Thinking that there might have been a misunderstanding, Smith sent in registration forms several times over the next 25 years, all of which were denied. Then last March, the state adopted House Bill 4, also known as the New Mexico Voting Rights Act, establishing that anyone convicted of a felony can vote as long as they are not incarcerated, including while they are still on probation and parole. 

Feeling hopeful that the new law may clear up whatever confusion had caused the state to keep turning down her applications, Smith logged on to the New Mexico Secretary of State’s website and filled out another registration form. Again, she received a letter titled, “notice of rejection due to a felony conviction,” stating that she was ineligible. Smith said she was confused and disappointed but trusted state officials’ assessment of her eligibility. 

“I thought that because they were telling me I couldn’t, they knew better than I did,” she told Bolts. “I was like, ‘What the hell? Maybe the law didn’t change.’”

It wasn’t until organizers reached out to Smith to tell her that the state was wrongly denying voters with felonies from registering online or in the mail that she realized she’d been right all along. Last month, Smith registered to vote at the clerk’s office in Bernalillo County, home to Albuquerque. This time, instead of trying online, she went in person, with organizers to help her if any issues came up. 

“It felt awesome. I felt like a citizen,” she remembered. “I felt like I was never going to be allowed to vote, that right was something I’d never be able to retain.”

When HB 4 went into effect in July 2023, making New Mexico one of 25 states where at least anyone who is not presently incarcerated has the right to vote, it was cause for celebration for the voting rights organizations that championed the reform for years. But in the time since, they have run into many people like Smith who told them they were denied their rights.

While working to register newly eligible voters, organizers identified nearly 1,000 people with a felony conviction who had tried to register to vote online or in the mail but were incorrectly rejected. They also realized this problem was pervasive long before HB 4, affecting people like Smith. They sounded the alarm, but it wasn’t until they filed a lawsuit last month that state officials took action to fix the problem and ensure that the people affected will be able to vote in November. By that time, they had already missed out on voting in the June primary. 

Voting rights advocates are hopeful the state’s adjustments will be enough to renew confidence among those who were wrongly refused, but some say they’ve had to work overtime to make up for the damage the state has already inflicted.

“​​They could have done this a year ago, and not cause the confusion or the strain on a population, which is already vulnerable because they’re impacted,” Selinda Guerrero, director of prisoner advocacy for the organization Millions for Prisoners New Mexico, told Bolts. “They’re humiliated because they’ve already tried and been told no and turned away and told you don’t belong here.”

Justin Allen, an activist with Millions for Prisoners who is formerly incarcerated and testified for the reform in the legislature, put it bluntly: “It’s been a year of frustration.”

Problems with the implementation of HB 4 started to arise shortly after Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed it into law last year. The bill, championed by Democrats, was intended to introduce widespread enhancements to voting rights across New Mexico. Along with narrowing felony disenfranchisement, the bill established a new system for automatically registering voters who interact with the Motor Vehicles Division and created policies aimed at making voting easier for Native people. 

“Passing a bill is one piece of it, but then it’s the implementation, that’s the other piece,” said Andrea Serrano, executive director of OLÉ New Mexico, a civil rights group that supported HB 4.

In states that expand rights restoration, the burden of getting the word out about the reform and telling people about their new rights often falls on outside groups and volunteer organizers. But in New Mexico, a swath of errors by the state made the implementation even tougher.

Blair Bowie, director of the Restore Your Rights project at the Campaign Legal Center, a legal advocacy group working on voting rights cases, told Bolts that the rules of who is eligible to vote under HB 4 are clear: “If you’re in prison you can’t vote. If you’re not in prison, you can,” she said. 

She blames the issues with its implementation on longstanding problems with information sharing between state agencies. 

Last month, Bowie represented Millions for Prisoners, Smith, and three other people who had been denied because of a felony in filing their lawsuit detailing violations of state law. The lawsuit alleged that the state gave county clerks—the local officials in charge of voter registration—incorrect guidance about how to handle the changes. It claimed that Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver’s office told them that newly eligible formerly incarcerated voters had to register to vote in person and they should deny anyone who applies by mail or online. 

Also, for much of 2024, the online registration forms on the secretary of state’s website incorrectly said people with felony convictions who have yet to complete probation and parole cannot register. They also required people to sign an affirmation that they’d finished the entirety of their sentence if they wanted to register, under penalty of perjury. The forms were only updated in late September, and roughly 14 months after HB 4 went into effect. 

Just over a week after filing the lawsuit, the plaintiffs reached a settlement with state authorities addressing those problems. 

It mandates that elections officials immediately correct their errors by registering anyone who was wrongly denied. It also requires that, going forward, the secretary of state’s office and the New Mexico Department of Corrections share information to help elections officials determine if an applicant with a past felony is eligible to vote. 

The corrections department also created a hotline for county clerks to call to confirm whether a person is incarcerated. 

Alex Curtas, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, told Bolts in an email that Toulouse Oliver “has long been committed to making sure every New Mexican who is eligible has the opportunity to register to vote in accordance with state statute and federal law.” Curtas said the office had provided updated printed forms to county clerks in July 2023 and had uploaded them to the website but some links still directed registrants to the old forms. He also noted that the state had been working to fix the registration problems leading up to the election by the time the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit.

Bowie says public authorities often fail to update each other about who has regained the right to vote, an issue that Bolts has covered in other states.  “States are generally quite good at coordinating information when somebody gets initially convicted of a felony, so when they initially lose their right to vote,” she said. “But they’re generally really bad at getting the information they need on the other end to remove markers of ineligibility.”. 

New Mexico’s corrections department is required to distribute voter registration forms to people shortly before they’re released from prison, since they’ll become eligible once they’re freed. That still leaves it up to would-be voters to complete and submit the forms, and hope that officials respond correctly. Michigan last year became the first state to automatically register people to vote when they leave prison, without requiring them to take any action. 

Some voting advocates in New Mexico also want to repeal felony disenfranchisement entirely and allow people to vote from prison, as is already the case in Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.. Besides restoring voting rights to the roughly 5,000 people who are currently incarcerated in New Mexico, this would also reduce the risk that people who are already eligible to vote are denied. This proposal has failed in the past in the legislature, but Millions for Prisoners New Mexico says it plans to bring the bill back in the next session. 

The court will only assess whether the state followed the settlement terms in January, months after the election, according to Bowie. But at least the 1,000 people whom advocates identified as wrongfully denied are now registered, and Blair is hopeful that New Mexico’s fix will provide a model for information sharing in other states putting legislation into practice.

She also thinks that the settlement terms will help people who plan to take advantage of same-day voter registration. “It will ensure that there’s not going to be any confusion about their eligibility,” said Bowie. 

The deadline to register by mail or online passed on Oct. 8, but voters can still register in person during early voting until Nov. 2, and on election day on Nov. 5. Organizers are using the final days leading up to the election to educate newly eligible voters that they can cast a ballot. 

Guerrero also said the settlement terms seem to be fixing registration issues. In test calls to the hotline, she confirmed that staffers are providing accurate information. “So far so good,” she said. “Now it’s just more about the outreach and the re-education…trying to help people have hope again that they’re not going to be turned away.”

Allen said he’s spending his days mailing postcards and calling people who were wrongly denied and will now be able to vote. Some, he said, have told him that they don’t want to try again. 

“We have a conversation with them and remind them the reason they’ve made it so hard is because it’s so important and these barriers are designed to make us think that we don’t matter, our voices don’t count,” Allen said.

Smith was able to cast her vote last week during early voting. It wasn’t her first time voting—she got to cast a ballot in another state in 2008 and 2012 while she briefly moved away from New Mexico—but it was important to her that she finally be able to participate in the state where she was born and raised.

Walking into the polling place, Smith said she felt nervous but couldn’t pinpoint why. She shared her story with an election worker and it brought them to tears, she said. 

“It made me want to become more politically knowledgeable,” Smith recounted of the experience. “It ended up being a very exciting and empowering feeling.”

The post “A Year of Frustration”: How New Mexico Kept Denying People Voting Rights Despite Reform appeared first on Bolts.

The block was lifted by the Nebraska Supreme Court, which ordered state officials to immediately comply with two related laws—one from 2005, and another passed this spring—that allow people to regain voting rights after completing their felony sentences. The court’s ruling on Wednesday reversed the actions of Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state, Bob Evnen, and attorney general, Mike Hilgers, who together in July abruptly declared both laws unconstitutional and blocked Nebraskans with past felony convictions from voting.

The court’s decision means that nearly 100,000 Nebraskans who’d already regained voting rights over the last two decades because of the 2005 reform law, only to see their rights thrown into question this summer, are once again unambiguously eligible to cast a ballot. It also allows approximately 7,000 Nebraskans who were enfranchised by the law adopted this year to finally register to vote.

Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman, who ruled with the majority, criticized Evnen and Hilgers for attempting such a massive rollback of voting rights right before a major election. “Why now?” she wrote. “Why not take the opportunity to challenge the laws long ago with available remedies, rather than creating uncertainty at this time?”

Voting rights advocates celebrated the court’s decision but they remain outraged at Evnen and Hilgers for the confusion and delays they created. The timing of the court’s decision gives advocates little opportunity to help people who might be confused about their voting rights because of Evnen and Hilgers: It came just two days before the Oct. 18 deadline to register to vote online. The cutoff for people to register in person is next week, Oct. 25. 

“The rush to get this word out is going to be intense,” Aaron Pettes, a formerly incarcerated organizer in Nebraska, told Bolts. “The challenge now is to shout about it from the rooftops.”

Pettes, 44, has never voted and says he’s thrilled that he’ll now get to. But he is also concerned that time is running out to convince others to engage in a process of voting “that essentially booted them out” less than two months ago.

“Letting people know is one thing, but getting them to reinvest, to actually cast a ballot, will be hard, but not impossible,” he said. 

The Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, which comprises many nonprofit groups in the state, vowed to try. “Our teams will soon be in the field, reaching out to Nebraskans so that they can restore their vote and reclaim their voice,” the coalition said in a statement shortly after the court made its ruling. 

Nebraska previously disenfranchised anyone convicted of any felony for life. But in 2005, the state passed Legislative Bill 53, which allowed Nebraskans to restore their right to vote two years after completing their sentence. The law instantly restored voting rights to some 59,000 people, according to the ACLU of Nebraska. In the nearly two decades since, the law has enabled another 38,000 people to regain their rights. 

Nebraska’s GOP-run legislature decided to go further this year. With broad, bipartisan support, it passed LB 20, which removed the two-year waiting period for rights restoration and made Nebraskans eligible to vote as soon as they complete their sentence, including any post-incarceration term of probation or parole.

With that law set to go into effect on July 19, the Voting Rights Restoration Coalition and its allies spent months preparing to contact the roughly 7,000 people affected by the 2024 reform—that is, those who completed felony sentences less than two years ago—to help facilitate registration.

But on July 17, less than 48 hours before this new law was to go into effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion in which he declared that both the new legislation and the 2005 law unconstitutional. Hilgers argued that only the state’s board of pardons—a three-person body comprising Hilgers, Evnen, and Republican Governor Jim Pillen—had the power to restore voting rights. 

Absent a direct pardon from this body, Hilgers said, the state constitution demands that Nebraskans with felony convictions be barred from voting for life. Only a couple of states in the U.S.—Virginia and Tennessee—enforce a system of disenfranchisement that’s comparably strict. 

Evnen, the secretary of state, promptly followed Hilgers’ guidance and directed county elections officials to cease all new registrations of Nebraskans with previous felonies. Their acts also threw into question the rights of many Nebraskans with past convictions who had already registered and voted in previous elections. 

The nonprofit Civic Nebraska and three disenfranchised plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU, quickly sued, and the Nebraska Supreme Court heard the case in late August. 

On Wednesday, the court rebuffed Evnen and Hilgers and ordered state elections officials to follow the 2005 and 2024 laws. The ruling came on a 4 to 2 vote, with each of the justices writing a separate opinion; a seventh justice concurred with the majority only in part.

John Gale, a Republican who preceded Evnen in office and disagrees with his actions to undermine the reforms around rights restoration, told Bolts that Wednesday’s supreme court ruling was “a very clear victory.” 

“The fact that the legislature has passed two statutes over 20 years, in an effort to expand the franchise to people who have successfully completed the discharge of their sentences as felons, seems clear to me to be a true, solid expression that the majority of people in Nebraska believe this is appropriate,” Gale said. 

Chief Justice Michael Heavican, who joined Wednesday’s majority ruling, lamented in a concurring opinion that the court was presented this question only a few months before the November election. “Even under this expedited timeframe, there was relatively little time between the submission of the case to this court and the onset of deadlines related to the 2024 general election,” Heavican wrote.

Voting rights advocates alleged throughout this summer and fall that Hilgers and Evnen deliberately tried to suppress voter turnout. Some also faulted the court for taking so long to rule given the fast-approaching registration deadline and election. “The inaction from the Supreme Court on this issue is unacceptable,” state Senator Terrell McKinney, a Democrat, posted on X on Oct. 2, after the lawsuit had already languished for weeks. 

Those who just regained their voting rights are disproportionately people of color, as a result of profound racial disparities in the state’s criminal justice system. Nebraska’s Black imprisonment rate is almost 10 times higher than that of white residents; Latino and Native American people are also imprisoned in Nebraska at high rates. 

According to the Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, a disproportionate share of the people who risked losing their right to vote live in the areas of Lincoln and Omaha, the state’s population centers and host to several pivotal elections this year. 

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are competing for an electoral vote in Nebraska’s swing 2nd Congressional District, which centers around Omaha; the district also features a competitive U.S. House race. Nebraskans statewide are deciding other high-stakes races, including measures on abortion rights and paid sick leave, and a heated U.S. Senate race.

Advocates had planned on spending the summer and fall spreading the word about the new state law giving back voting rights to thousands more Nebraskans. Now they only have days before the deadline for registering new voters, and they feel like Hilgers and Evnen got away with throwing people’s voting rights into turmoil ahead of a critical election.

They also worry that even Nebraskans who have already been registered since 2005 may now have second thoughts about voting, out of fear of violating state law.

“The voter suppression has worked,” Jason Witmer, a policy fellow at the ACLU of Nebraska who used to be incarcerated, said at a rally in Omaha held hours after the court ruling landed. “There are a lot of people who are not going to speak to us, who have no more interest in being a part of it this year. So, it has worked to suppress many, many people’s voices.”

Bolts has reported that some states have confusing rules about who has the right to vote, which creates a climate of fear that can discourage people from participating even if they are eligible. Several formerly incarcerated Nebraskans told Bolts over the summer that they would sit out this election regardless of how the court ruled.

“I’m that concerned about going back to prison,” Tommy Moore, who was released from prison in 2009 and who has been legally voting in Nebraska for a decade, told Bolts in August. “I never want to encounter that humiliation again, and I prefer not to vote than to take the risk.”

Reached by text this morning, Moore said that he was still digesting the ruling but that he’d changed his mind: “Right now, I think I will vote,” he wrote.

The post Nebraskans Rush to Undo Harm, After Court Rebuffs GOP Bid to Block Thousands of Voters appeared first on Bolts.

The Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition was ready for July 19. A new state law, Legislative Bill 20, would take effect that day, instantly granting voting rights to some 7,000 people with past felony convictions. Because the law requires state officials to do very little to notify people of their newfound eligibility, let alone to automatically register them, the work of contacting and assisting those affected would largely fall to community groups.

And so the coalition reserved ad space on print, digital, and radio platforms. It organized registration drives in Omaha and Lincoln, each to be held in the first days of the law’s enactment. Those events were to kick off a statewide campaign that would touch many more towns and cities, and go through late October, when Nebraska cuts off new voter registration ahead of the general election.

But the ads never ran. No one was registered at the events in Lincoln and Omaha. More than a month after its planned launch, the campaign has yet to begin.

That’s because two Republican elected officials in Nebraska—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen—halted implementation of the new law, shutting down new registrations for people with past felonies and throwing into question the voting rights of tens of thousands of other Nebraskans who, until last month, were legally, unambiguously eligible to vote.

Nebraska voting rights advocates maintain hope that the actions of Hilgers and Evnen will be reversed soon, but they also worry that profound, lasting damage will have already been done: this registration shut-down has prompted so much confusion and fear, they say, that it could cause many people to disengage entirely with the democratic process.

On July 17, less than 48 hours before LB 20 was to take effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion stating that the new law was unconstitutional. But Hilgers didn’t stop there; he also declared unconstitutional a 2005 reform law ending lifetime disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of any felony; the 2005 law, Legislative Bill 53, allowed Nebraskans to vote two years after completing their sentences, a waiting period that LB 20 was set to eliminate. 

In his opinion, Hilgers wrote that the state Board of Pardons—a three-member body composed of him, Evnen, and Republican Governor Jim Pillen—has sole discretion over whether to restore someone’s voting rights. Right after Hilgers issued his opinion, Evnen, the state’s top elections official, emailed county-level elections offices, ordering that, based on the AG’s stance, “we will not be implementing LB 20 and will no longer register individuals convicted of felonies.”

These moves by Hilgers and Evnen shocked Nebraskans who have spent years pushing for voting rights restoration. The new law had overwhelmingly passed the Republican-controlled legislature earlier this year, and Nebraskans with past felonies have been registering to vote, and actually voting, for almost 20 years with little issue or outcry.

“For two guys, working with one mind, to come in and say, ‘Eh, you know what, never mind; we’re taking it back and also jumping in our political DeLorean and removing the law’—it’s outrageous,” Aaron Pettes, a formerly incarcerated organizer and advocate in Omaha, told Bolts. At 44, he’d been poised to vote this fall for the first time in his life. “When it was revoked, it was traumatic. It felt like I was back in prison,” he said. 

The nonprofit Civic Nebraska and three disenfranchised plaintiffs, represented by the state branch of the ACLU, sued Evnen and two county-level elections officials in late July, seeking to compel them to allow citizens who have finished all terms of their convictions to register to vote, in accordance with both the new reform law and the one that passed nearly 20 years ago. The state supreme court in early August agreed to hear the case, and plans to hold oral arguments on Wednesday.

“We didn’t have any problem finding plaintiffs, because so many people who had been excited to register to vote were so upset,” Adam Morfeld, a former state lawmaker who helped found Civic Nebraska, told Bolts. “It’s a mess.”

The mess, said Pamela Pettes, Aaron’s wife, has left many nervous about even trying to register. Mass confusion can be a potent voter suppressant, especially when people are scared they could be criminally charged for trying to register, as changes around felony disenfranchisement in states like Virginia and Kentucky have recently demonstrated. 

“There are so many questions going on surrounding this that people are scared,” said Pamela, who lost her voting rights almost 20 years ago due to a felony conviction, regained them in 2011 and then became a regular voter—and who now, thanks to state GOP officials, fears she has lost her voting rights once again. 

“People are scared they’re going to get charged with something if they try to vote and can’t vote, so a lot of people will just wash their hands of it—are already washing their hands of it,” she told Bolts. “They don’t want to go and vote unless they have a clear idea of what’s going on. They don’t have that.”

LB 53, the 2005 law, ended a Nebraska policy dating to 1875 that imposed blanket, lifetime felony disenfranchisement—a practice that as of 2005 was unusually harsh, and one which only persists today formally in Virginia, functionally in Tennessee, and hardly anywhere else in the world.

About 59,000 Nebraskans with felony convictions were instantly granted the right to vote after enactment of the 2005 law, which made people eligible two years after they completed their full criminal sentences—including parole, probation, and any debt of restitution. The reform disproportionately benefited people of color: Nebraska’s Black imprisonment rate is almost 10 times higher than that of white residents, an unusually high disparity that is about 50 percent above the U.S. average. Latinx and Native American people are also dramatically overrepresented in Nebraska jails and prisons.

The ACLU of Nebraska reports that, in addition to the 59,000 people whose voting rights were restored in 2005, another 38,000 have gained voting rights in the 19 years since, thanks to that reform. But advocates for rights restoration say that many of the people made eligible by that law still never registered; it’s not always realistic, they say, to expect people already grappling with all the challenges of prison re-entry to keep track of a two-year countdown clock and maintain interest in registering once that clock expires. 

Jake Shaddy, who was previously incarcerated in Nebraska and now runs a group of halfway houses in Omaha, says there’s an information void around voting rights for currently and formerly incarcerated people. He says he has spent years believing he’ll never be able to vote again, and that he knows many who think the same.

“A lot of people who’ve been incarcerated give up on politics and tune off, because they feel like it doesn’t apply to them,” Shaddy told Bolts. “I’ve worked with probably over 500 guys at my halfway houses, maybe more, and they are all under the impression they are unable to vote.”

This environment of misinformation was a primary target of LB 20, the law that passed this year. Advocates in Nebraska worked for many years to get rid of the two-year waiting period baked into the 2005 law, because, they argued, immediately restoring people’s voting rights upon sentence completion would reduce uncertainty and fear over voting for people with prior convictions.

Though it took years of sustained advocacy to become law, LB 20 ultimately proved quite popular in Nebraska’s legislature. It was introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, then passed the statehouse by a vote of 38-6 in April. Governor Pillen declined to sign the bill, but he also declined to veto it, and so it went into law.

In his opinion calling LB 20 unconstitutional, Hilgers challenged the legislature’s ability to restore people’s voting rights and said those powers rest solely with the state’s pardons board—in other words, up to the discretion of just him, Pillen, and Evnen, the secretary of state. 

“A pardon is an act of grace that relieves a person of legal consequences of his crime. A legal consequence of a felony is losing the right to vote,” Hilgers wrote in his opinion. “Restoring that right is an act of grace that undoes a legal consequence of a crime. In other words … (T)he act of restoring civil rights is a pardon and within the exclusive power of the Board of Pardons.”

The ACLU, Civic Nebraska, and many others argue this is out of step with existing law. The state’s supreme court has traditionally agreed: In a 2002 case, it ruled that the legislature can determine through statute policy concerning voting rights restoration. State court precedent also casts doubt on Evnen’s interpretation of Hilgers’ recent opinion; in a 1983 case, the court determined that an attorney general’s opinion “has no controlling authority on the state of the law discussed in it.”

Evnen’s decision to order county officials to cease registration of people with past felonies has not only reversed the will of the many lawmakers who supported the reform, but has also drawn the ire of his immediate predecessor. John Gale, a Republican who served as Nebraska’s secretary of state from 2000 to 2019, signed on to a brief in support of the lawsuit pending now at the state supreme court. That brief predicted that Hilgers and Evnen abruptly upending state law on voting rights “would lead to disorder in this year’s general election.”

“Secretary Evnen and I are old friends,” Gale added in a press announcement last week. “In this case, I strongly believe the Nebraska Legislature acted with clear authority and LB 53 and LB 20 should be enforced as the law for the 2024 election and future elections.”

If Hilgers’ opinion were to hold up, it would carry heavy consequences moving forward; Nebraska releases more than 2,000 people from prison every year, and those people would re-enter society under a legal presumption of lifetime disenfranchisement. After his order to county elections officials, Evnen promised to seek approval from the pardons board to restore the rights of people who had registered since the 2005 reform, though he has put that on hold pending a state supreme court ruling.

Danielle Jefferis, an assistant professor of law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies criminal punishment, said Hilgers’ opinion, and Evnen’s subsequent order, are not only constitutionally unsound, but cruel. 

“There’s just so many ways in which the criminal legal system dehumanizes people, including taking away their democratic voice,” she told Bolts. “To get that voice back, it’s a way of feeling like a human again, a way of feeling like a member of the community again. Yes, you made a mistake, yes, you owed society a debt, but you paid that debt. And for the attorney general to issue that decision so abruptly—it’s hard to find another word than whiplash.”

Aaron Pettes was convicted at 18 and sentenced to a term of incarceration, and then probation, which he only just finished in January. He works today at RISE, Nebraska’s largest nonprofit organization promoting successful community re-entry for people as they transition from incarceration back to free society. He talks often with the people he serves about voting, and was himself excited to finally vote this fall. He had been thinking lately about which candidates and issues he’d support in November. 

Aaron says he will be ready to register if and when the state supreme court, which has a conservative majority, rules against the actions of Hilgers and Evnen. But he’s doubtful that other formerly incarcerated people he works with every day would do the same. 

Aaron says the recent loss of voting rights and the continued uncertainty over them, even for those who’ve completed a sentence, is just one of many ways government subjects people to unending punishment and demoralization.

“Incarceration just confirms to people that this system shouldn’t garner any support from them, because it’s broken, and then they get out and they’re not welcomed back into the community but allowed back in, with minimal rights, minimal resources, and the system waiting to trap them again,” he said.

Against that backdrop, Aaron says he’s often found it challenging to convince formerly incarcerated people to vote. They were typically skeptical before Hilgers’ bombshell, and are even more so now, he says.

“You tell them to come out and vote, that they can make a difference, and they’re finally like, ‘OK, fine,’” Aaron added. “Then this happens, and they’re like, ‘See, I told you.’”

RISE is a part of the Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, which was poised to launch the statewide campaign to convince people their vote matters, and to then help them exercise it. The group remains ready to make that case if LB 20 and LB 53 are ever restored, but Aaron isn’t optimistic about restarting the engine. 

“After all this, to encourage people to re-engage, it’s going to be difficult,” he said. “We were right there, and with one swoop of a pen we were ushered out again.”

Tommy Moore of Lincoln, Aaron’s colleague at RISE, has been out of prison since 2009 and voting since he got off probation and finished his full sentence in 2013. He says he’s worked hard to chart a successful course post-incarceration: He earned a doctoral degree, started teaching at a community college, and now works to improve local systems of mental health care and prison re-entry services. Voting, he says, is one part of his overall mission to contribute positively to society. 

But Moore says the present uncertainty over his voting rights in Nebraska makes him wary to even attempt to participate in this election, regardless of what the state supreme court may command in coming weeks. He says he is too afraid of being accused of breaking election law.

“I do not plan on voting, which is really sad because it’s a pretty critical year,” Moore told Bolts. “I’m that concerned about going back to prison. I do not want to affiliate myself again with the opposite side of the criminal justice system. I never want to encounter that humiliation again, and I prefer not to vote than to take the risk.”

The post Nebraska Reverts to 19th-Century Voting Restrictions, Clouding Rights for Thousands appeared first on Bolts.

The decision, delivered by the full Fifth Circuit, one of the nation’s most conservative federal appeals courts, overturns a shock ruling by a three-judge panel last year that had struck down the state’s disenfranchisement schemes. Barring people from voting permanently, those judges said, is unconstitutional because it’s a “cruel and unusual punishment.”

While civil rights advocates enjoyed a moment of hope after last year’s ruling, they braced for the full Fifth Circuit to take up the case and reverse it, given its staunchly right-wing reputation. The Fifth Circuit did just that in a 13 to 6 decision on Thursday, rejecting the claim that lifetime disenfranchisement amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. 

“In short, ‘cruel and unusual’ is not the same as ‘harmful and unfair,’” wrote Judge Edith Jones for the majority. The matter should be decided by the legislature, not a court, she said.

Judge James Dennis pushed back in his dissent. “Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy and the deprivation of the right to vote saps citizens of the ability to have a say in how and by whom they are governed,” he wrote.

He added, “Denying released offenders the right to vote takes away their full dignity as citizens, separates them from the rest of their community, and reduces them to ‘other’ status.” All six dissenting judges were selected by Democratic presidents. Twelve of the 13 in the majority were selected by Republicans; they were joined by Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, a Biden nominee.

With the November elections fast approaching, the ruling keeps the door firmly shut on people who’ve lost the right to vote—many of whom haven’t gotten to vote for decades, if ever.  Mississippi keeps no transparent record of the exact number of people blocked from voting, but one study estimates that about 50,000 people were disenfranchised between 1994 and 2017 alone. 

The majority of people who are disenfranchised in Mississippi are Black, a product of deep inequalities in the state’s criminal legal system.

“We know this is all about POWER,” Jarrius Adams, an advocate at the nonprofit Mississippi Votes, told Bolts in a text message on Thursday. “African Americans make up 36 percent of Mississippi’s voting-age population but nearly 60 percent of its disenfranchised individuals.

“Imagine if just half of those folks could vote,” Adams continued. “Our elections and elected officials would look much different.”

These numbers are not accidental. Mississippi set up a system of lifetime disenfranchisement when crafting its 1890 constitution, with drafters explicitly saying they wanted to limit Black political power. The authors of that document chose to make people lose the right to vote only when convicted of certain felonies—a list comprising crimes of which they thought Black residents were most likely to be convicted. The state has since amended that list; today, it includes 23 crimes, including theft, perjury, carjacking, and murder.

The only way for someone to regain the right to vote is for Mississippi to adopt a law specifically tailored to that individual. Only 16 people regained their rights through this process this year. 

“We’re living in the community, driving on the streets, working our jobs—but our voice isn’t heard,” Cornelius Clayton, a Mississippi resident who lost his voting rights in 2007 over a conviction for theft and has not been able to vote since, told Bolts last year. 

These rules are punitive even by U.S. standards, which are out of step with most of the rest of the world. Mississippi is one of the 10 states that bars at least some people from voting for life over a felony conviction. (Virginia is the only state with a permanent ban for any felony, though the situation is functionally the same in Tennessee.) In most states, people regain their rights either as soon as they’re released from prison, or when they complete probation and parole. In Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., no one ever loses the right to vote, including in prison, just like in some other countries.

The plaintiffs in the Mississippi case are “exploring next steps,” said Jon Youngwood, co-chair of litigation at ​​Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, a law firm that’s leading this case alongside the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

“Denying broad groups of our citizens, for life, the ability to have a role in determining who governs them diminishes our society and deprives individuals of the full rights of representative government,” Youngwood told Bolts, in an emailed statement. “Our clients remain committed to ensuring that their right to vote is restored.”

If the plaintiffs appeal Thursday’s ruling, the next step would be the conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

Mississippi’s GOP-run legislature earlier this year considered a limited bill that would have narrowed felony disenfranchisement; the bill passed the state House before dying in the Senate. 

There is no path for now for Mississippi advocates to change the rules through a ballot initiative because the state supreme court shut down direct democracy entirely in the state in 2021. Lawmakers have chosen to not revive the initiative process since then.

Some states in recent years have expanded voting rights for people with past felonies, typically where Democrats are in power. Other states, including Virginia and Tennessee, have lately made their rules harsher. Just this week, Nebraska’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state abruptly halted implementation of a law, passed by the GOP-run legislature, that was meant to restore voting rights for an estimated 7,000 people with felony convictions.

Felony disenfranchisement anywhere is an untenable and unjust scheme, argues Paloma Wu, an attorney who helped file the Mississippi case years ago, and who today works at the Mississippi Center for Justice. 

“It’s one of the great success stories of white supremacy that there are so many things that are rooted in white supremacy that we take for granted as normal,” she told Bolts. “People think it’s normal to take away the right to vote from people when they’re convicted of certain crimes. It’s not.”

“The idea that we can somehow look deep in somebody’s soul as to whether they deserve the right to vote, as a citizen of a democracy, is the fundamental lie,” she continued “We should not be hitching anything to the right to vote other than whether they are a citizen.” 

The post Court Upholds Mississippi’s Jim Crow-Era Lifetime Voting Ban appeared first on Bolts.

The timing of both elections are major surprises. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called them in late May, while French President Emmanuel Macron shocked his country on June 9 by announcing that he was dissolving the National Assembly and organizing elections within a month.

Each election will decide who governs the country, using rules that often differ from U.S. norms. The modes of government vary, of course, but so do policies, gerrymandering, voter registration, voting in or after prison, voter ID, tabulations, and much more. 

At Bolts, we’re always interested in varying models of democracy, and what lessons they teach us. And we suspected that our readers have many questions as well. 

As part of our ongoing “Ask Bolts” series, we asked you to let us know what you’re thinking—and you delivered. We narrowed down your questions (with great difficulty) and had fun answering them below.  

We’ve organized your questions under five themes—explore at your leisure:

Why is this happening right now?

How do these parliamentary elections even work?

So, how do you vote?

How are districts drawn?

Who can vote?

Read on to learn how people vote in France and the U.K., why snap elections are a thing, what constraints exist on gerrymandering, and much more. 

Why is this happening right now?

Why are they allowed to decide when to hold elections? That seems kind of undemocratic to me, to call an election whenever the political tide favors them. What sort of balance is there in the system to prevent one party from running up the numbers for decades? — @aurorasintexas, on X

Snap elections are indeed unusual by U.S. standards: Current U.S. law dictates that federal elections be held in early November every two years—rain or shine. State governments tend to have similarly rigid calendars. 

In France, by contrast, the president has unchecked power to dissolve the National Assembly and order parliamentary elections; the only constraint is that it can’t be done again for a year. But this move is always a personal gamble: When presidents lose parliamentary elections, they appoint a prime minister from within the coalition that controls the Assembly; in such a configuration, presidents are largely reduced to a figurehead when it comes to domestic affairs. That’s what happened in 1997, the last time a president called snap elections: Conservative President Jacques Chirac thought his camp would emerge victorious, but there was instead an upset by the left. 

And now it’s happening to Macron, who called elections three years before they were scheduled. His party held a plurality in the outgoing Assembly but now appears on track to lose at least half of its seats later this week. 

In the U.K., snap elections are even more routine. It’s always the prime minister’s prerogative to decide when exactly to schedule the next national elections, though they must be within five years of the last ones. Unlike in France, there isn’t even a default date for the next election.

This system has faced plenty of criticism that it gives the ruling party an unfair advantage, and the U.K. actually experimented with reform in recent years: A 2011 law significantly constrained the PM’s prerogative, setting a default term of five years and requiring that the House of Commons approve earlier elections. “For the first time in our history the timing of general elections will not be a plaything of governments,” said one of the reform’s champions at the time. But subsequent PMs still managed to convince Parliament to schedule unexpected snap elections to take advantage of favorable polling, and the reform was repealed in 2022. 

But let’s return to the U.S.: Manipulating the timing of elections isn’t exactly rare here either.

State and local officials sometimes schedule ballot measures on dates they think will be most favorable to their goals. In 2018, for instance, Missouri Republicans controversially rescheduled a labor initiative from the November general election to the lower-turnout summer primary, expecting that this would yield better outcomes for them; last year, the Oklahoma governor scheduled a popular initiative to legalize marijuana on a standalone winter date, a choice denounced by state groups as a maneuver to depress turnout. 

How do these parliamentary elections even work?

Can you explain the runoff process in France? How is it determined which candidates make the runoff, e.g. how can three candidates qualify? — B., from New York | I see that France and the U.K. both elect representatives by district. Does that look the same as in the U.S.? — Anonymous

Just like in the U.S., France and the U.K. are carved up into districts, and each district elects one member of Parliament. (That’s what’s happening this week.) Unlike in the U.S., neither country has intraparty primaries; party leaders designate their nominees, rather than leave that decision to a popular vote. 

Otherwise, the rules of U.K. elections should be familiar to Americans: Each district holds a first-past-the-post election to select its MP, much like what’ll happen in the U.S. in November. In each district, the candidate with the most votes wins the seat, whatever their share of the vote. 

France holds its parliamentary elections over two rounds, though. In the first round, voters get to choose between all candidates who filed to run. If a candidate tops 50 percent, they win outright. Otherwise, a runoff is held a week later, and whomever gets the most votes in the runoff wins.

But who exactly makes these runoffs? Here’s where things get tricky: Runoffs in France’s parliamentary elections can have more than two candidates. 

The top two candidates always advance, plus any candidate who gets the support of more than 12.5 percent of the district’s registered voters. When turnout is low, it’s a lot harder to cross that threshold; candidates need a prohibitively high share of the actual votes cast. But when turnout is high, as it is this year, third-placed candidates routinely make it through. 

In France’s 2022 elections, turnout was just 48 percent; as a result, just eight out of 577 districts saw three-way runoffs. But turnout last Sunday surged to 67 percent. As a result, 311 districts saw three candidates advance; a handful of districts even had four candidates make the runoffs.

This set up a mad scramble. There are many French districts in which the far-right party, the Rassemblement National, likely cannot top 50 percent of the vote in two-candidate runoffs; but it has a much stronger shot in three-way battles where it only needs a plurality. In an effort to block the far-right and not split the vote, over 200 candidates dropped out in the days after the first round; as of publication, only 91 districts are still set for a runoff of more than two candidates.

Do these countries end up electing leaders who are more representative? — Bolts Lovers, in Virginia | Does the two round system work to improve representation? Why does France use it instead of instant runoffs/the single transferable vote? — Sefine 

In fact, France came close to having a system that looks a lot more like the U.K.’s: One of the main drafters of the 1958 constitution admired the British first-past-the-post system, but was overruled by President Charles de Gaulle, who saw the runoff system as likelier to produce stable majorities, according to Georges Bergougnous, a professor at the Sorbonne University. 

Neither the French nor British system is ultimately conducive to a parliamentary landscape where smaller political forces are well represented. The U.K.’s first-past-the-post system creates the same sort of pressure for voters to opt for the dominant parties as in U.S. general elections. In France, with each district electing one member and a two-round system that usually requires candidates to get a majority, it boxes out many parties unless they ally with larger forces.

Both countries have seen insistent calls by smaller parties and some election reformers to select at least part of Parliament through a method of proportional representation, but these proposals have not come through. (France briefly switched to a proportional system from 1986 to 1988.) 

Both countries’ parliaments also skew male and white, and people with immigrant backgrounds are underrepresented. 

France does have a law requiring that parties nominate an equal number of men and women, or else face fines. Since the law was adopted by the left in 2000, the share of women in the National Assembly has soared from 11 percent to 37 percent in 2022, but some parties don’t respect the requirement. (France imposes stricter gender parity in other elections.) In the U.K, which has no such requirement, women make up a third of the outgoing House of Commons. Women in the U.S. won 29 percent of House seats in 2022, which was a record-high for the country. 

So, how do you vote?

A family friend from France was visiting and told us that, instead of absentee ballots, you deputize another person who fills out a ballot for you on Election Day. How many people do that? — @rvarco, on X

Neither France nor the U.K. has any in-person early voting. Polls are open on Election Day. In France, that’s always on a Sunday; in the U.K., it’s always been on a Thursday since the 1930s. 

So what do you do if you can’t make it to the polls on that one day? As the question indicates, France has no mail-in voting. The U.K. does, though: Voters there can cast postal ballots.

Plus, both France and the U.K. have a system of proxy voting: People can deputize their right to vote to someone else by filing an application, which in both countries can be done online. On Election Day, this person then has the ability to go to your polling place and cast a ballot in your name—in addition to the ballot they’ll cast in their own name. There’s no way to control what the person you deputized does: You’ll have to find someone you trust will respect your wishes.

To your final question, the number of people who deputized their right to vote surged in France, in part due to the fact that Macron timed these snap elections for the early summer. More than 2 million voters signed up for proxy voting, which is more than double the 2022 elections.

I believe that, as reported, voter fraud was not a problem that needed solving in the U.K.. But why was voter fraud not more common before voter ID was required? — Paula 

The U.K.’s Conservative government recently adopted new requirements for people to show photo ID to vote. It was implemented for the first time in local elections last year, and will be used again in the national elections this week. We posed your question to Jessica Garland, director of research and policy at the U.K.-based Electoral Reform Society and a critic of this new requirement.

This is a “solution looking for a problem,” she answered. “Prior to the introduction of voter ID there were very low levels of recorded personation fraud in Britain,” she said, pointing to the country’s 2019 national and local elections: “Out of all alleged cases of electoral fraud that year, only 33 related to personation fraud at the polling station—this comprises 0.000057% of the over 58 million votes cast in all the elections that took place that year.” 

Compare those tiny numbers to the disruptions caused by the new law: Thousands of British people were turned away from the polls in 2023 due to the requirement, and thousands more did not attempt to vote as a result, according to the nation’s Electoral Commission. 

Said Garland, “Since its introduction, voter ID has prevented thousands more people from voting than have ever been accused of personation fraud.” This is a familiar phenomenon in the United States. Under the guise of cracking down on fraud, which is tremendously rare, conservative laws have deterred large numbers of eligible Americans from voting.

Do [France and the U.K.] have voter registration? Can you register between the 1st and 2nd rounds in France? — @m_schettig, on X

In both countries, it’s up to residents to proactively register to vote and update their registration as they move (either online, or at a government agency). And they must register weeks before election day. In France this year, because Macron organized snap elections within three weeks—an exceptionally rapid campaign—the deadline came within a day of his announcement, leaving people virtually no time to check their status and get on voter rolls amid widespread confusion.  

Reformers warn that millions of people are falling through the cracks of this system in both the U.K. and France. Many aren’t registered to vote or are registered at the wrong address. 

“This process for registration is proving to be an obstacle to universal suffrage,” Garland told Bolts about the U.K., where she works. “The groups most likely to be missing from the electoral registers are those who rent their homes (only 65 percent of private renters are registered compared to 95 percent of those who own their homes) and young people.” 

Garland wants the U.K. to adopt automatic voter registration, a model that exists in other European countries and many U.S. states. (French people are automatically registered at age 18, provided they abided by the mandatory census at age 16; but there is no update after they inevitably move.)

The idea is for public agencies to use information they already have to proactively register people to vote; this increases the registration rates among groups that are less likely to be engaged in the electoral process. (In the U.S., many states automatically register people through the DMV; some states are trying to register people when they interact with Medicaid services or when they are released from prison.)

The Labour Party has said it’ll introduce automatic voter registration in the U.K. if it wins Thursday’s elections. 

How are districts drawn?

In the U.K. and France, what is the (re)districting process like? Is there a scheduled amount of time until new boundaries are drawn? How does it compare to the U.S., where redistricting is plagued with gerrymandering, protection of incumbents, and litigation? — Tommy, in Pennsylvania

Let’s tackle them one by one. In the U.K., these districts are drawn by so-called boundary commissions. There’s a separate commission for each of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Since a reform adopted in 2020, boundaries are meant to be reviewed every eight years.

These bodies are mostly independent. “The scope for electoral gerrymandering, U.S.-style, is vanishingly small,” The Guardian quipped in 2023, the last time the map was redrawn. Garland agrees: “Changes must include public consultation and be agreed by parliament, and boundary decisions must be made according to principles that are set out in law,” she told Bolts. “This process and the commissions are generally viewed as non-partisan, and the commissioners are not under direct ministerial control.”

France mostly ignores redistricting. The country last redrew its boundaries in 2010; despite extensive demographic change, the rounds of redistricting before that were in 1986 and 1958.

It’s effectively up to the ruling Cabinet to decide if the time has come. At that point, the process is led by the Minister of the Interior in consultation with local leaders and political parties.

On paper, this could be a recipe for gerrymandering gone wild since the entire nation’s map is overseen by one partisan actor. But that doesn’t tend to be the case, according to Thomas Ehrhard, a professor of political science at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas who has written a book on redistricting in France. He told Bolts that redistricting in the past has produced maps that were meant to protect incumbents, but that they were not distorted by partisanship. 

One reason for this is that districts must respect other administrative boundaries; this “prevents monstrous forms of gerrymandering,” Ehrhard said. For instance, districts can’t overlap between different départments (the rough equivalent of a U.S. county), many of which are quite small; this greatly constrains what can be done with them. Districts “have fairly homogeneous territorial cohesion that respects the socio-economic realities of small geographical areas,” Ehrhard says. 

Each of the last two rounds of redistricting was overseen by the ruling conservative party, Ehrhard points out. Each time, the center-left won the first elections held under the new maps. 

How does the malapportionment of representatives compare between the U.S., the U.K. and France? — @USHouseEquality, on X

The fact that France redistricts so rarely means that it addresses demographic shifts very slowly, and population disparities between districts can snowball. 

And even when the country adopts a new map, districts may already be drawn with uneven sizes. Each district can deviate by up to 20 percent from its county’s average district population. That’s a large allowance compared to the U.S., where all districts within a state must be as equal as possible. 

Right before the 2010 redistricting, there was a 7 to 1 disparity between the populations of the smallest and largest district in mainland France. (Districts in some of France’s overseas regions tend to be smaller.) As of 2022, the disparity was 3 to 1, according to an analysis by Le Monde that shows large variance across the country. 

On paper, the U.K. is much stricter: The country only allows for a variation of 5 percent.

But there’s another major source of disparity there: The size of districts is assessed based only on the number of people who are registered to vote, not based on an area’s total population. This dilutes representation for areas that have a greater number of residents who are ineligible to vote, or who simply are less likely to be on voter rolls. 

“Practically, it means the [Members of Parliament] representing young and diverse inner-city seats have to serve much larger populations of constituents than MPs representing older, rural seats with high registration rates,” Robert Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, told The Guardian. An analysis released last year by pollster Peter Kellener confirmed that this significantly distorts the political map; districts held by Labour are on average more populous than districts held by the Tories. 

Who can vote?

Can voting rights be removed from citizens in France and the U.K., such as if they receive a felony conviction? — Madison, from New York

France mostly does not strip people of the right to vote when they’re convicted of a crime—including while they’re incarcerated.

It largely enables people to vote even from prison, as Cole Stangler reported in Bolts during the country’s 2022 presidential election. “Today, only a small minority of the country’s prisoners are stripped of their voting rights—political officials who have misused their power and convicted terrorists,” Stangler wrote at the time. This is a far cry from the U.S., where only Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., have no restrictions on people voting from prison.

France has also taken proactive steps in recent years to help incarcerated people actually exercise this right. Turnout among people from prison surged nearly 13-fold between 2017 and 2022.

The U.K. disenfranchises people convicted of a crime while they’re in prison. The European Court of Human Rights repeatedly said that this ban violates human rights, rulings that triggered some debate in the country but ultimately led to only minor changes. 

But the U.K. allows its citizens to vote when they’re released from prison.

That, too, is a far cry from vast swaths of the United States; in roughly half of the states, people with felony convictions are barred from voting long after they’ve been released; sometimes they have to pay hefty fees to regain their voting rights. Neither France nor the U.K. does anything resembling the practice of some U.S. states like Mississippi and Virginia, which strip people of their right to vote for life over most or all felony convictions. 

I’m a British citizen living abroad. I still can vote and I have applied for a postal vote in the last constituency in which I lived in the U.K.. Do French citizens living outside of France have voting rights, and if so, where do their votes get counted? — Ray 

The two countries approach representation for citizens who live overseas very differently. 

U.K. citizens vote in the district where they used to live. (This means that they cannot vote in parliamentary elections if they’ve never lived in the country in the past.) In practice, this means they have to cast a mail ballot or deputize a proxy to vote for them. 

France, by contrast, has seats just for its citizens who live outside of France: The entire globe is carved up into 11 districts, and each of these districts elects an Assemblymember through the same exact procedure as any other seat. (There are calls in the U.K. to set up similar districts.) French citizens who live abroad can vote at polling centers set up by their consulate on election day, or they can vote online—an option that does not exist in mainland France. 

For instance, all of the United States makes up one French district alongside Canada. In the district’s first round this past Sunday, a candidate from Macron’s party and a candidate from the Left coalition advanced to a runoff.

The post How Voting Works in the U.K. and France: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

His confidence faded as jury selection began. Stackhouse, a Black man then in his late 20s, found no one who looked like him among the pool. There were no Black males and few people of color at all, and hardly anyone close to his age, he recalls.

“I was terrified,” Stackhouse, now 47, told Bolts. “I remember going through and trying to select individuals who I felt would at least hear my side of what happened, but then I was going to trial knowing that I could definitely be speaking on deaf ears.”

Stackhouse was convicted and later incarcerated for 12 years. 

The jury arrangement in his case was hardly an unlucky break. By design, New Jersey jury pools are unrepresentative of the populace, in large part because of state law excluding people with past convictions from juries for life. 

These exclusions massively bias the jury pool because New Jersey’s criminal legal system so disproportionately targets Black residents, from police stops to sentencing. The state permanently bars about 25 percent of Black adults from serving on a jury, according to estimates shared by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. By comparison, it bars 7 percent of all adult residents.

These are high rates even by national standards. Though every state excludes some people with criminal records from juries, New Jersey’s policy is unusually harsh: It bans people from jury service for life if they’ve been convicted of any “indictable offense”—a category which include felonies as well as some lower-level crimes that would be considered misdemeanors elsewhere. Only four other states are as restrictive as New Jersey: Maryland, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas.

A free man today, Stackhouse is now helping to champion a proposed reform meant to make New Jersey juries more representative of the communities in which they serve. Assembly Bill 834, filed earlier this month, would allow anyone to serve on a jury so long as they are not currently incarcerated for an indictable offense. 

The bill calls for the continued exclusion of those who’ve been convicted of murder or aggravated sexual assault, but otherwise opens jury service up to everyone living on the outside—including those on parole or probation. Its passage into law would instantly make New Jersey’s jury exclusion law one of the country’s most permissive. 

“New Jersey has an opportunity to be a leader in the nation, and a leader in one of the best ways: having our juries be robust and reflective,” Emily Schwartz, senior counsel for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, told Bolts. “We have an incredibly diverse state of all life experiences. That can only make this process a stronger one.”

New Jersey lawmakers have been debating this question as far back as 1995, when the state adopted a law permitting jury service for anyone who’d completed a full sentence for an indictable offense—only to repeal it in 1996.

More recently, lawmakers have considered reforms to expand jury service eligibility every session since 2018. This year’s proposal seems to have real momentum, as a reform identical to AB 834 already cleared one chamber of the statehouse in early January, at the end of the last legislative session. AB 834 was filed the next day, at the onset of the current session, sponsored by Assembly members Verlina Reynolds-Jackson and Shanique Speight, both Black women. 

“We’re getting close,” Stackhouse said. Schwartz added she believes this bill can pass by the summer. 

New Jersey, like the rest of the country, owes much of its jury exclusion practice to explicitly racist post-Reconstruction campaigns to keep Black people out of jury boxes. Those efforts are still serving their purpose today; all across the country, Black and other Americans of color overall are disproportionately more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. This means they are less likely to serve on juries, either because of exclusion for past convictions or because of state policies that alienate marginalized communities from civic life. 

Plus, defendants must contend with a criminal legal system in which trial judges and elected prosecutors are almost always white.

“We’re whitewashing a space that’s disproportionately affecting Black and brown communities,” Schwartz said, “which really calls into question: who is getting a jury of one’s peers?”

The upshot in New Jersey is a disparity between imprisonment rates for Black and white citizens greater than in any other state in the country. The Sentencing Project reported in 2021 that Black New Jerseyans were 12 times likelier than their white neighbors to be incarcerated—more than double the national average disparity.

In New Jersey and the U.S. overall, the vast majority of criminal cases never go to trial, resolving instead with plea deals. Among the reasons why, several formerly incarcerated New Jerseyans and criminal defense attorneys told Bolts, is the discouragement that comes from knowing one’s fate at trial may well be determined by a set of people who cannot relate to the defendant.

“The expected composition of the jury affects the way we advise people about whether to go to trial, in certain types of cases,” said Andy Elders, a Virginia-based public defender. “If our defense is going to be that the police are lying, or that there was police violence, or if our defense is that the accused fled from the police because he was afraid of them—those are experiences that are more likely to be racially coded, where, for example, Black people may have different experiences than white people.”

Research has shown that more diverse juries are less quick to convict, deliberating longer and more thoughtfully. One study conducted in the Houston area concluded that proportionate representation on juries could reduce median sentence terms by 50 percent.

“More perspectives on juries means more understanding,” Schwartz argued. “In a room where you have 100 people and they all hear the same story, what each person takes from that story can shift a little bit, so doesn’t it give more credibility to the process to have more perspectives?”

The jury selection process, known as voir dire, is already designed to dismiss those who demonstrate biases that could cloud their judgment. At the heart of the argument for New Jersey’s reform is the basic premise that everyone has a unique worldview that precludes total impartiality, and that it is thus unfair to exclude one class of people entirely. 

“Ultimately, the prosecutor and the attorney have to agree on who sits on the jury. There’s a process in place to weed them out, so why wouldn’t we be included in that?” Frank Gilmore, who was incarcerated for seven years in New Jersey, told Bolts.

Gilmore is now a city council member in Jersey City. It’s one of the most racially diverse cities in the country, with roughly equal numbers of white, Asian, Black, and Latinx residents—but Gilmore recalls that the jury in his trial was mostly white. The conviction resulting from that trial is still keeping him from serving on juries today, which he finds especially, bitterly ironic.

“I’m a legislator; I create legislation, I write laws. Who better to judge if someone broke the law than a person that created it?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not consistent with this idea that we give people second chances.” 

Gilmore and others backing the New Jersey bill say they’re concerned that it carves out those convicted of murder and aggravated sexual assault. Schwartz called this a “kneejerk reaction to what [lawmakers] think of more upsetting crimes,” and said this selective exclusion “also ignores the reality that we all have our biases.” 

Rev. Dr. Russell Owen, who was released from prison in 2021 after being incarcerated for 32 years on a murder conviction, said that the exclusions in the bill also serve to keep people like him in a permanent underclass. “They’re telling me there’s a limit to my integrity, a limit to my goodness, a limit to my rehabilitation,” Owen, now a community organizer with Faith in New Jersey, told Bolts. “I am not a carve-out. I am more than that, but what they’re saying is that I’m still not a real citizen.”

But those proposed carve-outs were the product of an amendment to last session’s version of the bill that passed late last year by a Democratic-controlled Assembly committee and later by the full Assembly. Advocates aren’t happy with the change, Schwartz said, but they feel it makes the bill much more likely to pass.

Ann Roan, a longtime public defender who has lectured around the country on voir dire, warns that even if New Jersey’s bill does become law, it may not make juries much more racially representative. Roan has seen up close how a law that appears inclusive on paper may not play out in practice: she’s from Colorado, which has one of the country’s most permissive laws on jury exclusion, and she said racial bias still very much persists there in jury trials. 

Though the U.S. Supreme Court has held that one cannot be dismissed from a jury pool simply on the basis of race, Roan said plenty of proxy options remain. Those hailing from communities that experience heaviest policing and incarceration are often most skeptical of law enforcement, Roan has found. In the voir dire process, she said, many prosecutors find such skepticism to be disqualifying.

“Your lived experiences and your honesty about your lived experiences only work if those lived experiences are congruent with support for law enforcement. Otherwise you’re deemed not fit to serve,” Roan said.

“I tend to believe that if this bill in New Jersey passes, you will not see skyrocketing numbers of prior convicted felons being part of juries, because prosecutors are not going to let that happen.”

The post New Jersey May Open Juries to Most People with Criminal Convictions appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Michigan Law Is First to Automatically Register People to Vote As They Leave Prison appeared first on Bolts.

Beshear emerged victorious on Tuesday, securing a second term by defeating Attorney General Daniel Cameron by 5 percentage points as of publication, the same margin by which Kentuckians rejected an anti-abortion constitutional amendment last fall.

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, made the inverse gamble this fall that he could convince Virginians to hand the keys to their state government to his party even if he told them that the GOP would introduce new restrictions on abortion in the commonwealth. He proposed a new ban after 15 weeks, similar to some congressional Republicans’ proposal. 

But Virginians on Tuesday rejected Youngkin’s offer and Democrats, who campaigned hard on promising to protect abortion rights, won both chambers of the legislature by defending their majority in the Senate and gaining control of the state House from Republicans.

With these results, Democrats held off major Republican efforts to take full control of the state governments of Kentucky and Virginia, a replay of the GOP’s disappointment in the fall of 2022 when it failed to capitalize on the traditional gains for an out-of-power party. 

Republicans’ setbacks last year were widely attributed to the unpopularity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, and voters reaffirmed various times throughout 2023 that reproductive rights remain a motivating issue. 

Proponents of reproductive rights on Tuesday also secured a decisive win in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to establish a right to abortion. And Democrats also prevailed in a critical state supreme court election in Pennsylvania after they assailed the Republican nominee for signaling support for restrictions. 

Beyond Kentucky and Virginia, two other states were electing their state governments on Tuesday, and both held to their usual partisan form. 

In New Jersey, Democrats easily defended their majorities in both legislative chambers, expanding their majorities despite GOP giddiness this fall, so they will retain full control of the state government for at least the next two years. 

Republicans got their best result of election night in Mississippi, where they will keep control of the state government thanks to Republican Governor Tate Reeves’ reelection victory. The GOP did score a decisive victory last month in Louisiana, which holds its state elections in October, as they flipped the governorship to win control of the state for the first time in 2015.

Republicans will exit the 2023 elections with trifectas in 23 states, and Democrats will enjoy trifectas in 17 states. Ten states will have split state governments. Most states will elect their lawmakers or governors next state, opening the door to further upheaval in the shadow of the presidential race.

Below is Bolts’ rundown of the results in each of the four states that selected their state governments on Tuesday. (Bolts covered the Louisiana elections last month, and will continue covering the results of Tuesday’s local elections throughout the week.)

Kentucky: Democrats keep a foothold in a ruby red state

Beshear squeaked into the governor’s mansion in 2019, ousting a Republican incumbent by less than one percentage point. But he won reelection on Tuesday by a more comfortable margin, 52.5 to 47.5 percent. 

He enjoyed wide popularity during his first term, and his win on Tuesday was powered by heavy support in the state’s urban cores, and slimmer losses than four years ago in rural Kentucky. 

Cameron did his best to tie the race to national politics, pointing to Trump’s endorsement. He also accused Democrats of not supporting law enforcement and vowed to champion stiffer criminal penalties, a familiar campaign strategy for his party. As attorney general, he was responsible for the decision to not file charges against the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in Louisville. But Cameron ran far behind the GOP’s other statewide candidates, all of whom prevailed easily for races such as attorney general and secretary of state.

The legislature was not up for election on Tuesday, though, and the GOP will retain their large majorities in both chambers, with which they’ve routinely overturned Beshear’s vetoes during his first term, for instance ramming through a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and major abortion restrictions earlier this year. 

Beshear has tried to make up for his de facto inability to veto Republican bills by occasionally flexing his executive authority, drawing some lawsuits and retaliation from Republicans. Within days of coming into office in 2019, he issued an executive order restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of residents with felony convictions who until then had lost their right to vote for life. His reelection virtually guarantees that this executive order will remain in place, and in fact is likely to grow calls from voting rights activists who are pushing him to go further, ending the practice of lifetime disenfranchisement altogether as in the case in most states.

Virginia: Democrats grab full control of the legislature

Youngkin wasn’t on the ballot this year, but he banked on a strong showing by Republicans in the legislative election to deliver him more power and to solidify his national reputation. He spent months recruiting candidates and enforcing strict campaign messaging to pick up the few seats in the state Senate that would deliver his party full control of the state government. He proposed restricting abortion to 15 weeks, calling this a “reasonable” compromise in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and assailed Democrats for supporting criminal justice reforms.

Instead, it’s Democrats who made major inroads on Tuesday. Not only did they defend their edge in the state Senate, but they also gained at least six seats in the state House, costing Youngkin some of his political allies and flipping the chamber.

Over the last two years, Republicans in the state House had teed up legislation that would shift the state to the right, including new limitations on local criminal justice reforms and new restrictions on ballot access, such as repealing same-day voter registration and getting rid of ballot drop boxes. Such proposals will remain dead on arrival, as does Youngkin’s project of introducing new abortion restrictions. 

Still, Youngkin, who cannot run for reelection in 2025, retains use of executive power; earlier this year, he used that authority to drastically curtail the voting rights of people with felony convictions.

Mississippi: Republicans hold off Democratic hopes for an upset

Mississippi is one of the nation’s poorest states, and it’s also one of only ten that has refused to expand Medicaid to cover more lower-income residents, as provided by the Affordable Care Act. Democrat Brandon Presley made Medicaid into a major campaign issue this fall as he took on the state’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves, a staunch opponent of expansion. Presley, a commissioner on Mississippi’s public utility commission and a cousin of Elvis Presley, also zeroed in on a scandal involving tens of millions of dollars of misspent welfare funds that has engulfed Reeves, making Democrats hope for their first gubernatorial win in decades.

But Mississippi’s Republican bent proved too large for Presley to overcome. Black Mississippians vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but white residents vote Republican by a consistently huge margin. Reeves secured a second term on Tuesday, leading by five percentage points as of publication. 

Republicans also easily kept their majorities in the state legislature. They were running unopposed in nearly the majority of districts to start with.

Tuesday’s contests were beset by issues at polling locations in Hinds County, home to Jackson, which is a majority-Black county and the state’s most populous. They were also held in the shadow of a short-lived decision by a federal court to strike down the state’s exceptionally harsh felony disenfranchisement rules, which disproportionately affects Black residents. The ruling in August offered a glimmer of hope to disenfranchised Mississippians but the Fifth Circuit of Appeals ended up vacating it, once again shutting off polling places to hundreds of thousands of Mississippians.

New Jersey: Democrats put 2021 behind them

Democrats barely held onto their trifecta in New Jersey in 2021, when a surprisingly-strong Republican Party gained seven legislative seats and came within close striking distance of the governorship. This year, with all legislative seats up for grabs, Republicans hoped to make further gains on Tuesday—perhaps even breaking up Democrats’ legislative majorities for the first time since 2001—by rallying voters under the battle cry of parental rights and taking issue with school policies that seek to shield transgender students. 

Instead, Democrats easily maintained control of both chambers. Far from losing seats, they made up ground they lost two years ago; they have flipped five Assembly seats as of publication. Democrats also ousted Republican Senator Edward Dunn, whose shock victory against the chamber’s Democratic president in 2021 came to encapsulate their party’s poor results that year.

Continued Democratic control over New Jersey will test the at times frosty relationship between legislative leaders and Governor Phil Murphy, who was not on the ballot on Tuesday. Progressive priorities like same-day voter registration have stalled in the legislature.

And don’t forget about New Hampshire

By winning New Hampshire’s sole legislative race in a special election on Tuesday, Democrat Paige Beauchemin pulled her party within just one seat of erasing the GOP’s majority in the state House. Democrats now have 197 seats to the GOP’s 198.

In the never-ending election cycle, watch out for more special elections in coming months—two seats are already vacant—that will test whether the GOP retains a trifecta in this state.

The post Abortion Rights Power Democratic Wins in Kentucky and Virginia appeared first on Bolts.

Paloma Wu allowed herself a moment of celebration in August, when a panel of three federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a shock decision to strike down Mississippi’s longstanding practice of permanently stripping voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies. By disenfranchising people “forever,” the panel ruled, the state was violating constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. 

Wu, who helped file the case as an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center and now works at the Mississippi Center for Justice, told Bolts the ruling was “one of the most meaningful things in our community of many, many, many people who are fighting like hell in Mississippi.”

“The people of Mississippi, in their struggle, felt recognized for a glimmer of a moment by the judicial system,” she added.

The moment lasted just eight weeks. After Mississippi’s Republican officials appealed the panel’s decision, the full Fifth Circuit in late September agreed to hear the case en banc. That means its entire bench of judges, a famously conservative lot, will issue a new decision at an undetermined time in the future. 

The announcement vacated the August panel ruling. And it shut the door on the tens of thousands of Mississippians who could have benefited from the August ruling and taken part in the state’s Nov. 7 elections for governor, lawmakers, all prosecutors, and many other offices.

“We’re living in the community, driving on the streets, working our jobs—but our voice isn’t heard,” said Cornelius Clayton, a Mississippi resident. Clayton was convicted of theft in 2007 and served one year in prison, but he has been disenfranchised ever since. He will once again not be able to vote this fall. 

“We make mistakes along the way, as teenagers or younger adults or whatever, and the first thing they do is strip away our rights,” he told Bolts.

Mississippi has one of the nation’s harshest disenfranchisement systems. Nearly all states take away voting rights for some period of time after a felony, but the vast majority restore them when people are released from prison or complete their sentence. In Mississippi, though, people who are convicted of any of 23 categories of charges lose their voting rights for life. (People convicted of felonies that aren’t on that list don’t lose their rights.) 

According to an analysis conducted by the Sentencing Project, a national research and advocacy organization, roughly 240,000 Mississippians were barred from voting as of the 2022 midterms; that’s nearly 11 percent of the state’s voting-age population, the highest rate in the nation. Estimates vary as to the exact number of people who are disenfranchised, with the plaintiffs behind the lawsuit saying the figure may be lower; the state has no transparent record and the list of disenfranchising felonies has evolved over time, making the task of identifying—and reaching out to—affected Mississippians tricky.

The state technically allows people to regain their rights if they receive a pardon from the governor, or if the state adopts a law with the specific purpose of enfranchising them, but such acts are vanishingly rare. Only seven individuals regained their voting rights this way in 2021 and 2022, and zero this year, Mississippi Today reported. 

A bill that would have restored Clayton’s voting rights passed the House this spring before dying in the Senate.

Most people who are disenfranchised in Mississippi are Black, though Black people represent 38 percent of the population. According to the Sentencing Project, 16 percent of Black adults in the state are barred from voting, the second highest rate in the nation behind only Tennessee. 

That is no coincidence. The politicians who set up the practice of lifetime disenfranchisement as part of Mississippi’s 1890 constitution openly said that their intent was to exclude Black people from the electorate. 

They chose to tie disenfranchisement only to specific felonies of which they thought Black residents would be likely to be convicted. The state has since expanded the list of disenfranchising offenses, but there are massive inequalities in its criminal legal system and Black residents continue to suffer the brunt of disenfranchisement. Voting rights lawyers have argued that these disparities violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection, and the three-judge panel ruled in August that the constitutional provisions of 1890 have over time been “remarkably effective in achieving their original, racially discriminatory aim.”

“Mississippi was voting in an extraordinary majority of Black representatives at every level” in the late 19th century, Wu said. “The constitution of 1890 wiped them off the rolls, and the ability of people in Mississippi to elect the candidates of their choosing has been severely hampered and never given back.”

Mississippi has many other restrictive rules that make it one of the least convenient places in the U.S. to cast a ballot, especially for Black residents, from harsh voter ID laws to heavy restrictions on early and absentee voting. Officials have closed many polling places in recent years.

Even when the federal panel struck down disenfranchisement and vindicated their arguments, voting rights advocates in Mississippi were careful not to urge people affected by the ruling to register to vote. They suspected that the law would be revived and wanted to minimize the whiplash. 

“We realized it was monumental in and of itself and that there was still a big old fight ahead,” said Arekia S. Bennett-Scott, executive director of Mississippi Votes.

She explained that fighting confusion about voting rules is nothing new to a civil rights group like hers. Time she and others might otherwise spend on voter outreach or on advocacy for various policy changes is often devoted to clarifying what state law actually says.

Many Mississippians mistakenly think they’ve lost the right to vote, Mississippi Today has found. Those who have been convicted of felonies can still vote, even while incarcerated, if their charges are not on the state’s disenfranchisement list—but the government offers little voter education and public outreach on these issues.

Even people in charge of the system often don’t seem to know what’s going on, Bennett-Scott told Bolts. “We’ll call a prison or a jail and ask if we can come in and do voter registration,” she said, “and before we even get to the point of talking to folks serving time, we have to spend a lot of time with faculty to explain the category of people who are ineligible to vote, and why it’s legal for some other people who were not convicted of felony disenfranchisement crimes to still vote.” 

Other states with harsh disenfranchisement laws are also prone to mass confusion around who is eligible to vote. Civil rights organizations and formerly incarcerated organizers are often left to pick up the slack and to ensure that people are informed of their rights. Two of the four states besides Mississippi that are selecting their state governments this fall, Kentucky and Virginia, enforce lifetime bans on voting against many of their residents. They are sidelining large and disproportionately Black swaths of their respective population, and their leaders have made matters worse this year with government errors and failures in communication.

Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, who is running for reelection this fall, has been hostile to loosening disenfranchisement rules. He vetoed a bill last year that would have made it easier for someone whose conviction is expunged to regain the right to vote. 

He faces Brandon Presley, who is aiming to become the state’s first Democratic governor since 1999. Democrats have poured in resources into winning this race, pointing to a fraud scandal that has engulfed Reeves. The state’s GOP-run legislature, control of which is on the ballot as well, has killed other legislative proposals to expand rights restoration. 

Also running for reelection this year is Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who appealed the federal panel’s ruling striking down disenfranchisement. Kemp Martin, Fitch’s Democratic challenger, has said she would drop the state’s appeal and she has denounced the state’s felony disenfranchisement laws alongside Ty Pinkins, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state.

When results roll in from Mississippi on Nov. 7, Wu said she’ll view them with an asterisk. 

“Every time you’re at the polls in Mississippi,” she said, “there are ghosts standing behind you that should be there, but for the race-based hitching of the criminal legal system to the power of the vote.”

The post After “Glimmer of a Moment,” Mississippi Once Again Shuts Out Aspiring Voters appeared first on Bolts.

But Shelton knew this was wrong. While she has a felony in her past, Virginia’s then-Democratic governor restored her voting rights in 2021 and she has had no new convictions since.

“I was like, ‘This isn’t right. I had my rights restored and I’ve already been voting. I shouldn’t be getting this letter,’” she recalls. 

Still, she dared not participate when this summer’s primary elections rolled around in June. “I knew that it was illegal if I voted, that I could be criminally charged,” she told Bolts. “I was worried they would try to come after me.” 

She was finally vindicated in early October, when Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration acknowledged a major error: It had incorrectly marked some Virginians as receiving a new felony conviction that they’d never actually received, instructing local election officials to remove them from their voter rolls. (Virginia disenfranchises people when they are convicted of a new felony, and Youngkin this year made it much harder to regain those rights.)

The state’s admission, first reported by Virginia Public Media, has triggered an outcry among voting rights groups and state Democrats. Virginia’s two U.S. Senators have called for a federal investigation into the erroneous removals, whose visibility bubbled up throughout the summer as some Virginians removed from the rolls went to court in protest. 

Even after Virginia’s delayed acknowledgment, it took the state two additional weeks to reinstate Shelton onto voter rolls. She found out Monday when she checked her registration status on the state’s site.

Shelton says neither state officials nor her county registrar have reached out to tell her that she has been reinstated. “I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I just happened to be checking online,” she said. “If I wasn’t checking, I would not have known, and I would keep on assuming I was denied.”

There is little time before Virginia’s Nov. 7 elections, which will decide control of the legislature and other local offices; half of the early voting period is over, and the deadline to ask to vote by mail looms next week.

Voting rights advocates warn that Virginia is doing too little, too late to stave off confusion and correct its costly mistake in the lead-up to Election Day.

They say they don’t even know how many people the state has reinstated so far and how many remain improperly purged, since the state is sharing little information. “They’re very tight-lipped about what they’re doing now, how this happened, and how they’re going to rectify it,” says Sheba Williams, who helps formerly incarcerated people regain their rights as the founder of the Richmond-based nonprofit Nolef Turns. “I don’t think they care.”

Even if Virginia restores everyone on the rolls, the confusion sparked by the error would be hard to walk back in such a short amount of time if officials are not proactively reaching out to voters, and Williams explains that it’s difficult for outside groups to step in. “It’s really hard to pinpoint who’s been removed and how to do outreach for people who have been removed,” she says.

The Virginia Department of Elections told Bolts that it was working with the Virginia State Police to identify the people incorrectly booted from voter rolls, and that once it had those names it would notify local election officials to reinstate them, with no action needed on the part of those whose rights were wrongly denied. But Andrea Gaines, a spokesperson for the Department of Elections, specified no timeline for this correction. Macaulay Porter, a Youngkin spokesperson, similarly told Bolts that the governor “ordered a review,” but provided no sense of timing.

Neither responded to follow-up questions about the timeline and how the state intends to reach out to wrongly purged voters.

The state’s explanation, relayed by Gaines, is that the mistake is due to a data classification error in a database maintained by the Virginia State Police. 

The police share this database with election officials, who then consult it to determine who to remove from voter rolls. Gaines said the police wrongly recorded people who violated the conditions of their probation as having a new felony conviction. This would be a problem because voters are supposed to lose their voting rights over a new conviction, but not over a probation violation, which can occur over events like a failed urine test or a missed appointment.

Youngkin’s administration has minimized the issue’s scope. Elections Commissioner Susan Beals told The Washington Post this month that the state wrongly purged at least 270 people, and that the number was not expected to grow much higher upon further review. 

But voting rights advocates worry that the problem is much larger. They point to a Department of Elections report released last month, in which the agency touted that it removed more than 10,000 people from voter rolls between September 2022 and August 2023. “These were individuals who had their rights restored following a felony conviction, and then were convicted of a new felony and were not subsequently removed from the voter list,” the report said. Released weeks before officials admitted an error, the report immediately raised alarm bells among voting rights groups worried that this purge was too aggressive, Virginia Public Media reported in September.

The same groups are now skeptical that only 270 people were affected, given the revelation that state police were classifying probation violations as new felonies. 

Galen Baughman, a Virginian who was wrongly disenfranchised in the same way as Shelton and who advocates for criminal justice reforms, said he suspects the state’s estimate is but “the tip of the iceberg,” an analysis echoed by politicians and attorneys who spoke with Bolts.

Thousands of Virginians violate their probation each year, according to state data. Virginia State Police spokesperson Corinne Geller told Bolts that the police database that records probation violations—the database that the state says is responsible for the wrongful disenfranchisement—does not pick and choose which violations it records and refers to elections officials. Youngkin’s spokesperson did not answer Bolts’ question about how they reached the estimate of 270. 

Questions also remain about why the state coded probation violations as new felonies in the first place. Bolts talked to Geller, the police spokesperson, in mid-September, before the Youngkin administration admitted the error and attributed it to her agency. Geller said her office hadn’t recently changed anything about how its databases record information. “Our portion of this picture is just that we maintain the database,” she said. “As far as who’s determining rights lost, rights gained, rights restored—that is all under the Department of Elections.”

The suspicions of voting rights advocates are deepened by other policies that the Youngkin administration has pursued this year to drastically tighten the rights of Virginians with felony convictions.

He announced in March that he was rescinding his predecessor’s executive policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights when they leave prison. This made Virginia the only state to enforce a lifetime of disenfranchisement on anyone with a felony conviction, absent a discretionary decision by the governor. (Tennessee has since joined Virginia.)

Youngkin’s decision barred voting for thousands of Virginians who have been released from prison during his governorship and would have had their rights restored under the policy he ended, Bolts reported before the June primaries. It also led to widespread confusion for many Virginians whose rights had already been restored by Youngkin’s predecessors. Still, his announcement only applied going forward, as he could not strip voting rights already restored by past governors.

In June, Baughman walked confidently into Swanson Middle School, in the northern Virginia city of Arlington, to cast his vote. His voting rights were restored in 2021 by Northam, and he had made a point to vote in every election since; he follows local politics closely and, on that day at Swanson, was excited to weigh in on the local sheriff and prosecutor contests, among others.

Baughman was shocked when poll workers could not locate his name on the voter rolls, and even more so when the precinct chief informed him he’d been removed from those rolls. He cast a provisional ballot, which he later learned was never counted, left the school, and started to investigate why this had happened.

Baughman got a judge to issue an order in July saying that he should be reinstated on voter rolls. Still, it took months longer for the Youngkin administration to acknowledge that his and other residents’ exclusion was the result of a systematic error. 

“The fact that it took somebody in my position to figure this out—it suggests to me that this problem is way bigger than we realize,” Baughman told Bolts. He is a white man with professional ties to criminal justice organizations that work on court and legal issues. “Too often, the people that are impacted by these problems are too marginalized to be able to do anything about them.”

Shelton suspects that the erroneous exclusions that were exposed this fall go hand-in-hand with Youngkin’s policy announcement this spring. After all, the report in which the state congratulated itself for purging over 10,000 people with felony convictions comes from the same agency that has implemented the governor’s decision to tighten voter eligibility. 

“I think that Governor Youngkin has cultivated a culture of marginalizing people and really putting a negative face on reformed criminals,” Shelton said. “I just think, personally, that this is malicious and it is with every intent to keep away voices that are not aligned with Governor Youngkin.“

Baughman has little confidence as he watches the officials who ignored his cries over the summer now helming the crisis response. 

“There are a lot of people who could’ve stepped up and chose not to, who chose the easy, bureaucratic thing,” Baughman said. “I’m very leery of having those same people now fix the problem.”

Local elections officials don’t seem to have a clear plan, either. When Bolts talked last week to Kathy Davenport, Northumberland County’s registrar, who heads the office in charge of voter registration where Elizabeth Shelton lives, she said she was only vaguely aware of the scandal. The state had not notified her of any county resident wrongly stripped of voting rights, she said. In a follow-up call on Monday, after Shelton learned her voting rights were reinstated, Davenport declined to detail how her office is addressing this and how it would reach out to wronged voters, telling Bolts to call the state instead. 

Thalia Simpson, a spokesperson for the Prince William County Office of Elections, initially told Bolts that it may cause “unnecessary panic” for her office to reach out to people to inform them that they were affected by an erroneous purge. Simpson called back shortly after to say her office would actually mail letters to any county residents affected by the illegal purge. “The burden of correction has fallen completely on our office,” she said.

Voting rights advocates in Virginia want the state to reach out to voters as promptly as possible. “People may not be checking their status,” said Williams, the head of Nolef Turns. “A lot of people won’t check their status until it’s time to go vote, if they check at all.”

Even if state and local officials correctly identify everyone wronged by the purge and send them all letters, it may not be enough to mitigate the harm.

At least some of those affected by this purge received letters from their county registrars informing them they had lost their voting rights, and advocates are concerned that this did lasting damage even if they were to now receive a notice correcting the matter. 

“At a bare minimum, somebody should go knock on their doors and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and make sure they got the message,” Baughman says. “A lot of people don’t check their mail and, a lot of times, mail doesn’t get to people.” 

Jon Sherman, litigation director of Fair Elections Center, a group that promotes rights restoration, worries that the error will undermine people’s trust in government. “Many people, if they have a conversation with their local registrar or the Virginia State Police or the secretary of the commonwealth, will accept their authority, not contest it, and be intimidated. Most people aren’t lawyers,” he said.

And some harm cannot be undone. Baughman, like Shelton, already lost the opportunity to cast a ballot in the primary. “Even though I did everything right and made every effort at every opportunity to try to correct this problem, the other side still won by default. My ballot wasn’t counted,” he said. “It was legally cast, and I should have properly been registered, and yet they won.”

Now he fears others will experience the same frustration next month. “Voting is already going on,” he said, “so the time is now.”

The post “I Don’t Think They Care”: Virginia Is Slow-Walking the Fix to a Wrongful Voter Purge appeared first on Bolts.