Barnett worried that if Los Angeles County’s progressive District Attorney George Gascón lost to opponent Nathan Hochman, policing could increase in the downtown Los Angeles neighborhood home to thousands of unhoused and formerly unhoused residents. 

“It’s going to be horses back down here,” said Barnett, alluding to the Los Angeles Police Department’s mounted unit. “It’s just going to incarcerate a lot of people, people are going to be going to jail for petty stuff.”

Homelessness was on the California ballot again this year, as it is increasingly playing a role in the state’s politics. A February 2023 survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found that Californians “are most likely to name ‘jobs, the economy, and inflation or homelessness’ as the most important issue for the governor and legislature to focus on. In Los Angeles County, nearly three-quarters of residents said homelessness “is a big problem in their part of the state.” 

Measure A was the clearest referendum on homelessness policy in LA County this year. The measure asked voters whether to extend and double the county’s quarter-cent sales tax that funds services and housing for people experiencing homelessness. And even in less direct ways, LA’s elections shape how homelessness is felt, from local and state ballot measures related to rent control and affordable housing to races for local elected officials who make decisions on the frequency and locations of sweeps, and how homelessness will be criminalized within their jurisdiction. 

But as a voting bloc, people with lived experience with homelessness like Barnett are underrepresented at the ballot box. More than 1 in 5 people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. live in Los Angeles County, and the county’s unhoused population of over 75,000 equals a constituency bigger than most of the county’s 88 cities. These potential voters could inform state and local efforts on homelessness by choosing which elected officials, policies, and programs might best serve them—but structural barriers make them less likely to vote. Data on voting among people experiencing homelessness is scarce, but one estimate found only about 10% of unhoused Americans vote each year.

Los Angeles County is actively working to change this trend with the Flex Vote Center Program, which brings voting directly to shelters and service centers for people experiencing homelessness. The hope is that bringing the polls to locations where unhoused people are already receiving services will reduce one barrier to voting. 

“Voting is the least of their concerns,” said Angel Agabon, 24, who recently experienced homelessness himself and voted for the first time this year at My Friend’s Place, a drop-in center in Hollywood for young people experiencing homelessness. “They got more shit to worry about than voting… They don’t know where they’re going to stay tonight, they don’t know what they’re gonna eat, they don’t know when they’re next meal’s gonna be, so voting, it’s not their primary concern, especially when they’re in this situation.”

The hope is that with Flex Vote Centers, people can go to places where they can get these basic needs met, and also participate in civic life. My Friend’s Place hosted a Flex Vote Center on Monday, October 28, one of 93 sites that the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk opened this year. The County Clerk launched the program back in 2020 along with other efforts aimed at making voting easier, especially among underrepresented groups such as voters experiencing homelessness, voters with disabilities, voters residing in assisted living homes, and geographically isolated voters. Most Flex Vote Centers are open for one or two days during the two weeks leading up to the election, while the county’s regular vote centers are either open for 4- or 11-day voting periods. 

The effort to make voting as accessible as possible has meant placing vote centers at locations including a tiny home village for people experiencing homelessness, a youth shelter, and a transitional housing site for women and children. Because the Flex Vote Center Program doesn’t only focus on unhoused voters, other locations included a jail and detention center, churches, city halls, and health centers, and other community organizations. 

“I think that the combination of having Flex Vote Centers, same-day registration, all of these different things, makes it easier. It’s never going to be easy when you’re living in a tent, but easier for people to be able to vote when they’re unhoused,” said Kat Calvin, founder and executive director of Spread the Vote, which helps unhoused people and others obtain identification documents so they can vote. “I haven’t seen anywhere else in the country that’s worked as hard as they have in LA.”

The effort has had an effect: The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office estimates that in the 2020 November General Election, a total of 2,794 people “who may not have had the opportunity to vote were able to accessibly, securely and independently cast their ballot in the General Election through the Flex program.” 

At My Friend’s Place this year, at least 31 young people registered to vote, according to Mat Herman, a Safe Haven Counselor at My Friend’s Place. In the weeks leading up to the election, My Friend’s Place hosted voter education events on topics like the two major political parties, a primer on voting in local elections, and voting as a member of the BIPOC community. 

“Overall, we really wanted to take this opportunity to educate [people] that just because you’re unhoused doesn’t mean you can’t vote,” said Herman. 

That included letting people know they could vote without a permanent address, by listing the address of My Friend’s Place or using cross streets as their address. Across the U.S., no state requires voters to have a traditional residence to vote, although many potential unhoused voters are unaware of this, according to the National Coalition for the Homelessness. Lacking identification documents can also serve as a barrier in some states. 

Even after registering, people experiencing homelessness still face barriers to voting. All but a dozen states and the District of Columbia have some form of voter ID laws, and roughly half require photo ID to vote. But frequent encampment sweeps makes obtaining proper documents more difficult. “We are constantly having to reorder birth certificates, re-get IDs, etcetera,” said Calvin. 

And not having these documents can have cascading impacts, even in states like California without voter ID laws. 

“If you don’t have an ID, you can’t get a job, you can’t get housing, you can’t get healthcare, you have bigger problems. And so it’s hard to even think about voting and participating in civic life when you don’t know where you’re sleeping tomorrow,” said Calvin. 

Other barriers include overcoming historic and systemic disenfranchisement, as many established voting practices are based on the assumption that a voter has a permanent home address, from important voting information sent via mail to identification requirements in some states. In some ways, these barriers are the last remaining vestiges of the country’s first voting requirements, which only allowed white male landowners to vote. 

Agabon estimates he personally persuaded over a dozen of his peers at My Friend’s Place to register to vote this year, in part by emphasizing the importance of weighing in on matters that directly how the election could impact housing and homelessness. 

“A lot of people don’t know that if you vote for the wrong people, places like this could shut down,” said Agabon. 

Measure A, the ballot initiative on the tax for homelessness services, ultimately passed with 58 percent of the vote. But other ballot measures focused on housing and homelessness didn’t fare as well. A statewide ballot measure aimed at making it easier for cities to expand rent control (which Agabon supported) failed for the third time in recent years. Still, it was important to Agabon and others that unhoused voters have a say in this policy that affects them directly. 

“All the great programs we work with, they are all going to get help getting funded with Measure A,” said Herman. “We’re just trying to show them that this is a huge thing for your community, Measure A.”

The James Wood Community Center, where Barnett voted, was one of two voting locations for Skid Row residents this year. It operated as one of the county’s routine voting centers that opened the Saturday before the election, not a Flex VoteCenter. 

It was an improvement on the 2020 general election, when there wasn’t a single official voting center in Skid Row. The only in-person voting option in the neighborhood was a mobile voting station that popped up only for election day, while other neighborhoods in downtown Los Angeles had voting centers open for four to 11 days. 

For Barnett, the community center location was convenient—just a few blocks from the single-room occupancy hotel where he currently stays. He learned the vote center was open through “word of mouth.”

“We thought they forgot about us,” he said about the wait to find out if a vote center would open in Skid Row this year. “We’re aware of the issues. It was just that we didn’t know if they were gonna let us vote.”

As soon as Barnett heard the James Wood Community Center was open for voting, he made his way over, casting his ballot the first day it opened. “I was early,” he said. 

The post Pop-Up Voting Centers Bring the Polls Directly to Unhoused Angelenos appeared first on Bolts.

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.

“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”

He added, “I thought this was a serious document, and that there would be some standard.” Other Ohioans have come forward with similar stories in recent days, complaining they meant to vote ‘yes’ but got tricked by the ballot language into not doing so.

Now the fate of Ohio’s redistricting reform hinges on whether its proponents can dispel this confusion and get the word out to all the residents who intend to support it. 

The result will determine who gets to draw future state congressional and legislative districts, and it may shift seats as early as 2026. But more than that, the dispute adds to a larger saga over the viability of direct democracy in Ohio. Just last summer, the GOP pushed an amendment that would have made it much less likely for future citizen-initiated measures to succeed. That proposal failed, but Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told me at the time that she expected Republican leaders to “come back and try again” this year. Now she says that’s exactly what they did when they skewed this latest measure’s ballot language. 

Lewis helped organize Issue 1 this year. And just like in the summer of 2023, she said, state officials “are threatened by the idea that the people of Ohio would have power.”

“They have understood that Ohioans don’t want gerrymandering, they have nothing good to say about voting ‘no’,” she said, “so the only thing they can say is, if you vote ‘yes,’ on this, you’re requiring gerrymandering, which is the exact opposite of the truth.”

Issue 1 would amend the state constitution to create a new panel to draw Ohio districts. It would be made up of 15 citizens selected by retired judges from a pool of applicants; the body would need to include five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. Elected officials would be barred from serving on the commission. 

An independent commission would mark a huge change from current law, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor, the secretary of state, and appointees of legislative leaders. The constitution already requires that new maps respect certain principles of fairness. But when Ohio’s high court in 2022 struck down GOP gerrymanders seven separate times, ordering the process to be more equitable, GOP leaders ignored the rulings and ran out the clock until they landed a more conservative court in the 2022 midterms. Issue 1 would also codify more stringent fairness criteria for the new commission to respect. 

The coalition that drafted Issue 1 collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot. But as the secretary of state, LaRose got the opportunity to write the measure’s official summary. LaRose had been an active player in the redistricting process that drew the current maps that favor the GOP, but wrote his proposed summary in a way that suggested Issue 1 would make it likelier that Ohio gets gerrymandered. Proponents of Issue 1 immediately complained that his text was misleading. 

They got more angry after LaRose’s draft went up for review in front of the Ohio Ballot Board, a five-person body that includes LaRose and has a GOP majority. During that process, Republican state Senator and board member Theresa Gavarone proposed the specific wording that Kwon says tripped him up most: She suggested using the term “gerrymander” to describe the way Issue 1 would require a commission to divide up the state.

Gavarone’s proposed tweak was met by gasps and startled laughter from the audience. (This can be heard in the recording’s 1:35:20 mark.) State Representative Terrence Upchurch, one of two Democrats on the board, then laughed in bewilderment when given the opportunity to respond to Gavarone. Still, a majority of the board approved LaRose’s draft and Gavarone’s amendment.

Voting rights groups rushed to court, asking for the language to be struck down. But the state supreme court, which has a narrow GOP majority, rebuffed them in September and upheld most of the ballot summary. 

The four Republican justices said it was accurate to say that the new independent commission would “gerrymander” Ohio since it would be tasked with taking partisanship into account, even if it’s to draw a more evenly divided map.

The three Democratic justices disagreed furiously. Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in a dissent, “We should be requiring a nearly complete redrafting of what is perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.”

According to Derek Clinger, an Ohio-based lawyer who has litigated past ballot language cases in front of the Ohio Supreme Court, many states use a system like Ohio’s: They ask elected partisan officials to draft ballot summaries. Still, some do it differently. Oregon, for instance, randomly selects citizens to meet and write statements summarizing each ballot measure. 

But what frustrates Clinger is that Ohio’s state constitution does contain “workable standards” that are meant to enable oversight onto the decisions made by state officials; it states that language on the ballot can’t “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Clinger said, “You have this standard, but you had a majority [on the state supreme court] that disregarded that.”

Some Ohio justices take the view that they’re not supposed to play a strong oversight role. Pat DeWine, a Republican justice who is also the son of Ohio’s governor, even has a forthcoming law review essay on the matter. DeWine admits that the Ohio Ballot Board “is composed of partisan actors who may have incentives to draft language that at least subtly favors one side or the other.” But the court should be wary of second guessing them, he writes: It “polices only the outer boundaries of the board’s discretion.” 

Clinger, who now works at the State Democracy Research Initiative, a research hub at the University of Wisconsin Law School, disagrees. He points to a separate dispute that unfolded in Utah this fall: There, Republicans advanced a referendum meant to allow lawmakers to more easily overturn citizen-initiated measures, while also crafting ballot language claiming that their proposal would “strengthen the initiative process.” 

The Utah supreme court voided this measure in September, writing that a referendum must be placed “on the ballot in such words and in such form that the voters are not confused thereby.”

“Despite the partisan implications of the case, the Utah Supreme Court seemed able to assess in good faith whether the ballot language fairly described the proposal,” Clinger said. “The big takeaway for me is that the personnel of the court is so important.”

The composition of Ohio’s supreme court is on the line this fall since the state is holding elections for three of its seven seats. The GOP could expand its majority from 4-3 to 6-1, but Democrats also have an opportunity to flip the court in their favor. 

Neither Gavarone nor LaRose responded to Bolts’ requests for comment for this story. LaRose said in a statement last month that the court’s decision was “a huge win for Ohio voters, who deserve an honest explanation of what they’re being asked to decide.” 

If Issue 1 passes, the state would have to quickly set up a new commission to create new maps by the 2026 midterms. But for now, proponents of the reform are focused on getting the measure across the finish line. 

 A poll conducted this month by YouGov found that support for Issue 1 had a large lead of over 20 percentage points. But the survey did not use the actual language that people are seeing on their ballot; instead, it asked how respondents would vote after telling them that “a ‘yes’ vote would establish a new bipartisan redistricting commission” and “ban partisan gerrymandering.” That’s precisely the explanation that proponents are fretting won’t be on the measure.

“I’m not going to rest easy at all until election results have come in,” Lewis said. She says she is worried about “a lot of confusion and purposeful misinformation” during the campaign, like the incorrect claims by GOP opponents of the measure that law enforcement officers and veterans would not be eligible to be on the redistricting commission, for instance. 

Citizens Not Politicians, the committee running the “yes” campaign, is working to reach voters and explain what the measure actually does. The group launched an ad this fall in which former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor tells voters that politicians opposed to Issue 1 have “lied” to them. O’Connor, a Republican, voted to strike down GOP gerrymanders in 2022; since leaving office two years ago, she has helped champion Issue 1. 

The committee behind the “no” campaign, Ohio Works, is running ads as well. They have used the same strategy as the Ohio Ballot Board, of trying to associate Issue 1 with gerrymandering. In response to the criticism that some voters feel tricked by this characterization, a spokesperson for Ohio Works has said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

But Kwon, the comic book writer, gives this warning to other Ohio voters: “Be careful. When you read the description, they’re going to refer to any attempt to change the current districting as gerrymandering. That’s what really threw me.”

“I would just say that, if you’re voting ‘yes,’ you’re voting to reform the current districting system,” he added.

Kwon feels frustrated that he unintentionally undercut a reform he supports and canceled out his wife’s vote. But together they’ve been burning up their friend network ever since to share word of his misfortune. 

He said, “If me sharing the story prevents somebody from getting tricked like I was, or one or two people from getting tricked, hopefully that will balance it out.”

The post Anti-Gerrymandering Groups Warn That Ohio’s Ballot Language Is Misleading Voters  appeared first on Bolts.

In 2020, as the world grappled with a deadly global pandemic, Connecticut officials lifted restrictions limiting who can vote by mail, allowing every citizen in the state to obtain an absentee ballot.

The results were historic: More than 650,000 Connecticut citizens voted absentee, roughly a third of all votes cast.

The liberalization of voting laws benefited everyone in the state who wanted to vote by mail, but the change particularly impacted those with disabilities. Researchers from Rutgers University and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that the “disability gap” in Connecticut—the gulf in turnout between voters who had disabilities and those who didn’t—was only 3.3 percent, compared to a national average of 5.7 percent that year.

“People with disabilities are more likely to vote when they have access to voting by mail,” said Douglas Kruse, the co-director of the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University and one of the report’s authors.

But for the 2022 midterms, Connecticut reverted back, and voters once again needed to have an excuse if they wanted to vote by mail. The result was a disability turnout gap of roughly 11 percent—one of the highest in the country and significantly higher than that year’s national average of 1.5 percent. The turnout was “consistent with the idea that rolling back no-excuse absentee voting discouraged turnout among people with disabilities,” said Kruse. 

“It’s not that people with disabilities are less interested in voting,” he continued. It’s that “they face a variety of voting difficulties, everything from getting to the polls, to requesting ballots, to getting inside polling places.”

Mail voting could become easier if Connecticut voters approve a ballot initiative this November that would amend the state Constitution and create a path for everyone to acquire an absentee ballot without needing an excuse. If the proposal passes, it will be up to state legislators to put it into law. 

Should the initiative pass and lead to future legislation, Rutgers and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s research suggests it likely will lead to higher turnout among voters with disabilities. Between the 2018 and 2022 midterms, five states switched to a no-excuse system where anyone could vote by mail, leading to an almost seven percent increase in turnout among people with disabilities. 

“Just to have that ability to get that ballot, in your hands, no excuse needed, is just huge for people with disabilities,” said Carol Scully, director of advocacy for The Arc Connecticut. 

Currently, Connecticut is one of 14 states that require an excuse in order to vote absentee. The state’s Constitution only allows citizens to vote absentee for a handful of specific reasons, which include being sick or out of town on Election Day, or having a physical disability. Even so, not everyone with a disability qualifies for an absentee ballot, and those who must vote in person often have difficulty casting a ballot due to a myriad of possible issues at polling places.

The current statute allows voters with certain disabilities to obtain a permanent absentee ballot, meaning they receive a mail ballot for each election in which they’re eligible to vote. But first, they need to get a note from a doctor stating that they have a permanent physical disability and can’t get to the polls.

“It shouldn’t be on the person with disabilities to prove that they have a right to vote,” said Jess Zaccagnino, policy counsel for the ACLU of Connecticut, which is leading a campaign supporting the ballot initiative.

Existing law is also rigid about what disabilities qualify for an absentee ballot, said Gretchen Knauff, director of Disability Services for the City of New Haven. The statute only allows mail voting for citizens with physical disabilities preventing them from getting to the polls on Election Day, which Knauff said leaves out people with intellectual disabilities or mental health conditions.

“It’s basically treating voters who don’t have physical disabilities differently in the absentee balloting process,” she said. “You’re leaving out people who have disabilities other than physical, and making the assumption they don’t need a permanent absentee ballot.”

People with cognitive impairments are among those least likely to cast a ballot, according to research from Rutgers University and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Lisa Schur, co-director of the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers and one of the report’s authors, said some people with cognitive impairment resulting from a physical disability, like cerebral palsy, would likely qualify for an absentee ballot under Connecticut’s law, but, “it’s kind of a mushy line, so there are a lot of people with cognitive impairments who may not be counted.”

A coalition of voting rights advocates, including the ACLU and a Connecticut chapter of the NAACP, launched a campaign over the summer to build support for the ballot initiative. If the measure is successful, all registered voters would simply be able to request an absentee ballot before each election, and no longer need to navigate logistical hurdles like securing a doctor’s note. 

That means people with disabilities would be treated just like everyone else, said Knauff.

“There’s no barrier, except you have to do the same thing that everyone else has to do, which is request a no-excuse absentee ballot,” Knauff said. “You don’t have to spend your energy trying to prove you’re a person with a disability.”

Adopting the measure would put Connecticut in league with the majority of states that already have some level of no-excuse absentee voting. The proposal has broad support among Connecticut residents. A recent poll from the Connecticut Project Action Fund found that 60 percent of voters support expanding no-excuse absentee voting. 

Even if voters approve the constitutional amendment, it will be up to state legislators to make it law. Given that the measure was referred to the ballot by lawmakers, advocates are hopeful that they would make it a priority. Still, Zaccagnino cautioned, “There’s nothing stopping them from ignoring it.”

If legislators did have any hesitancy about enacting the measure, it could stem from a scandal over mail ballots that has embroiled Bridgeport in recent years, leading to the arrest of four political operatives this summer over the improper handling of absentee ballots during a 2019 Democratic primary. 

Even if Connecticut passes no-excuse absentee voting, advocates for people with disabilities don’t see it as a cure-all. People with disabilities who do decide to vote in person currently face an array of challenges at the polls, said Kasey Considine, supervisory attorney for Disability Rights Connecticut. Voters have reported a lack of parking spaces close to the entrance; doors that aren’t wide enough to fit a scooter or wheelchair; poll workers who aren’t properly trained on how to operate the state’s accessible voting machines, or who make the assumption that people with certain disabilities cannot vote. (The Connecticut Secretary of State’s office did not respond to Bolts’ questions about accessibility at polling locations.) 

“It’s incredibly insulting,” said Considine. 

In a 2022 video produced by Considine’s organization, Carly Bobenski recalled an Election Day where a poll worker asked her if she wanted to vote for her favorite farm animal. 

“My mother and I were really too shocked and embarrassed to say anything except that I had been voting for many years,” said Bobenski, who has cerebral palsy, is quadriplegic and relies on assistive technology to communicate. “By then people were already staring at me.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires polling places to provide accommodations for people with disabilities. Voters with disabilities should not need to tell anyone their condition to receive an accommodation. But in practice, Considine said many voters feel they must disclose personal health information to poll workers in order to get what they need to cast a ballot, as uncomfortable as it is.

“It can feel like you have to choose between your right to privacy and your right to vote,” Considine said.

Difficulties at polling stations are not unique to Connecticut. Research from Rutgers University and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that 20 percent of voters with a disability had trouble voting in person in the 2022 election, compared to 6 percent of those who voted by mail. 

But despite those challenges, Kruse said that about half of people with disabilities would still prefer to vote in person, as long as it’s accessible.

It is not enough, Considine said, for Connecticut voters with disabilities to have to rely on voting by mail because their polling place isn’t accessible enough. 

“Everyone should have that freedom to wait in line, cast their vote, fill out the ballot themselves and get that ‘I voted’ sticker,” she said. “I want to make sure that we still are mindful that disabled voters may still want to go in person, and we still have more work to make sure that is accessible.”

But if voting in person proves challenging for people with disabilities, Zaccagnino said, “no-excuse absentee voting also presents another avenue to vote if their needs aren’t being met by the state.”

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Connecticut Ballot Measure Could Make Voting More Inclusive appeared first on Bolts.

The ruling is certain to deter voting rights litigation within the Eighth Circuit, and advocates worry that the U.S. Supreme Court could take the rule nationwide. Since the 1980s, outside organizations have pursued the vast majority of VRA cases since the DOJ doesn’t have the resources, and in many cases the political will, to pursue many lawsuits on its own.

But lawmakers in Minnesota looked for a remedy this year, and Minnesota has now become the first state within the Eighth Circuit to enshrine a private right of action into state law. Governor Tim Walz in May signed the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, which spells out protections for voters and allows private citizens and outside organizations to bring lawsuits in state courts.

For David McKinney, an attorney at the ACLU of Minnesota who supported the law, the reform “honors a tradition and sets a value under Minnesota law that individuals, when their rights are violated, they’re the ones that are best positioned to assert it.”

“They are the folks who, under the theory of their case, can’t vote, right? They’ve been unlawfully discriminated against, and so they’re in the best position to assert their rights,” McKinney continued.

The Minnesota Voting Rights Act was adopted as part of a package that contains other voter protections, like an end to prison gerrymandering. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that the Eighth Circuit’s ruling supercharged their push, and ensured that enshrining a private right of action would be part of the bill. Several other states have passed similar laws in recent years to shield voters from voting rights’ federal erosion.

“It was the Eighth Circuit decision that added the urgency by taking away the ability of Minnesotans who have been discriminated against to go to court and enforce their rights under federal law,” explains Emma Greenman, a state Representative who co-authored the bill, along with Minnesota Senate President Bobby Joe Champion. Greenman pointed to the fact that two thirds of Voting Rights Act cases are brought by private plaintiffs or organizations. “The U.S. Attorney General is a piece, but not a big piece, of the way that the federal rights are enforced.”

Often, individuals or groups that are being discriminated against are represented in court by organizations such as chapters of the ACLU or NAACP. “Litigation is expensive, and so you do require a fair amount of resources to successfully bring a case. And I think a lot of these organizations do have resources that individual citizens might not have,” said Justin Erickson, general counsel in  the Minnesota secretary of state’s office. “A lot of these organizations are doing this work throughout the country, so they have a really good grasp of the trends that are out there, the different work that’s being done, the best practices that different agencies have undertaken in order to protect voting rights.”

The Eighth Circuit, in a ruling authored by Judge David Stras, a former Minnesota justice who was nominated to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2017, has threatened to halt a lot of that work. 

Before the decision came down, the Minnesota bill’s crafters had been weighing whether to include language codifying a private right of action. While the federal VRA doesn’t include a provision saying explicitly that private citizens can sue for violating the law, Americans have for decades sued under Section 2 of the VRA; in 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this right for private individuals and organizations alike. Greenman says there are also many aspects of federal voting rights law that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the VRA but have been affirmed by courts, which can make legal proceedings complicated.

But given the current conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, Greenman and her allies wanted to be more proactive in protecting rights. “What was a simple and very eloquent bill has been made more and more complicated, especially since we’ve had a Supreme Court that has really been hostile to its protections,” said Greenman. 

They looked to these federal court precedents, as well as to VRAs that were popping up in other states, championed by well-known national organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Brennan Center for Justice. Greenman described the thought process as, “How do we provide strong protections in light of what’s happening to the federal Voting Rights Act?” 

Lilly Sasse worked on Greenman’s state House campaign, and now works for We Choose Us, a coalition of groups that support stronger voting rights protections in Minnesota. Sasse said that the coalition began in 2021, but the campaign became much stronger after the Eighth Circuit decision. “In order for people to have those protections from voter suppression, vote dilution, their day in court, we needed to have something in Minnesota that explicitly stated that.”

Eight other states have adopted their own Voting Rights Acts—California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington. Greenman said she and her colleagues looked to these existing laws and to other states still considering their own state-level VRAs, including Michigan and Maryland, as they drafted their own bill. “It’s always impossible to use a specific model, because all states are so different,” she said.

In part, these laws are a way for a state to go beyond the floor of federal voting protections, and enshrine more specific rights relevant to its particular communities. New York’s VRA, for example, guarantees ballot access in languages other than English.

But they’re also a reaction to worries that courts could further erode federal voter protections. “In recent years, federal courts have been spending some time stripping the VRA of critical components and creating a body of case law that can make it extremely difficult for plaintiffs to win their cases,” said Lata Nott, of the Campaign Legal Center. 

Last year’s Eighth Circuit decision came out of a dispute over a redistricting plan in Arkansas. Liberal groups in that state, including local branches of the ACLU and NAACP, announced in July that they won’t appeal the circuit court’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and will instead seek redress under other laws, even though they believe it was wrongly decided. An adverse ruling by the Supreme Court could end a private right of action nationwide. But in the meantime, the right to sue in federal courts has virtually ended across the Eighth Circuit, which besides Minnesota covers Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. 

“With the Eighth Circuit now having significantly curtailed private causes of action under the Voting Rights Act, and who knows what the Supreme Court’s gonna do on this one, what at least happens in Minnesota now is that voting rights are protected under state law, and individuals now have this ability to enforce their own voting rights,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science and law at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Another key protection of the federal VRA gutted by federal courts is Section 5, known as the preclearance requirement. Under it, jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination had to get federal approval before making changes to voting rules. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling struck down Section 5 in 2013, giving the issue greater significance at the state level. 

New York and Connecticut have both added preclearance provisions into their state VRAs, requiring that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get approval, either from state officials or courts, for proposed voting changes before they can be implemented. Nott said her organization has pushed for preclearance requirements in state VRAs, but this didn’t make it into the Minnesota law. 

“We’re hoping, actually, that next session, that’s something that we can try to push forward,” she said. “With the Eighth Circuit decision, there was some emphasis on being able to pass a bill that could protect the rights of Minnesotans to assert their own rights in court.”

Experts also point to Minnesota’s particular racial disparities in voter turnout as a reason why the state law is necessary. Today, slightly more than a fifth of Minnesotans are people of color, roughly double the population of 30 years ago, according to Schultz. “Minnesota remains a state with enormous racial disparities in criminal justice, education housing, et cetera, but one of the other major racial disparities in the state of Minnesota,” Schultz said, “is voter registration and turnout.”

“A lot of people say the state of Minnesota is usually the north star when it comes to voter turnout. But I also think that we need to stop and ask, for who? For who is the state of Minnesota the number one in voter turnout?” said Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of Common Cause. Belladonna-Carrera and her organization helped campaign for the Minnesota VRA. “Most of the categories where the state of Minnesota does outshine the rest is in the disparities,” said Belladonna-Carrera. 

In part because of how recently the law was enacted, no lawsuits have yet been filed under the Minnesota Voting Rights Act. Belladonna-Carrera said that Common Cause Minnesota is “entertaining a couple of potential cases” but nothing is definite yet. Nott, of the Campaign Legal Center, said that even in the other states with their own VRAs, there’s “not a huge number” of cases yet. “People fear that passing one of these will lead to a torrent of litigation. That’s not the case,” she said.

“These cases are not easy,” acknowledges Greenman. “They have a very high burden of what you have to prove.” But that’s why she believes it’s important for voters to know it’s a right they may exercise. 

“Without a private right of action,” she continued, “what it would mean is you would have to wait for the discretion of a government official to decide whether to bring that case or not, and it would just depend on the resources that the attorney general had.”

Correction: This article has been updated to include a mention of New Mexico’s Voting Rights Act.

The post Minnesota’s Voting Rights Act Preserves This Key Protection A Federal Court Has Erased appeared first on Bolts.

New Hampshire Republicans have passed legislation that would create a new barrier to register to vote—and the big question is whether Republican Governor Chris Sununu will allow it to become law.

In late May, the GOP-controlled New Hampshire legislature adopted a bill that would require people to present their birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers proving their U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote, with no exceptions. That would be a major departure from longstanding New Hampshire law that allows people to sign sworn affidavits as a substitute if they don’t have proof of citizenship when they register to vote. 

Under current New Hampshire law, voters are asked to provide proof of identity and age (usually a driver’s license), proof that they live where they want to vote, and proof of citizenship (either a birth certificate or a passport) in order to be able to register and vote. Less than half of Americans have a passport, and a new study by the Brennan Center found that nine percent of Americans don’t have any proof of citizenship readily available. The current law in New Hampshire allows people to sign a sworn affidavit attesting that they’re telling the truth about their citizenship and residency. Roughly 6,000 people used affidavits in the 2016 election cycle.

The attorney general’s office then follows up after the election to verify those claims. Republicans point to the fact that after the 2016 election cycle, the AG’s office was unable to verify whether 230 of those affidavits were true statements. But that doesn’t mean those registrations contained false information—it just means the AG’s office couldn’t run down the paperwork. The office couldn’t provide any examples of them bringing charges against people for lying on their affidavits in years when asked by NHPR.

The bill would make New Hampshire the only state in the country to require people to bring documentation to prove their citizenship in order to be able to register to vote. 

Republican proponents in the legislature insist it’s a guard against voter fraud, but Democrats as well as many nonpartisan election administrators are worried this new stringent standard will compromise the rights of many eligible voters.

Nashua City Clerk Dan Healey, a registered Republican who is president of the nonpartisan New Hampshire City and Town Clerks Association, warns that the new requirements would disenfranchise voters for no good reason. For Granite Staters who were born in other states and find out last-minute that they need a copy of their birth certificate to register, there’s no way that they will be able to get it in time. 

“We’re very concerned with denying eligible voters the right to vote on election day, because there’s really no cure in place for them to then be able to vote. And I see it as a huge problem, and I think we’re going to get a lot of complaints,” he told Bolts. “As far as I can see, it’s unnecessary…they’re trying to cure something that’s really not a problem.”

He said making the bill a law would be “a pretty big change for our poll workers” and leave election officials scrambling to train them and implement the new requirements. 

Healey sent a letter to Sununu on behalf of the organization in late May asking him to veto what they called a “troubling” bill. But he told Bolts that he had heard nothing back from the governor’s office.

In March, as the bill began making its way through the statehouse, Sununu initially expressed skepticism about its necessity.

“Our system works really well right now,” he told WMUR. “The affidavit, ballot, and process, that seems to work pretty darn well, I haven’t got any negative feedback just yet. So generally I’d just say our system works very well, so I’m not looking to change it.”

But he’s been radio silent about the effort ever since. He hasn’t said a word in public about the bill since March, and his office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Sununu is a sometimes-independent-minded governor who aggressively backed Nikki Haley over former President Donald Trump in the 2024 primaries. He’s since said he’ll vote for Trump over President Biden, but has remained critical of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and pushed back against Trump’s lies about the voting system. Just days ago, he said on CNN that state officials who certified the 2020 election “got it right” and that Biden won fair and square.

In the past, Sununu has signed restrictions on voter access that he’d previously criticized. 

The bill was sponsored by state Representative Bob Lynn, a former chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court who was nominated to the court by Sununu. During an April committee hearing on the bill, he admitted that he didn’t think New Hampshire faced a widespread problem with noncitizens voting, but argued that the bill was still necessary.

“Do I think there’s a huge issue of voter fraud in New Hampshire? No, I don’t, because I think if there was, we would know it,” Lynn said. “But the idea that it’s sort of de minimis, that there really is no voter fraud, or almost no voter fraud—I think we really don’t know the answer to that question, because voter fraud is very difficult to identify and prove.”

New Hampshire Republicans’ push is part of a national GOP effort to require proof of citizenship to register and vote, driven by lies from Trump and his allies that noncitizens are voting in droves.

Trump falsely claimed this was the reason he lost the popular vote in 2016, and launched a voting integrity panel that failed to turn up any evidence of this claim. He’s returned to this theme in recent months. 

At Trump’s behest, Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced legislation in early May to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. Republican Senators Mike Lee and John Kennedy introduced a companion bill on the Senate side.

Similar laws have been tried before—and did more harm than good. Kansas Republicans passed a proof-of-citizenship voting law in 2013. It was blocked by a federal judge a few years later, but not before 30,000 people were prevented from registering to vote in the three years it was in place, according to the Associated Press.

The New Hampshire bill is also part of a nationwide wave of similar proposals. 

Republicans in Arizona have already adopted a law requiring voters to prove their citizenship, but people there can still vote in federal elections without fulfilling the proof requirement due to a federal consent decree. 

A dozen other states have seen similar legislation introduced, including in Louisiana, where Republicans recently sent a bill to the governor that would require voting registration applicants to prove their citizenship, and in Wisconsin, where state legislative Republicans passed a bill in 2023 that would have required use of the DMV’s citizenship data to verify voters’ citizenship. Democratic Governor Tony Evers vetoed it last December. 

It’s already a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in state and federal elections, and studies and surveys from various academics and voting rights groups have found that the actual cases of noncitizens voting are extremely few and far between.

A second bill is currently working its way through New Hampshire’s legislature that would similarly ban affidavits for registering and voting but attempts to offer a partial solution to the problem it creates. Details aren’t yet finalized, but this bill would create a hotline for election officials to call the attorney general’s office and DMV to try to verify citizenship if people forgot to bring their documentation. That bill is expected to be finalized and voted on late this week, though it’s not yet known exactly how this bill would interact with the one already passed and awaiting signature—or whether Sununu might decide to veto one but let the other become law.

At a hearing last week on the second measure, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan, a Republican, signaled support for these types of efforts.

“I don’t think that it is voter suppression or too much to ask voters to be able to give that confidence that they’re qualified to vote,” he said.

But even he warned that implementing measures like these in time for the state’s September primaries could be tough. “I agree that what is being asked is a significant new program, and it will require effort on the part of local election officials to be trained on this new process so that they understand it,” he said.

The new requirements in both bills could be particularly disruptive in New Hampshire because the state allows same-day voter registration. That’s a convenience most voters welcome, but it could be effectively made moot if the new bill means many people who show up on election day expecting to be able to register and vote would be left with almost no time to scramble to get their documents in order. 

“New Hampshire has a large percentage of voters who register same-day, and I think that they would all be in jeopardy,” said Olivia Zink, the executive director of the New Hampshire voting rights group Open Democracy.

The post New Hampshire Republicans Try to Require Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

The proposed reform would have ended what is known as prison gerrymandering, which distorts census counts by inflating population totals where prisons are located—typically rural, politically conservative areas—and lowering them in the places prisoners come from, disproportionately communities of color in urban centers. But Minnesota lawmakers rejected the change in 2010, which, as ever, gave extra political clout to prison communities. After that year’s redistricting cycle, the Prison Policy Initiative found that at least five county and municipal districts in the state had their populations inflated by at least 16 percent, by counting state prisoners, who cannot vote, as local residents.

Minnesota lawmakers again considered fixing this ahead of the 2020 redistricting cycle, and again failed to approve two different legislative proposals, leaving the skewed counts intact on its current political maps. By that cycle, prison gerrymandering bans had become more common, with more than a dozen states adopting reforms in time to affect maps redrawn after the 2020 census. (In addition to states that ended prison gerrymandering in time for the 2020 cycle, Maine and Illinois have also passed bans that will apply for the first time during the 2030 cycle.)

After 14 years of deliberation, Minnesota finally got on board last week: Democratic Governor Tim Walz signed into law a ban on prison gerrymandering in the state. The reform is part of an omnibus elections finance and policy bill that contains other provisions meant to protect voting rights and expand ballot access in general.

Unlike in the immediate leadup to the 2010 and 2020 censuses, when no party enjoyed full control of the state government in Minnesota, Democrats now have a legislative trifecta in the state thanks to their gains in the 2022 midterms, which they’ve already used to reverse the political exclusion of some Minnesotans with criminal convictions. They needed every bit of that power to get this new reform passed: The omnibus bill cleared the state Senate on a party-line 34-33 vote, and passed the state House by a vote of 69-62, with every Democratic member, plus one Republican, in support.  

“We wanted to pass it now, just to make sure that we could be ready for 2030,” Democratic state Representative Esther Agbaje, who championed the prison gerrymandering ban, told Bolts. “This gives time for our secretary of state office and for our counties to get ready to do that count.”

The secretary of state and top Minnesota elections official, Democrat Steve Simon, was appreciative that lawmakers gave the state a long runway to implement the change: “I really am glad this is under consideration now, in a year ending in four,” he told a state legislative committee in March. “When you start talking about redistricting issues in years that end in eight, nine, or zero, it tends to get more political.” 

In terms of raw numbers, the impact of this reform can appear marginal: Minnesota has a population of almost 6 million people, of which some 8,000, or 0.1 percent, are incarcerated in state prisons. Minnesota’s move will apply to local, state, and congressional redistricting, and, in that latter category, the shift in political power will be especially small; U.S. House districts each represent close to a million people.

At the state level, however, the change is easier to spot. The Prison Policy Initiative, which publishes research on and advocates against prison gerrymandering, reports that three different Minnesota state legislative districts count prisoners for at least 4 percent of their populations.

The distortion of prison gerrymandering can be particularly stark at the local level. PPI reported that in 2013, one district in Waseca, a small Minnesota town with a state prison, counted prisoners for 35 percent of its population. 

PPI spokesperson Mike Wessler told Bolts that elsewhere in the country, incarcerated people who cannot vote comprise up to 13 percent of the population in state legislative districts. In some local jurisdictions with prisons, he said, incarcerated people count for up to 80 percent of the population.

Skewing census counts in this way, Wessler argued, “creates a pretty twisted incentive for the people who represent prisons in the legislature to keep those prisons and prison communities full, and maybe even make them fuller. The fuller they are, the louder voice those communities have in government.”

In states with prison gerrymandering, this boosting of political power in prison communities dilutes representation in many of the places where higher portions of the population are incarcerated. Data show people rarely are incarcerated in their home communities, and that holds true for many Minnesotans: The Twin Cities metro is home to some 60 percent of Minnesotans, but several of the largest state prisons are located in small towns far from that area. 

The geographic skew most acutely affects Black Minnesotans, who comprise about 7 percent of the state population and 35 percent of its prison population. The vast majority of Minnesota’s Black population calls the Twin Cities area home.

“These prisons are often built way out in the rural communities, and the very communities where harm may have happened are harmed yet again,” Elizer Darris, an advocate for criminal justice reform, who previously served time in multiple Minnesota prisons, told Bolts. “You leave the pain here, but you put the dollars there. It’s very undemocratic and predatory.”

Darris was closely involved in a 2023 Democrat-led reform in Minnesota to restore voting rights to about 50,000 people serving terms of parole or probation. But imprisoned Minnesotans still cannot vote, and that reality, along with prison gerrymandering, has left politicians who represent prison communities with little reason to view incarcerated people as constituents, Darris says.

“It kind of has hallmarks back to the three-fifths Compromise,” he added. “Despite the fact that we weren’t able to vote, our bodies were being counted.”

He recalled his time incarcerated at the Stillwater prison on the outskirts of the Twin Cities area. It was punishingly hot inside that prison, he said, and so he reached out to local officials about the problem.

“The walls were sweating,” Darris said, “The representatives never represented us. There were plenty of times I wrote to the local state rep or the mayor, and absolutely none of them ever intervened. They did not see themselves as representing us despite the fact that the prison was inside their community, and the issues we were complaining about were in their community.”

Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, director of the Minnesota branch of the national advocacy organization Common Cause, told Bolts that previous efforts to end prison gerrymandering failed because politicians from both major parties were glad to keep counting prisoners in their districts, even if those politicians made little effort to represent prisoner interests.

“Power doesn’t like to give up power easily,” she said, reflecting on why this reform struggled for so long in Minnesota. “The resistance came from people who asked why we’d need to reform something that works. My question is: Who does it work for? It may work for the political parties, but not for constituents.” 

This argument is evidently an easier sell in states where Democrats hold power. Save for Montana, no red state has yet adopted a reform similar to Minnesota’s, which leaves prison gerrymandering intact in most of the country. 

Wessler told Bolts that the U.S. Census Bureau could end these state-level debates by changing its policy of counting people in prison as residents of the facilities in which they are held. The agency has so far declined to do that, though it has blessed the efforts of individual states that want to undo prison gerrymandering, and has even published data to help facilitate those changes. 

Absent federal action, the project of dismantling prison gerrymandering remains incremental.

Agbaje, the Minnesota lawmaker who sponsored this year’s reform, said she hopes the change her state has made will encourage government officials to rethink how they view people held in custody. 

“You shouldn’t be counted where you lay your head, as a prisoner. You’re there involuntarily,” she said. “I think this really with our efforts to make sure that people look at prisoners, and the formerly incarcerated, as whole people.”

The post Minnesota Just Became The Latest State to Eliminate Prison Gerrymandering appeared first on Bolts.

“When I had that first experience of voting (without assistance), emotionally… I can’t even describe how wonderful the feeling was to be able to go in and do it on my own, and it still is, 20 years later,” Thom told Bolts.

Thom, who is on the board of directors for the California Council of the Blind, is part of a group of disabled Californians and advocacy groups who want all disabled voters to have access to that experience of marking, verifying, and submitting a private ballot, including when they vote remotely. In March, they sued the California secretary of state over absentee ballot rules that they say discriminate against disabled voters and deny their right to a secret ballot. 

While voters in California can access ballots and mark them electronically, using a one-time link sent by the state, they must print out and mail in their marked ballot or drop it off at a voting location. Disability rights groups say that raises significant barriers for low-vision voters, cognitively impaired voters, and others with disabilities that make it challenging to print and mail their ballot without assistance.

The lawsuit demands that California let disabled voters submit absentee ballots electronically, which at least a dozen states already allow for voters with disabilities—by fax, email, or through an online portal. 

The plaintiffs include voters who are blind or have cerebral palsy, which limit their ability to handle and mail paper documents without assistance. The suit argues that the state is violating federal and state laws guaranteeing equal ballot access for disabled voters. “Forcing voters with print disabilities to seek the assistance of another person deprives them of the right to their political choices without others’ presence or knowledge (that is, a secret ballot)—a hallmark of our electoral process,” the lawsuit states. 

“We want to vote the same way that other people do,” Thom, whose organization is one of the plaintiffs, told Bolts. “That’s on our own without somebody to help us, without someone standing over our shoulders looking at how we vote.” 

The California lawsuit is part of a state-by-state fight by disability rights groups to implement electronic voting and ballot return methods for disabled voters, which ratcheted up as the coronavirus pandemic made in-person voting an even greater hurdle for many people with disabilities. A similar lawsuit brought by disabled voters in North Carolina in the summer of 2020 ultimately forced the state to allow online voting for blind people. Another lawsuit by disabled voters led Maine in 2021 to implement a system of electronic voting for people with limited vision, limitations in physical dexterity, learning disabilities or cognitive impairments. Last month, voters with disabilities filed a similar lawsuit against the Wisconsin Election Commission, demanding options for receiving and returning absentee ballots electronically. 

Aside from being a fundamental right, disability rights advocates say the ability to vote independently is also critical for ensuring that people vote without coercion or fear of reprisal. For example, someone in an abusive relationship might have reason to fear that their partner would spoil or simply refuse to return a ballot, or might feel pressured to vote for particular candidates or measures. Disabled people are more likely to be in abusive relationships where a partner might withhold access to care, finances, or other basic needs to coerce a vote.

Decades of federal legislation reiterate that people with disabilities deserve equal access to the ballot, and to all options for voting—whether in person or absentee. “If sighted people have both options, we want both options, regardless,” said Claire Stanley, director of advocacy and governmental affairs for the American Council of the Blind. For polling places, this has led to requirements that they be physically accessible for people with disabilities and also provide voting equipment that allows disabled people to vote independently. 

Though these rights are clearly spelled out, people with disabilities still regularly encounter difficulties voting. A Rutgers study published last month found that 14 percent of disabled voters reported encountering difficulties casting their ballot during the 2022 midterms, compared to just 4 percent of nondisabled voters. The study also found that overall turnout among disabled voters trailed that of nondisabled people by about 11 percent during the last presidential election.

Around two-fifths of disabled voters used mail ballots in 2022, according to another study prepared for the Election Assistance Commission last year. Disabled people still often report encountering barriers to voting absentee, including ballot collection laws in some states that restrict who can return a ballot on their behalf. Making disabled people print out and mail absentee ballots, as is required in California and many other states, can also force them to involve others in the voting process. “I’m blind. Why would I have a printer?” Stanley wryly remarked. 

Gabe Griffith, president of the California Council of the Blind, argued that disabled voters should have the option to privately complete the voting process and cast their ballot from home with the technology they’re already comfortable with and use regularly, especially considering how often disabled voters face barriers at the polls. He says physically going to the polls might require an hour or more resolving issues with an accessible voting machine, rather than simply “popping in and out in 15 minutes.”

“If I’m using a piece of technology on a daily basis, I’m going to know how to fill out and submit my ballot using that piece of technology, rather than going into polling places and using technology that only gets pulled out and dusted off every two years,” Griffith said. Griffith also regularly works with such technology and trains people on how to use it in his work as a tech specialist with LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. He says his agency, among others, could offer technical assistance to the state on ensuring that low-technology voters would have access to information and equipment to help them vote independently. 

Disability rights advocates in California and elsewhere have faced pushback over security concerns raised by electronic voting. A risk assessment conducted ahead of the 2020 election by the National Institute of Standards and Technology stated that electronic ballot return “creates significant security risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of voted ballots,” noting that such risks can occur at scale and affect election results. “Securing the return of voted ballots via the internet while ensuring ballot integrity and maintaining voter privacy is difficult, if not impossible, at this time,” the report said. 

A working group of election and cybersecurity experts hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, between 2021 and 2022 came to similar conclusions. In a report they issued in December 2022, the group listed numerous technical problems that would need to be addressed before any widespread adoption of electronic ballot returns—such as protections against malware or targeted denial-of-service attacks. Still, the group acknowledged that electronic voting “can be an important tool for accessibility and ballot access” for overseas and disabled voters, and that eliminating it entirely without reasonable alternatives “could produce an unacceptable risk to those with accessibility needs.” 

The California Secretary of State’s office has echoed those security concerns in fighting against electronic ballot returns for disabled voters. In a recent court filing responding to their lawsuit, the office wrote, “The public has a compelling interest in the accuracy and integrity of the forthcoming election that weighs heavily against granting an injunction.” A spokesperson for the office declined to answer questions by Bolts, saying they couldn’t comment on pending litigation.

In their lawsuit, the California plaintiffs note that the state already has an e-return option for certain military and overseas voters, as do many other states. The lawsuit also points out how the state’s current system of allowing voters to receive and mark ballots electronically is already compatible with assistive technology, such as screen readers or sip-and-puff devices that allow disabled voters to read and mark their devices without outside help. 

Disabled voters, like other concerned voters, say they value safe and secure elections, but they also believe it’s necessary to address security risks without abridging personal rights. The “equity concerns of people who are blind or have low vision,” says Thom, are critical to the democratic process in California, a state long known as a pioneer in disability rights. He says the community is tired of fighting the state over the issue. Thom says disability rights activists approached the Secretary of State in 2021 about remote voting options with an interest in collaborating on a secure, accessible solution. In 2022, legislation that would have allowed electronic returns for people with certain disabilities failed after opposition from a variety of groups, including the secretary of state, much to the frustration of the disability community.

“I am not aware of any kind of election interference in the states where they have implemented electronic voting for folks with disabilities,” says Rosie Lee Bichell, a staff attorney with Disability Rights Advocates, a national advocacy group. “Any security concerns that might arise with our request would be no different than those that already exist.”

Chris Danielsen, public relations director for the National Federation of the Blind and a Maryland voter who needs help to mail his ballot, says opponents of electronic returns for disabled voters ignore how existing barriers already impact their ability to securely vote. “I have less assurance with the current system where I’m letting somebody else handle my ballot or help me than I do if I sent it electronically,” Danielsen said.

The post Disabled Californians Challenge Absentee Voting Rules That Deny Them a Secret Ballot appeared first on Bolts.

Practitioners like Pernick need to go town by town, village by village, collecting and cleaning data themselves, often spending hundreds of hours on mundane tasks just to get this basic information. That is, if local election offices are even willing to provide it in the first place. 

School districts across New York are especially prone to discrimination because they often use at-large voting systems that can marginalize residents of color, Pernick explained. But the lack of accessible data poses obstacles to investigating them. “There’s something like 700 school districts across New York and the only way to do an analysis of those school districts is to go one-at-a-time and send an open records request to each one,” Pernick told Bolts. “There could be confusion and delay in responding to requests that could push back even the beginning of an investigation by months.” 

“Because of these challenges in identifying and gathering data, we knew that in some jurisdictions where there is racial discrimination in voting, it would be difficult or even impossible to prove it,” he added. 

Perry Grossman, director of voting rights at the New York Civil Liberties Union, shares Pernick’s frustration at the countless hours his team has poured into data gathering, often dealing with resistant or unresponsive local offices. “I shouldn’t have to threaten to sue counties to get this data,” he said.

The New York Senate passed legislation in January that would mandate a centralized state election database that anyone could access. But the bill has since languished in the Assembly, leaving its champions anxious that the problems may endure well past the next round of elections this fall. 

And the problem extends far beyond New York. Precinct-level election data underpins a world of election analyses. It’s a foundation for Voting Rights Act lawsuits throughout the country. Proving how badly maps are gerrymandered is impossible without this data, since it’s needed to assess districts’ partisanship. It’s also used to make all sorts of maps, graphics and tools of neighborhood partisan trends. And combining precinct partisanship data with demographic, geographic and income data is used to address a wide range of political science questions, including showing that voter fraud claims in the 2020 election were unfounded. 

Yet there is no entity in the United States that records election returns or maintains boundary maps for the country’s 180,000 precincts. Many states don’t even provide this data for the full collection of precincts within their borders. Instead, universities, newsrooms, nonprofits and volunteers collectively spend thousands of hours after every major election gathering it themselves. 

It’s a Herculean task for organizations that are often short on time and resources, and leaves the people who need precinct data at the mercy of individual county or local election offices whose data quality varies drastically. It also burdens underfunded election officials who are inundated with repeated requests for the same data. 

Some states make this process a lot easier than others. For example, Minnesota’s secretary of state’s office posts the entire state’s precinct-level election results together on its website; it also provides digital maps of precinct boundaries, called shapefiles. 

The variation between states was captured in dramatic visual form in a project published by The New York Times after the 2020 election. A team of journalists, data scientists, and developers set out to produce a map of U.S. precincts, color-coded by how each voted. 

Four states on the map—Alabama, Alaska, Louisiana, and Virginia—are completely blank, as are large swaths of Idaho, Kentucky, and Missouri.

It took The Times three months of full-time data and software development work to assemble the data after the election, plus months of preparation ahead of election night, according to Miles Watkins, who helped manage the project. “As of when we published the nationwide map, I feel pretty confident that we were using every single piece of open data or FOIA-able information that we could,” he told Bolts. But even with that effort, one of the best-staffed publications in the nation wasn’t able to obtain the data to complete the map. 

Ultimately, over 10 percent of all votes cast in the election weren’t pictured in the map.

One problem that proved intractable was that some counties report a combination of their mail-in, early, and provisional ballots as one lump total, rather than distributing them based on where voters reside at the precinct-level. This practice prevents analyses of voting patterns at a more granular level, as was the case in the four completely blank states in The Times’ map.

Zach Mahafza, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who investigates voting rights violations in the South, says this lack of precinct data often stalls his efforts. In 2021, he was part of a team looking into the city council map of Mobile, Alabama. The 2020 Census showed that Mobile was majority-Black. But  there were only three majority-Black districts in their seven-district city council map. Stand Up Mobile, a local voting rights organization, enlisted Mahafza and the SPLC to see whether a new council map could be drawn with at least four majority-Black districts where Black residents would have a meaningful opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. They needed precinct level election returns and precinct maps for the project.

The city of Mobile provided maps in PDF format, forcing Mahafza to jump through various hoops to extract reliable data. “We’d have a zoom-in of this precinct in the northern part of the city, and another precinct in the southern part of the city and trying to weave all that back together got very difficult,” he said. He estimated that recreating the city’s maps took him 80 to 85 hours.

Ultimately Mahafza’s team showed that it was indeed possible to draw such a map; they warned local leaders that they may violate the VRA if they failed to ensure that Black voters were fairly represented when they redistricted the map. The city eventually adopted a map that has four districts with voting age populations that are over 53 percent Black.

To show that a map or election system violates the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination, plaintiffs must demonstrate several features about their jurisdiction, including racial polarization among voters; that is, whether different racial groups actually prefer different candidates. Practitioners conduct these analyses by looking at the demographic makeup and election returns of individual precincts and inferring the voting preferences of different populations. “If you don’t have precinct-level election returns, you have no way to show racially polarized voting,” Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, told Bolts.

“We couldn’t enforce the federal or any state voting rights act if we didn’t have precinct-level data,” Greenwood added.

In the absence of centralized information, a number of organizations have cropped up to fill the gap. OpenElections, a volunteer group of journalists and software developers, the Voting and Election Science Team from the University of Florida and Wichita State University, the Redistricting Data Hub and the MIT Election Lab have all poured resources into collecting, standardizing and publishing precinct-level election results or compiling precinct shapefile maps. 

After the 2020 presidential election, while The Times was embarking on their nationwide precinct map, the MIT Election Lab set out to make its own database of the country’s precinct results. It took a dozen computer scientists and political scientists nearly two years to complete this project—just in time to start over again after the 2022 midterms. Only about 10 states had data organized enough to put in their database without much work. For the remaining states, they wrote code to clean data, called county offices to get returns that weren’t posted online, used Optical Character Recognition software to read election returns from PDF files and other images and designed quality control processes to check their work. 

They even found the precinct-level results of a recount in Idaho’s Bonner County from a newspaper picture of numbers written on a whiteboard, recalled Samuel Baltz, a research scientist in the group. 

Tired of hitting a wall after every election cycle, some researchers and lawyers are pushing for reform, demanding that states clean up and post complete precinct-level data in accessible formats.

In early 2018, Kansas data scientist Peter Karman emailed his state representative, Boog Highberger, with just such a proposal. He had just spent months trying to compile the state’s precinct data by calling county offices, wrangling it out of PDF files and tediously matching precinct names between digital maps and spreadsheets. He thought the Kansas secretary of state’s office should be required to publish the data on its website. 

Highberger initiated a bill to address these issues, and Karman provided testimony in both chambers. He even included requests for data formatting: “publish the spreadsheet as a spreadsheet, not as a picture of a spreadsheet,” he implored. Within four months, Karman stood by as Governor Jeff Colyer signed legislation that required the secretary of state’s office to post precinct-level data on its website for all federal, statewide, and legislative races within 30 days of the final election canvass. 

More recently, Connecticut mandated a statewide elections database as part of its new Voting Rights Act; the broader legislation is part of a multistate effort to reproduce voting rights protections that federal courts have eroded. Pernick, the Legal Defense Fund lawyer, said the law’s database component was modeled after the legislative proposal in New York.

The New York bill, which Pernick and Grossman helped draft, would establish a statewide database that would house centralized election data and shapefiles for the entire state, down to the precinct level. Sponsored by Senator Zellnor Myrie, the proposal first passed the Senate in 2022, but didn’t receive a hearing in the state Assembly by the end of that legislative session. 

The reform’s latest version, Senate Bill S657A, is in danger of suffering the same fate, having passed the state’s upper-chamber in January but now stuck again in the House Election Law Committee. The committee is chaired by Latrice Walker, who is also a sponsor of the bill. Myrie and Walker did not return a request for comment. 

In the meantime, people who want New York precinct data have been left to their own devices, compiling the data on their own. Ben Rosenblatt, an independent New York political consultant who has worked on Democratic campaigns in the state, decided to cobble together a statewide precinct shapefile in 2022. He posted his progress on Twitter as he went, announcing it was complete in December 2023 after a year of gathering and cleaning data from each of New York’s 62 counties. The Times’ 2020 mapping project cites Rosenblatt’s work as its only New York data source.

“I’m trying to do it again this year for 2024,” Rosenblatt told Bolts.

Bills with similar provisions have been introduced in Michigan and New Jersey. Florida’s and Maryland’s versions did not move forward by the end of this year’s legislative sessions.

If this type of regulation existed in every state, with each state cleaning and posting their own precinct data in accessible formats, the resources spent on this task by outside groups would change drastically, if not cease altogether. 

Bolts asked Watkins how long his team would have needed to complete the data for The Times’ mapping project under these conditions. It probably would have taken “a few days,” he said. He paused to reflect and then added, “Maybe one week.”

The post Election Data Is Vital to Voting Rights. So Why Is It So Hard to Track Down? appeared first on Bolts.

The new measure passed by Republicans and signed into law by Alabama Republican Governor Kay Ivey last week makes it illegal for paid organizers to help others vote by mail, threatening the work of grassroots and national organizations who help voters register and cast their ballots. It includes a bevy of draconian punishments including lengthy jail sentences if paid organizers help others fill out or return their absentee ballots.

A lawsuit to block the bill is likely in the coming weeks.

“There’s definitely gonna be legal action,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of Alabama Values, a progressive advocacy organization, told Bolts. “That was already in discussion.”

A number of other leading civil rights groups who work in the state were tight-lipped about what their legal plans are, but they have been gearing up for this specific fight for some time. Last year, a nearly identical bill passed the Alabama House, but died in the senate. Kathy Jones, the head of Alabama League of Women Voters, told Bolts at the time that if the bill had passed then, “we would have sued.”

The law makes it even harder to vote by mail in one of the states with the most restrictive voting laws in the country, and threatens paid organizers with jail time if they violate its somewhat-vague provisions. Civil rights groups believe the new law is unconstitutional, but they’re even more worried about the fear the law will create for grassroots organizations’ efforts than the enforcement itself.

Hardy said she’d been talking to multiple groups who do voter education and outreach in the state who were alarmed that their normal work helping Black voters vote could now be illegal under the new law. And she said she’d been in touch with allied groups in Florida, which passed a similar law two years ago, about how they navigated that situation. 

“Some of the organizations stop the effort [to help people vote], because of the ambiguity and also, quite frankly, not wanting to take that risk. It makes a hostile climate for groups who are just trying to ensure that people have access to voting,” she said.

The new law bans anyone besides immediate family members and cohabitants from turning in anyone else’s completed absentee ballot applications, with the exception for people with disabilities or who can’t read or write, in an attempt to root out voter fraud by targeting what Republicans derisively call “ballot harvesting.”

Anyone who knowingly pays someone else to request, collect, or deliver absentee ballots could face a Class B felony charge—the same felony class as first-degree manslaughter in Alabama—which carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Anyone who is paid to request, collect, complete, prefill, obtain or deliver a voter’s absentee ballot faces a class C felony—the same felony class as looting, third-degree robbery and stalking—punishable by up to ten years in prison.

This new law comes amidst a renewed war from Alabama Republicans to restrict voting access in the state and strengthen their vice-like grip on political power at the expense of the state’s sizeable African American population. 

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Republican legislators had violated the Voting Rights Act with an illegal gerrymander of Alabama’s congressional district lines, and ordered them to draw a second district where Black voters would have a say in who represents them. Even that didn’t stop those lawmakers, who proceeded to try to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling until another court ordered them to reverse course.

Even before this new law passed, Alabama had some of the most onerous voting systems in the country. It’s one of only four states that allows no opportunities for people to vote early in-person, along with Delaware, Mississippi and New Hampshire. It also is one of just 20 states still requiring people to have a specific reason for voting absentee by mail.

And there have been very few proven cases of voter fraud in Alabama. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, a major proponent of anti-voting fraud legislation, has identified just 20 cases of voting fraud in Alabama since 2000. The only person charged with voting fraud in the last five years is former Republican state Representative David Cole.

“This is a bill that is proposing incarceration and criminal penalties for a problem that doesn’t exist,” ACLU Alabama staff attorney Laurel Hattix said during testimony against the bill last month.

But that hasn’t stopped Alabama Republicans from crying fraud.

When Ivey signed the bill into law last Wednesday, she declared “Under my watch, there will be no funny business in Alabama elections.”

The recently passed law was long a passion project for Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, who introduced a similar bill in 2022, when he was still in the state legislature. 

Allen, also a Republican, said in a statement after Ivey signed the bill into law that its passage “signals to ballot harvesters that Alabama votes are not for sale.”

But during his tenure as secretary of state, Allen has actually eroded safeguards against voter fraud. His first official act in office was to pull Alabama out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan, multi-state information-sharing effort that helps states identify voters who are also registered in other states in order to help prevent voting fraud. 

Allen was one of a number of Republican secretaries of state to attack, then quit, the organization after it became a target of false right-wing conspiracy theories. Allen has now attempted to set up a parallel version of ERIC, partnering with a handful of other red states in an effort that experts say lacks the basic information necessary to be accurate and effective.

Ronald James, an Alabama political consultant who until recently was the state organizer for Black Voters Matter, said that the new law will “scare a lot of people” and be “devastating” to grassroots groups like his former organization that work to help Black voters cast absentee ballots—especially rural elderly voters and those with limited literacy.

James said he’d worked with grassroots organizations in recent years whose normal activities are now considered felonies, like giving gas money to volunteers to drive others to vote, “or paying volunteers who are dedicated to making sure that people in senior citizen homes and elderly in their churches and in the neighborhood and community have a chance to cast their ballot.”

Now, if those volunteers violate the new law, they and the organization’s leaders alike could be facing jail time.

“There’s going to be a lot of people—a lot of people who just are not able to vote,” he said. “It’s catastrophic to the political scope of how we are active in communities, particularly in Black communities.”

The post Alabama Civil Rights Groups Scramble to Fight Back Against New Voting Law appeared first on Bolts.

When a coalition of voting rights activists in Ohio set out last December to introduce a new ballot initiative to expand voting access, they hardly anticipated that the thing to stop them would be a matter of word choice.

But that’s what Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost took issue with when he reviewed the proposal’s summary language and title, then called “Secure and Fair Elections.” Among other issues, Yost said the title “does not fairly or truthfully summarize or describe the actual content of the proposed amendment.” 

So the group tried again, this time naming their measure “The Ohio Voters Bill of Rights.” Again, Yost rejected them, for the same issue, with the same explanation. After that, activists sued to try and certify their proposal—the first step on the long road toward putting the measure in front of voters on the ballot. 

“AG Yost doesn’t have the authority to comment on our proposed title, let alone the authority to reject our petition altogether based on the title alone,” the group said in a statement announcing their plans to mount a legal challenge. “The latest rejection of our proposed ballot summary from AG Yost’s office is nothing but a shameful abuse of power to stymie the right of Ohio citizens to propose amendments to the Ohio Constitution.”

These Ohio advocates aren’t alone in their struggle to actually use the levers of direct democracy. Already in 2024, several citizen-led attempts to put issues directly to voters are hitting bureaucratic roadblocks early on in the process at the hands of state officials. 

Arkansas organizers have been stonewalled by their attorney general, who has rejected language for ballot proposals to expand medical marijuana and increase government transparency. In Nebraska, a lawmaker behind a law sending more public money to private schools has leaned on the secretary of state to block a ballot referendum attempting to repeal it. 

Abortion rights measures have been under particular scrutiny. Missourians attempting to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution were delayed from gathering signatures for months as state officials fought over the specifics of the ballot measure. Advocates in Montana are still fighting to get their proposal for abortion rights approved for signature gathering after the state’s attorney general rejected it in January. Meanwhile, observers across the South are waiting with bated breath for the Florida Supreme Court to decide the fate of a proposed abortion rights initiative, which could decide whether abortion remains legally available in the region; Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody asked the court to block the proposal, saying that the language is too confusing for voters to understand. 

Ostensibly, these proposals are being rejected over technicalities; a problem with a ballot title, or unclear language in the proposal. But in practice, advocates argue, the state officials reviewing these proposals are blurring the lines between procedural and political. They claim these officials are overstepping the bounds of their discretion to reject ballot initiatives based on their opposition to the underlying issue and not the quality of the petition.

“We have never seen the Ohio AG try to broaden their authority to allow them to determine whether a title is permissible,” explained Emma Olson Sharkey, an attorney specializing in ballot initiatives at Elias Law Group, one of the firms leading the suit against Yost, the Ohio attorney general. “This is clearly, from my perspective, an overreach of authority, and we are seeing similar efforts with conservative officials across the country.” 

National observers say this is an escalation of an ongoing effort by leaders of mostly conservative state governments to thwart direct democracy. Bureaucratic backlash to citizen-led ballot initiatives has become a pattern in some red states. Arkansas’ Republican-run legislature last year pushed through new rules raising the signature-gathering requirements, just a few years after voters rejected those same changes. Last August, Ohio voters similarly rejected a proposal put forth by state Republicans to increase the threshold needed for measures to pass.

“It’s all part of this larger puzzle of who gets a say and who gets to participate in our democracy, and where things are popular among constituents but that does not align with whoever is in political power in that state,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which tracks ballot measures around the country.

A rejection from a state official doesn’t necessarily spell certain death for a citizen-led initiative, because organizers typically have opportunities to correct problems and resubmit. But advocates for direct democracy say the long delays caused by fighting with an attorney general over the language of a ballot proposal wastes legal resources and precious time needed to collect signatures and connect with voters. In this way, even if state officials can’t kill proposals outright, then perhaps by a thousand cuts.

In the just over half of states that allow for citizen-led ballot initiatives or referendums, each one has different rules governing the process. In Michigan, a proposal is submitted to the secretary of state before signature gathering, and language is reviewed by the state Board of Canvassers. Illinois has next to no pre-approval process at all for a petition to make it onto the ballot. In Florida, by contrast, ballot title and summary language must be approved by the secretary of state, the attorney general and the state supreme court. 

In evaluating these petitions for inclusion on the ballot, these state officials are typically empowered to conduct a review of the petition’s formatting, language, and adherence to state and federal laws. This may mean an attorney general or lieutenant governor making sure that a petition only applies to one subject, or that the language of a summary is easy to understand. These officials don’t have the authority to review the underlying issue a petition is about. And yet, in recent years, some of them seem to be pushing the boundaries of their clerical duties. 

“It really should be more mechanical power to certify this and neutrally evaluate it,” explained Quinn Yeargain, a professor of state constitutional law at Widener University and frequent Bolts contributor. “They’re putting a thumb on the scale and pushing, I think, to expand the understanding of their power.”

David Couch, an Arkansas attorney who has spearheaded various ballot proposals for years, claims the state’s attorney tried to undercut organizers’ attempts to increase government transparency by repeatedly rejecting their proposed language for ballot measures. Couch worked with a coalition called Arkansas Citizens for Transparency last year to introduce a pair of initiatives aimed at amending the state constitution and creating a new state law to guarantee the right to access public information. The ballot initiatives were first submitted to Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin in November of last year, but he rejected one of them, on the grounds that the popular name and ballot title, “The Arkansas Government Transparency Amendment,” was not sufficiently specific.

The group resubmitted the amendment in December, offering four different options for ballot titles and other changes to the text, but the proposal was again rejected. They made a third submission in January, but before Griffin could issue a decision, Couch sued the attorney general in state court over the previous rejections. 

“In my opinion, he was using his statutory authority, which is very limited, to make us rewrite the amendment and rewrite the act to weaken it, and to make it be more what he would like it to be rather than what we the people would want it to be,” Couch told Bolts.

Griffin has maintained that his rejections remained within his authority, and stated in his first opinion from December that his “decision to certify or reject a popular name and ballot title is unrelated to my view of the proposed measure’s merits.” Even so, later on in the opinion, Griffin wrote that he took issue with the word “transparency” in the ballot title, saying it had “partisan coloring” and “seems more designed to persuade than inform.” 

Griffin eventually accepted both proposals, though not before one more rejection, and Couch dropped the lawsuit—not because he had a change of heart, he says, but because the coalition had already lost too much signature-gathering time. Organizers now have until July 5 to gather 90,000 signatures from voters in at least 15 counties to get the issue on the November ballot. (That threshold would be even higher under the bill Arkansas passed last year, but it’s currently held up by a different lawsuit heading toward the high court.)

“They use it to run the clock up. You lose a month every time you have to change something,” Couch said. “What he did was just wrong. It’s unconstitutional.” 

In Missouri, abortion rights organizers have engaged in a nearly year-long battle with the state over a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and override the state’s near-total abortion ban. 

After the group, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, submitted 11 different options for an amendment proposal back in March, there was a protracted legal fight with Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican. Bailey tried to force a fiscal impact statement onto the measure claiming it would cost taxpayers billions of dollars (the state auditor, who is tasked with such assessments, had initially determined the state would see “no costs or savings”). 

Once the state supreme court rejected the attorney general’s attempts to inflate the cost of the amendment, the proposal moved on to Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who was tasked with writing 100-word summaries of each option submitted. Organizers accused him of using misleading and partisan language to describe six of the proposals, and the courts ultimately agreed with them after they sued; in an Oct. 31 ruling, a state appeals court said that Ashcroft’s ballot summaries were “replete with politically partisan language,” and ordered him to use the more neutral summaries written by a lower court. Ashcroft tried to appeal the decision to the state supreme court, but they refused to take up the case. 

By the time the dust settled from all this legal back and forth and Missourians for Constitutional Freedom embarked on their formal signature-gathering campaign, it was already January, eleven months since they first submitted their proposal. They now have until May 5 to gather more than 170,000 signatures to get it on the November ballot. One observer with experience running petition campaigns described the experience to The Missouri Independent as “going downhill at a very fast rate of speed.” 

In Montana, a group backing a similar abortion rights measure, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, is still stuck in limbo. After state Attorney General Austin Knudsen, a Republican, rejected their measure for not adhering to the single-issue rule, the group quickly petitioned the Montana Supreme Court to overturn the decision, claiming that Knusden overstepped his bounds. They have some precedent on their side—the supreme court in November reversed a similar decision from the attorney general, after he invalidated a ballot measure to reform election rules to create a top-four primary. 

“We were prepared for the fact that it was likely [Knudsen] would try to block the ballot measure and try and take up more time,” said Martha Fuller, president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana, one of the groups in/leading the coalition. But Fuller says they’re not letting this delay kill their organizing momentum. 

“I feel really confident in our ability to gather the number of signatures even on a tighter time frame than we are now,” she said. “Every day we’re hearing from folks who are ready to go; we’re already feeling a sense of momentum building around this measure.”

As organizers fight to get their initiatives on the ballot, they also face broader conflicts around citizen-led ballot measures. Lawmakers around the country have continued to tinker with rules governing nearly every step of ballot initiative processes. While voters in Ohio and Arkansas have rejected state attempts to move the goalposts for ballot initiatives, in others states officials have forced those changes; an analysis by Ballotpedia of legislative changes made to the initiative and referendum process between 2018 and 2023 found that roughly 20 percent of all the legislation passed made the processes more difficult.

And the changes keep coming: Just last week, Republicans in the Missouri legislature advanced two different bills that would make it harder for initiatives to pass. One passed by the Senate would require that a proposal receive majority support in five of the state’s eight congressional districts to pass, in addition to a simple majority of voters statewide. The other, which just passed in the House, would add stricter requirements for the signature gathering process. 

“There’s a constant pushback from conservatives to try to stop these measures in their tracks,” said Olson Sharkey from Elias Law Group. “Because they know, especially with reproductive rights, if these measures get on the ballot, they’re going to win” 

Olson Sharkey sees these tactics coming out of conservatives’ playbook, but conservatives aren’t the only ones deploying them. As Bolts has reported, the Democratic city government of Atlanta changed the rules for popular initiatives in an effort to block a proposed referendum against the ‘Cop City’ police training center; the city council earlier this month went as far as to approve the controversial practice of signature matching to disqualify some people who signed the petition. 

For Fields Figueredo, who tracks ballot initiatives across the country, no matter who’s responsible, chipping away at ballot initiatives betrays a disregard for the fundamental principles of democracy.

“It’s ultimately about minority rule,” she said. “We could elect people in a democratic process, and also they are not actually listening to the will of the people.” 

The post Red State AGs Keep Trying to Kill Ballot Measures by a Thousand Cuts appeared first on Bolts.