reject the statute; at that point, the measure goes to voters who can force its adoption. 

If voters adopt a measure, the legislature can’t get rid of it easily, as three fourths of lawmakers must agree to modify it. Republicans in 2018, who were very far from having such a supermajority, would have been boxed in if they’d let the minimum wage and sick leave measures go to voters. Instead, they chose a maneuver known as “adopt and amend;” they “adopted” the measures in September 2018, preventing citizens from voting on them, and then they “amended” their own laws on simple majority votes in December 2018. 

The legislature insisted it was following the law. It relied on a last-minute advisory opinion from Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette, who overturned a 1964 opinion by Democratic Attorney General Frank Kelley that such a maneuver was unconstitutional. 

Clement agreed with Schuette on Wednesday. If the legislature chooses to adopt a proposal, she wrote in her dissent, it can use its normal lawmaking power after that point to modify it as it pleases.

Welch’s majority opinion was thoroughly unconvinced. 

“It is difficult to fathom that the framers intended for voters to expend countless resources and time to gather thousands of signatures to place an initiative on the ballot only to have to do so all over again via a referendum after the Legislature adopts and then amends the initiative,” she wrote. 

Welch added, “Allowing the Legislature to bypass the voters and repeal the very same law it just passed in the same legislative session thwarts the voters’ ability to participate in the lawmaking process.”

The court’s decision comes with a major caveat. It only bars lawmakers from amending a measure within the same session in which they’ve adopted it. But they can still do it in a future session; the court took specific issue with “the lame duck legislators” who, in December 2018, “avoided the democratic accountability” that the constitution “was designed to provide.”

This keeps the door wide open to lawmakers adopting a proposed measure to keep it off the ballot one year—and then gutting it in the following calendar year. 

Still, it can get more difficult to repeal a law as time passes because people are more likely to be feeling its effects. The minimum wage measure that was poised to be on the 2018 ballot would have raised people’s wages starting on Jan. 1, 2019. Republicans rolled it back in December before the increase went into effect. Having to wait until early 2019 would have meant cutting people’s actual wages—a maneuver that would have been far less palatable politically.

Plus, the Democratic justices on Wednesday signaled that they’ll stay vigilant in the future—if they can keep their majority in November, that is. 

Welch in her opinion snapped at lawmakers’ attempt to thwart their constituents, writing, “The people bestow power unto the branches of government, not the other way around.”

The post Direct Democracy Scores a Win in Michigan’s High Court. Can It Survive November? 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.

“It’s like these little cuts and scrapes that happen over time for Black mothers who have kids on the road who are driving,” Harrison said. “When I knew my youngest son was on the road, I was nervous all the time. I was on edge. When he called me, sometimes it was like my heart would stop.”

Harrison’s resulting policy, the Driving Equality Ordinance, passed handily in 2023 in the small progressive university town that often welcomes reform. The measure prohibits officers from pulling drivers over for small infractions, allowing them to send drivers a ticket in the mail instead. Now, the policy has also set the stage for a larger debate across Washtenaw County, where Ann Arbor sits. There, candidates in the race for county sheriff have echoed local calls to reform traffic stops, but have diverging visions on policy.

Sheriff Jerry Clayton announced in 2022 that he wouldn’t seek reelection after serving four consecutive terms leading law enforcement in Washtenaw. With no Republicans in the race, voters will choose Clayton’s successor in the Democratic primary on Aug. 6. Clayton never formally limited officers from making stops for equipment and registration issues. But he did previously speak out against the use of traffic stops to search drivers and fish for contraband after prosecutors decided in 2021 to stop charging many cases where drivers are arrested during a non-safety-related traffic stop.

Alyshia Dyer, a former deputy sheriff and social worker who is one of the three candidates in the sheriff’s primary, previously advocated for the Ann Arbor restriction on non-safety traffic stops and said she would scale the policy across the entire county if elected. 

One of her competitors, Ken Magee, does not support a restriction on non-safety stops, but has proposed a policy to reduce fines and fees from traffic enforcement. The third candidate, Derrick Jackson, has also included reforming traffic enforcement as an item on his platform, though his proposal for a comprehensive traffic stop study is less sweeping than the others’ plans. 

The traffic stop policy of whomever wins the race will most heavily affect those living not in Ann Arbor, but in surrounding areas like Ypsilanti Township, where the local government relies on sheriff’s officers in lieu of having its own police department. Nearly half of the 27,000 stops by sheriff’s officers in Washtenaw County in 2023 happened in Ypsilanti Township, where Black people make up a higher portion of the population than Ann Arbor and the county at large, data shows. 

“Traffic enforcement can often be a gateway for funneling people into the legal system. And even if you don’t get a ticket, it can cause a lot of trauma for people,” Dyer said. “Blanketing communities by making these low-level stops… I think all it does is criminalize the neighborhood instead of investing in the neighborhood to make it safer.”

Dyer’s approach to reforming traffic stops grew from her decade in the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office, where she encountered both pressure from the chain of command to do high volumes of traffic stops, and the negative effects of those stops on communities.

“I saw when I was doing community engagement work that it actually was reducing violence in the communities I was frequenting. But I was frustrated because I wasn’t getting evaluated on that good community engagement work,” Dyer told Bolts. “Instead, it was all about how many traffic stops, how many tickets or arrests you’re making.”  

It is illegal for law enforcement departments in Michigan to require officers to meet quotas for traffic stops, tickets and other activity. But even without a formal quota, higher-ups often evaluate officers’ performance using those metrics and officers are trained to initiate frequent contacts with civilians “to show they are being productive,” Dyer said.

“I really believe when you evaluate officers on punitive metrics like traffic stops, it creates an issue with over policing,” she continued.

In Ann Arbor, these policing practices rarely broke down evenly across racial lines. Around the same time that Harrison put forward the policy to reduce unnecessary encounters between police and civilians, Eastern Michigan University released a study that documented significant racial disparities in traffic stops conducted by the Ann Arbor Police Department. The study found Black drivers were stopped twice as often for equipment violations and searched at five times the rate that would be expected given their portion of the local driving population.

“It’s our goal to provide law enforcement services without bias or favor,” Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor told Bolts. But traffic stops based on equipment violations, where the racial disparity is the widest, generally “do not have any material public safety benefit.”

Harrison’s plan to take low-level violations like tinted windows, burned-out tail lights and loud mufflers off of police officers’ plates was intended to curb racial bias by preventing unnecessary police encounters. It is also meant to allow officers to focus on things that really make a difference when it comes to safety. Harrison based the ordinance on Philadelphia’s Driving Equality Act, enacted in 2022, that made it the first major city to limit officers from making stops for certain minor traffic offenses. 

“I want to free up the police department to go after speeding, running red lights, and those violations that can get someone seriously injured,” Harrison said.

The ordinance passed unanimously through city council with virtually no opposition. To Harrison’s surprise, the local police union did not challenge the reform, even though it limited officers’ authority.

“There is a common understanding that this is something the police should be okay with, in this day and age,” Harrison said. “I feel like we can be leaders, and we can set the example.”

In fact, police leadership announced that officers would stop pulling over drivers for equipment violations even before the ordinance took effect. “There is always a struggle with a change in culture,” said Ann Arbor Chief of Police Andre Anderson about the process of implementing the policy. (Anderson wasn’t police chief when the ordinance first passed, but is now overseeing its rollout.)

Despite some initial hesitation officers have been receptive to making changes that “ensure our actions build trust and don’t damage the relationship with the community,” Anderson told Bolts. 

The Driving Equality Ordinance in Ann Arbor served as a direct policy model for Dyer’s plan to end non-safety traffic stops throughout the county. Dyer’s proposal aims to end the indirect quotas by limiting the authority of sheriff’s deputies to pull drivers over for low-level infractions, including many of the same equipment and registration issues. Such a policy would have an immediate effect on traffic stops in Ypsilanti Township, Superior Township, and rural parts of the county where sheriff’s deputies routinely patrol. Shifting the culture within the department is equally important, Dyer said, and that’s something that must be achieved by restructuring the way officers are evaluated.

Michigan’s rules for funding the legal system also cloud the motive for county officers to do stops, since district courts are funded in part by traffic ticket revenue. The court in Ypsilanti Township has in recent years budgeted for some $625,000 in fees such as traffic tickets to flow through the court, accounting for up to a third of its funding, records show. 

The state’s Trial Court Funding Commission released a report in 2019 that said it was imperative to separate the justice system from penal fees due to risk of excessive police and court enforcement being used to boost municipal revenue. The funding mechanism risked a budget crisis for some courts during the coronavirus pandemic when fewer drivers were on the road and revenue plummeted, Dyer said.

“Local municipalities become reliant on it. What we realized during COVID is that it’s not sustainable,” Dyer said. “We shouldn’t be using deputies to be revenue generators.”

Magee, a former federal agent and one of Dyer’s opponents in the race for sheriff, also insists there should be no conflict of interest or incentive for officers to stop drivers for any reason besides traffic safety. The justice system shouldn’t balance its budget on the backs of working-class drivers, he said. But a blanket policy against stopping drivers over certain equipment and registration violations reaches too far and “flies in the face of traffic safety standards,” Magee told Bolts.

“These are traffic offenses that are geared towards making sure people’s vehicles are roadworthy and safe,” he said, adding that equipment standards prevent danger like carbon monoxide poisoning due to faulty mufflers.

Instead, Magee would reorient the ticketing system toward education rather than a financial penalty. Instead of paying a fine or challenging the ticket in court, Magee’s traffic education model would give drivers a third option: a short online course that addresses the specific traffic violation. Completing the 15- to 30-minute course suspends the ticket, and if the driver keeps a clean record for 18 months, the violation is dismissed without a fee or adding points to the driver’s record.

“Why are we utilizing this as a cash cow for the court systems?” Magee asked. “Traffic enforcement has to be about prevention of harm and educating people. It should not be a punitive process. An educated driver is going to save lives.”

Besides creating a traffic education model to take the money out of the traffic stop equation, Magee says the sheriff’s office must create “checks and balances” to address any biased policing and ensure officers aren’t making traffic stops just to make searches. 

To do this, Magee is proposing the creation of a countywide independent civilian oversight panel to investigate complaints of officer misconduct, review internal investigations and track any patterns that emerge in enforcement activities. Such accountability mechanisms are necessary, Magee says, to make sure existing guardrails like the quota ban are actually followed.

“Leadership has to hold their troops accountable to make sure those trends don’t lean towards racial bias, and leadership has to be held accountable for making sure those policies are adhered to,” Magee said.

Traffic stops are not the only issue that the incoming sheriff will face; at a public forum in May voters also questioned the candidates on how they would manage conditions at the local jail, develop programs for mental illness and substance abuse, and strengthen transparency and community partnership. 

But traffic enforcement is the most common encounter that people have with law enforcement, and in a progressive county where each of the candidates is trying to position themselves as a reformer, the differences between their platforms on this issue could impact how thousands of people experience their county’s policing force. 

Jackson, who is the current Community Engagement Director for the sheriff’s office and has received outgoing Sheriff Clayton’s endorsement in the race, has defended the current sheriff’s approach to reducing traffic stops and insisted that improvements are already in the works. While Jackson, who did not respond to Bolts’ request for an interview, proposed a study to analyze enforcement patterns, he approaches the issue of traffic stops as something to address through management rather than through a new policy. 

On the other hand, Magee and Dyer are more focused on entirely removing incentives for officers to make stops to gain ticket revenue or search for contraband. It’s a fundamental rethinking of the role of sworn officers in traffic enforcement that Anderson, the Ann Arbor police chief, says is happening more broadly. 

“It is something being considered all across the country, that at some point we will evolve in law enforcement where there may be alternative ways to address some of the more minor infractions,” Anderson told Bolts. “It may not be the police. There may be another way to address these concerns.”

The post A Michigan City Ended Low-Level Traffic Stops. Now the County Could Follow. appeared first on Bolts.

When Oakland County Clerk Lisa Brown looks back on the nine days of early voting she administered in the lead-up to Michigan’s Nov. 7 local elections, she considers it not only a logistical success, but a good time for those working the polls.

The people who came out to cast ballots were especially pleasant, she recalls, and election workers got to run the polls without the pressure of long and crowded Election Days. 

The southeast Michigan county was one of ten throughout the state where some voters tried out in-person early voting this fall, a first in this state. The innovation was one of the key provisions of Proposal 2, a constitutional amendment that voters overwhelmingly approved last year that contained many other changes aimed at protecting and expanding ballot access, including mandating ballot drop boxes and funding postage for mail-in ballots.

With the entire state set to adopt in-person early voting in 2024, Brown and some other clerks took advantage of the lower-turnout races this year to try out early voting as a pilot program. 

“We’re glad to be that resource for others,” Brown said. “It will make it easier for other clerks next year that we can share our experience, advice and knowledge.”

In addition to adopting Prop 2 last year, Michigan voters delivered the state House and Senate to Democrats, and reelected Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, giving the party its first trifecta control of the state government in 38 years. This came after several years of Republican legislators—many of them motivated by Trumpian voter fraud conspiracies—pushing for new voting restrictions, while others in the GOP played with overturning elections and ran for office on proposals to unwind the election system.

The newly-empowered Democrats, by contrast, made democracy legislation a priority. Powered by what voting access advocates are calling a “pro-voter” majority in the House and Senate, the legislature has passed a raft of new legislation that’s meant to make it easier for people to register and cast ballots, to shore up election systems, and to protect election workers.

“There was a call to action with the passage of Proposal 2,” said Democratic Representative Penelope Tsernoglou, who was elected to the House as part of this blue wave in 2022. “It was clear that people in Michigan wanted more voter access and wanted to support whatever we could do to…make voting easy, accessible, streamlined.” 

But key pieces of this agenda were left unfinished—including a state-level Voting Rights Act and a bill to end prison gerrymandering—and Democrats’ window of action to push them through may be closing just as quickly as it opened. The party finds itself in a very tight spot if they hope to pass more of it by next fall’s elections, when they risk losing control of the legislature.

The Michigan legislature adjourned for the year on Nov. 14, about a month earlier than usual, and when it returns Democrats will have lost their ability to pass legislation through the state House, likely through the middle of 2024. That’s because two Democrats are resigning from the House after winning mayoral races on Nov. 7, leaving the chamber evenly split between Democrats and Republicans until their blue districts hold special elections next year.

This puts pressure on 2024, a year that won’t just be a deadline for Michigan Democrats to complete their voting rights agenda, but also the first proving ground for some of their new elections measures, all against the backdrop of possible renewed efforts by Donald Trump to test the democratic system.

Kim Murphy-Kovalick, programs director of Voters Not Politicians, a group that organized to get Prop 2 on the ballot in 2022 and lobbied Lansing on voting rights this year, is glad to see so much legislation pass but acknowledges that there’s still much work to be done. 

“We have a pro-voter legislature but our majorities are very slim, and there are still elected officials who do not support these measures,” she told Bolts. “So while Michigan has made great gains in the last few years, we’re in a tenuous place.”

With the legislature set to adjourn earlier than expected this month, Michigan legislators worked right up to the end to pass a flurry of bills with the intended effect of reducing friction at nearly all points in the voting process, starting from registration. 

Michigan adopted automatic voter registration, a system in which the government uses existing points of interactions with residents to proactively register them, back in 2018, thanks to a different ballot proposition. But lawmakers on Nov. 8 passed a bill sponsored by Tsernoglou that would expand the state agencies tasked with automatically registering someone to vote. In addition to signing people up when they get or update a driver’s license, the state would also register them through interactions with Native American tribal nations, Medicaid applications (though this provision is contingent on a federal blessing) and the Department of Corrections. 

As Bolts reported last week, this is the first law in the nation under which people leaving prison would be automatically registered to vote. 

Lawmakers also passed a bill that would allow 16 and 17-year-olds to preregister, so that they’re already on the rolls to cast votes once they become eligible at 18. Proponents of this reform, which already exists in some form in 25 other states, say that it helps build civic habits early, and encourages turnout among young voters. Both of these voter registration bills now await Whitmer’s signature. (Editor’s note: Whitmer signed both bills into law on Nov. 30.)

Whitmer signed another bill this month that repealed the state’s ban on paid rides to the polls. This unusual restriction, defended by the GOP, threatened outside groups with criminal charges if they paid to transport people to the polls, limiting get-out-the-vote methods used elsewhere.

Another law that she signed would change the rules for ballot challenges so that votes cast by people who register on the day of the election are no longer automatically entered in “challenged” status, which delays ballot processing. Tsernoglou says this rule benefits voters in college towns like Ann Arbor and East Lansing, where many students use same-day voter registration. 

HB 4570, meanwhile, will allow voters to request absentee ballot applications online, codifying and make permanent a process that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has already put in place.

Still other legislation passed during this final sprint focused on protecting against false information on the campaign trail, and protecting voting procedures and election workers. One set of bills, also sponsored by Tsernoglou, would require disclaimers on campaign ads produced with AI technology, in an attempt to combat “deepfakes,” digitally-manipulated content that’s increasingly being used to spread political disinformation.

Other reforms would clarify that only the state supreme court may contest the results of a presidential election, and establish a process candidates must follow to petition for judicial review; lawmakers passed those bills to deter frivolous lawsuits of the sort that Trump’s campaign filed in Michigan in the aftermath of the 2020 election. All of these measures also await Whitmer’s signature. 

Lawmakers also passed a bill, now on Whitmer’s desk, that would make harassing or intimidating an election worker a crime, up to a felony. (Editor’s note: Whitmer signed this bill and the ones mentioned in the prior paragraph on Nov. 30.) With it, Michigan would join a growing list of states passing laws that have created new criminal charges for people who harass election workers since the 2020 election and its aftermath, which has seen election workers nationwide complain of threats they’ve received.

Where these laws have been proposed, though, some criminal justice reform advocates have raised concerns about the strategy of creating new criminal charges, objecting to measures that increase the footprint of the prison system and pointing out that such measures may needlessly pile onto existing anti-harassment laws. 

Earlier this year, Michigan Democrats already adopted another package of landmark reforms meant to implement and fund provisions of Prop 2: These measures established the modalities of early voting, detailed municipality drop box requirements, and codified a system for online absentee ballot tracking. It also allowed voters to sign up on a list to receive mail ballots every cycle, without having to ask for them again.

Whitmer signed this package into law in July. 

Brown, the Oakland County clerk, sees the changes brought about by Prop 2 as sorely needed. “From a voting rights perspective, I’d say we finally caught up to a lot of other states,” she said. “We were lacking and lagging for way too long.”

Brown served two terms as a Democrat in the state House from 2009 to 2012, when the legislature was either split or under Republican control. She recalls how difficult it was then to pass voting rights legislation. 

“You couldn’t get some of these issues through,” Brown told Bolts. “It took citizens to get together and say, ‘If the legislature can’t do this, we’re gonna do it.’ And that’s how we got those ballot proposals. So I think we made a lot of really good progress.”

When Democrats took control of Lansing last year for the first time since the 1980s, they were meant to have a two-year stint in power. But their narrow 56-54 majority in the state House has been thrown into question: Representatives Kevin Coleman and Lori Stone decided to run for mayor in their respective hometowns of Westland and Warren, and they’ll now leave their office early since they prevailed in those mayoral elections on Nov. 7.

Democrats feel confident they’ll eventually regain a working majority once Coleman and Stone’s seats are filled, since both come from solidly-blue districts. But these special elections may take a while to organize. 

Speaker Joe Tate doused some Democrats’ hope that the specials would happen in February to coincide with the state’s presidential primary, telling Bridge Michigan that he doesn’t “see that as feasible.” Bridge Michigan reports that special elections may be held in May, or even as late as August to coincide with another statewide primary. The final decision lies with Whitmer. (Update on Nov. 27: Whitmer has scheduled primaries for both seats on Jan. 30, with general elections to follow on April 16.)

In the meantime, there may be five to eight months in which Michigan has a Senate under Democratic control, but a House divided 54-54 between Democrats and Republicans—a situation that some observers are already calling a recipe for partisan gridlock. 

Advocates in the state are nervous that, by the time the specials are held, especially if they’re in August, lawmakers’ attention will have shifted to running for reelection in the November races. 

And there’s a lot else that they were asking of lawmakers. Murphy-Kovalick of Voters Not Politicians was hoping they’d pass a bill banning people from carrying guns within 100 feet of polling locations and county boards. 

“It’s very disappointing that banning weapons at polling locations didn’t make it across the finish line,” Murphy-Kovalick said, “because open carry of weapons at polling locations is a voter intimidation tactic that has been used in the past, and we would like to avoid that next year.” The bill passed the House but did not make it out of the Senate this year. 

Another reform that stalled this year was a proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act, intended to prevent racial discrimination in voting. At least six states have passed such measures in recent years in order to fill in voter protection gaps that have been left by the recent court decisions that weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, explains Aseem Mulji, legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a national organization that advocates for voting rights and endorsed the Michigan proposal. 

“There is a common-sense response to the erosion of voting rights at the federal level; states have the power to pass their own VRAs,” he said. “You don’t have to just rely on the federal law. It’s sort of baffling that the idea has just begun to catch on.”

Michigan’s proposed VRA, which didn’t pass either chamber this year, is designed to do just this. One provision would require local governments to get preclearance from the secretary of state or from a state court before making certain voting changes, which would mirror a key section of the federal VRA that was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. The package also includes provisions to protect Michigan’s minority groups; for example requiring voting materials to be translated into Arabic and other languages from the Middle East and North Africa, in service of the many people from those regions living in the state. 

“It’s worth acknowledging that the state’s taken really tremendous strides towards improving access and freedom to vote,” said Mulji. “And this is really a way to protect the progress the state has made against future backsliding, by saying, ‘we won’t allow you to backslide on any protections to the extent that they result in racial discrimination.’” 

Another missed opportunity to shore up voting equity was a bill to end prison gerrymandering. In Michigan, as in most states, people incarcerated in state prisons don’t have the right to vote but, for the purposes of drawing electoral districts, are counted as part of the population where the prison is located rather than where their last address before being incarcerated. This inflates the political power of small, rural areas where prisons tend to be located at the expense of more urban and more diverse areas that tend to suffer a heavier incarceration rate.

The Michigan Senate first took up the issue in September with a hearing in the Ethics and Elections Committee, but the legislation did not advance. For now, Michigan won’t join the other 11 states including Colorado and Virginia that have ended prison gerrymandering. 

Murphy-Kovalick doesn’t expect the VRA package or the prison gerrymandering bill to pass a tied House next year. But Tsernoglou doesn’t necessarily think that the next few months will be time lost. 

“We really need to have some time to do our work in our offices of getting bills drafted and introduced,” she said. “I think this is absolutely fine for us to have this time right now and it’s also a really great opportunity for us to figure out what we can do on a bipartisan basis.” 

She acknowledges that it’s been hard to generate bipartisan consensus on election legislation but thinks it’s still possible. 

Whatever happens with the rest of Democrats’ agenda Michigan voters will go into 2024 with stronger protections and easier access to the ballot than they’ve had in past years, and other states are already eying Lansing as a blueprint on how to strengthen democracy. But Murphy-Kovalick also warns that next year could be Democrats’ last opportunity for a while to build on their recent work.

“There are some other things that, if we end up losing a pro-voter majority moving forward, might not ever see the light of day,” said Murphy-Kovalick. “So we’re hoping to get some of these across the finish line next year to make sure that everything is in place to protect our elections, not only in 2024, but moving beyond that.” 

The post Michigan Democrats Sprint Through ‘Pro-Voter’ Agenda to Close Out 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

Nobody told Percy Glover he could vote when he was released from prison nineteen years ago. Michigan allows anyone who is not presently incarcerated to vote, meaning Glover could have immediately registered, but he spent years unaware of his rights.

“I was struggling financially. I couldn’t find a job. I was lost in everything,” he told Bolts. “It was years later before I actually considered even thinking about voting.”

Glover eventually learned his rights and started working to engage others in democracy. Last year, he founded F.A.I.R Voting Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for more inclusive election procedures in Michigan, and this month he is celebrating a major legislative victory: The state is about to make it a lot easier for people who exit prison to end up on voter rolls. 

State lawmakers last week adopted House Bill 4983, which would put Michigan in a unique class. If signed by the governor, this would be the first law in the nation to require a state to register people to vote when they’re released from prison.

The state would later send people mail notifying them that they have been registered to vote, as well as giving them the option to decline and opt out of voter rolls. 

Michigan first adopted automatic voter registration in 2018 as part of Proposal 3, a ballot measure that voters overwhelmingly approved. The idea is for public agencies to leverage their existing interactions with citizens to register them to vote, relieving individuals of that burden and shifting it to the state. But, like in most of the other states that have set up this program, Michigan has only implemented it to add people to voter rolls when they get, renew, or update their driver’s licenses or state IDs.

HB 4983 would significantly expand automatic voter registration by ordering the Department of Corrections to implement it as well; at least 8,000 people are released from state prison each year in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s office. The bill would also bring other agencies into the program, building on steps that a few states have already taken to register people when they obtain a Native American tribal ID, or when they sign up for Medicaid. 

“We wanted to include more than just driver’s licenses so that we could really get people registered any time they’re interacting with our government, which includes Medicaid offices and the Department of Corrections,” state Representative Penelope Tsernoglou, the Democrat who sponsored the legislation, told Bolts. 

Tsernoglou was first elected in 2022 as part of a blue surge that delivered full control of Michigan’s state government to the Democratic Party for the first time since the 1980s. Democrats have passed a number of major voting bills this year, and HB 4983 itself is part of a broad voting-rights package that now awaits the signature of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has supported other efforts to expand ballot access. 

Voting rights advocates in Michigan say they’re confident she will sign these new reforms; her office would not specify her plans when asked by Bolts. 

These advocates wanted to build on the 2018 ballot initiative to expand its reach. “Prop 3 was a huge step in the right direction, but there were a lot of people not interacting [with a driver’s license office] so conversations since then really centered around how to reach people where they’re at,” said Ben Gardner, Michigan campaign manager for All Voting Is Local, a national organization. This bill also authorizes Michigan to still identify other public agencies in the future that could also automatically register people to vote.

Michigan is already better than most states at registering people to vote, but there are still hundreds of thousands of eligible Michiganders who aren’t registered—and that population includes disproportionate numbers of low-income people and people of color, voting rights advocates say. They’re confident that, if Whitmer signs the bill to strengthen automatic voter registration, it can expect to reach and sign up most of them. 

Besides applying automatic voter registration to more agencies, HB 4983 would also greatly change how the program works—even at driver’s license offices. 

Right now, Michiganders are asked whether they want to opt out of having the state register them to vote in the course of the transaction in which they’re getting or updating an ID. Under HB 4983, they would no longer be asked this question while conducting this other business; instead, they would later be sent a mailer at home, and they would have to return it if they wish to not be registered.

This is known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. Data from Colorado, which has also opted for such a model, show that this system dramatically reduces the share of people who choose to opt out. This year alone, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., have adopted similar legislation to switch from “front-end” to “back-end” models. Oregon’s bill, like Michigan’s, also extends its program to apply to Medicaid.

The Medicaid change comes with an asterisk, though: States cannot enact it without the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up such reforms. 

Asked about Michigan’s bill, the Biden administration told Bolts this week that it is reviewing the issue, echoing an earlier statement it shared with Bolts in July about Oregon’s bill.

“We recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said in its new statement. “CMS is considering additional opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration while also ensuring compliance with Medicaid confidentiality requirements.” 

But Michigan would not need to wait for any approval to enlist its prison system into expanding voter rolls.

In fact, the state has already begun experimenting with this reform through administrative changes. According to the secretary of state’s office, Michigan has given people exiting any state prison the opportunity to register to vote since 2020, through a program that helps them obtain a state ID as they re-enter society. 

HB 4983 would substantially build on that administrative effort, codifying it into law to make it a requirement for the DOC to register people. It’d also expand it to anyone released from prison independent of an ID program, and switch the procedure to a back-end model.

Michigan is particularly well positioned to leverage the point at which people leave prison to register to vote, since it’s among 24 states where people regain the right to vote as soon as they exit the prison, without any of the long waiting periods or onerous additional conditions that many other states impose. (In Maine and Vermont, plus D.C., anyone can also vote from prison) 

Erica Peresman, a voting rights attorney in Michigan, told Bolts that many formerly incarcerated people are currently disinclined to register because they’re worried about whether they’re allowed. 

“They’d be afraid of doing something wrong,” said Peresman, who is senior advisor at the Michigan nonprofit Promote the Vote. “We’d be out there at voter registration drives and people would say, ‘no, I have a felony on my record.’ They didn’t want to get in trouble, and they weren’t necessarily going to listen to some lady standing on the street with a clipboard.”

HB 4983 would solve some of that problem; formerly incarcerated people would no longer have to wonder whether it’s safe to register because the state would automatically do that for them and send them a mailer. 

Still, advocates say Michigan should go further. The state will need a “massive voter education effort” to complement the new policy, said Peresman, who warns that many who stand to be affected by the state’s recent expansions to voter rights may still not realize that they’ve been registered, or that that they could take advantage of new voting procedures like vote-by-mail

Tsernoglou, the bill’s sponsor, agrees. She wanted the legislature to also pass another bill that would have required the Department of Corrections to provide people with specific information about their voting rights. That bill, HB 4534, would have required prison officials to tell people who exit incarceration that they are eligible to vote, how to obtain a mail ballot, and when elections are held in Michigan. (The secretary of state’s office says it already provides some of this info to people leaving prison; HB 4534 would expand and codify enshrine that in law.)

The bill did not pass either chamber before the legislature adjourned last week. “I think that bill would be a prime example of something we could do additionally, next year,” Tsernoglou told Bolts. 

Another issue that the reform will likely run into is that some people who leave prison don’t have a stable address to provide. Khyla Craine, deputy legal director in the secretary of state’s office, told Bolts that her office allows people with unstable housing situations to update their addresses online; the state would work with parole and probation officers, plus community organizations like Percy Glover’s, to make sure people know how to do this, she said.

Glover said that a bill like HB 4983 can only go so far if the state does not also step up its investment in the success of people re-entering society, ensuring they have access to jobs and housing. 

“Voter economics is real,” he said. “If you are impoverished, you are not thinking about an election, and most people leaving a prison are not walking into a strong financial position. Finding somewhere to live, having transportation, having basic needs met—that’s the priority.”

The plan to automatically register people leaving prison is “very important,” he added, “but we won’t see significant turnout, as we should, without all these other layers.”

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