Editor’s note (Dec. 9): Jenifer Branning defeated Justice Jim Kitchens in the Nov. 26 runoff, three weeks after David Sullivan beat Justice Dawn Beam in the Nov. 5 election.

Mississippi voters have dealt defeat to one conservative state supreme court justice and forced a moderate justice into a Nov. 26 runoff, with the final outcome possibly making the court more open to considering the rights of criminal defendants.

The nine-member court is largely conservative but justices have recently split in high-profile decisions that sharply affected state politics, including a ruling that shut down citizen-led ballot initiatives in Mississippi and allowed some state control over local criminal cases in its majority-Black capital. The court has also rendered rulings that have made the state increasingly unfavorable to defendants appealing their cases. 

“The ability of death row inmates in particular, and inmates in general, to access the courts has been recently curtailed significantly,” Matthew Steffey, a professor at Mississippi College School of Law, told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts following the Nov. 5 election.  

Justice Dawn H. Beam joined the majority in those decisions, acquiring a reputation of being hostile to appeals by criminal defendants, and she ran for reelection this fall as the Republican Party’s favored candidate. However, she lost in the state’s Second District on Nov. 5 to David P. Sullivan, a defense attorney who has worked as a public defender.

Judicial races in Mississippi are nonpartisan and Sullivan has given few explicit signals about his judicial outlook. He has supported at least some criminal justice reforms and would be the third justice with experience as a defense attorney on this court. Some reformers nationwide have pushed for more professional diversity on the bench.

Even if Sullivan turns out to be more centrist or independent than Beam on criminal law, any overall shift in power on the court depends on the outcome of a runoff election next week. 

Two-term Justice Jim Kitchens and challenger Jenifer B. Branning will face each other in the Nov. 26 runoff election after neither won more than 50% of the vote on Nov. 5. The runoff will take place across the 22 counties that make up the Supreme Court’s central district, including Hinds County, home to Jackson. Throughout the campaign, the state GOP targeted Kitchens with attacks, while Branning, a Republican state senator with a conservative voting record, is endorsed by the party.

Kitchens is one of two reliably moderate-to-liberal high court justices. Justices from among an additional group of four sometimes veer away from the majority, as well, but can be more unpredictable, and this group does not vote as a bloc. 

Quinn Yeargain, a Michigan State University law professor who closely watches state courts, recently analyzed the court’s voting patterns and found Beam was consistently more conservative than Kitchens in recent cases. Yeargain told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts that conservative and liberal voters often have few signals about how to select a candidate in judicial races. “It’s very hard to label the justices,” they said.

Sullivan, whose father was a Mississippi Supreme Court justice from 1984 to 2000, called himself a “conservative” throughout his campaign. But he has also touted the value of judicial independence and criticized Beam for campaigning on her endorsement by the state Republican Party. 

“I think that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way,” Sullivan told the SunHerald newspaper, speaking of Beam’s use of the endorsement. “Judicial races are nonpartisan for a reason. A judge’s impartiality could be called into question.”

Sullivan has broad legal experience, but much of his career has focused on private criminal defense while also doing some public defense work. He told The Marshall Project and Mississippi Today that he supported a new administrative rule handed down in 2023 by the state Supreme Court to require continuous legal representation for poor criminal defendants from the beginning of their cases. An investigation by The Marshall Project, ProPublica and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal last year found, however, that many courts were unready at the time to implement the new representation rules.

During the campaign, Sullivan told The Marshall Project and Mississippi Today that more work is needed to improve public defense.

Kitchens has also advocated for public defense reforms during his two terms on the court. He told a committee of legislators last year that the “playing field is far from level” between prosecutors and poor defendants.

On other criminal justice issues, he has sometimes dissented from opinions upholding death sentences. His decisions have scrutinized prosecutorial conduct and inadequate legal representation. 

Branning, the Republican senator, has a voting record on criminal justice issues that suggests a harsher approach toward criminal defendants. She has supported higher mandatory minimum sentences and reclassifying misdemeanors as felonies, has opposed expansion of parole and was among only a few lawmakers who voted against legalizing medical marijuana. 

She also supported increasing the jurisdiction of a controversial, state-run police force inside the majority-Black city of Jackson as well as increasing state control over many felony cases in Jackson. The Supreme Court unanimously curtailed much state power over these felony cases, but a majority left some control intact, with Kitchens and another judge dissenting.

Branning did not respond to questions from The Marshall Project – Jackson and Mississippi Today during the Nov. 5 campaign about her possible judicial outlook.

Kitchens was a prosecutor and then in private practice before joining the bench. Branning is a practicing attorney who typically handles civil cases. 

The winner of the Nov. 26 runoff will join Sullivan on a court that in recent years has been restricting the ability of people who say the legal system has wronged them to seek relief, legal experts told The Marshall Project – Jackson and Bolts this month. 

Krissy Nobile, director of the state’s Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, said it’s become “increasingly more difficult to correct a wrongful conviction.” Her office provides legal counsel for indigent people on death row. 

She said a number of recent cases showed the barriers the high court has erected for criminal defendants appealing their convictions, and demonstrated indifference to civil rights violations. Kitchens disagreed with the majority, in full or in part, in all but one of the appeals, which the court unanimously denied.

In a case earlier this year, the Court ruled to monetarily fine an incarcerated person for filing any future post-conviction relief petitions that lacked merit. Kitchens joined a dissenting opinion condemning the fine. In another, the court denied a man who argued that his lawyers were ineffective and that they did not challenge prosecutorial misconduct or false forensic evidence presented by a medical examiner with a checkered past. The court’s majority denied the motion, and in the process, overturned a precedent that allowed ineffective counsel as an adequate reason to give a case another look in some types of appeals. Kitchens dissented, along with two other justices. 

“For decades in Mississippi, the Court held that it would correct errors if there was a violation (of) a person’s fundamental rights,” Nobile said. But she added this has changed considerably. Now, if you land a terrible lawyer who rushes your case, “You are out of luck,” she said, “even if your core constitutional rights have been clearly violated.” 

For the court’s majority, Nobile added, “The legal technicalities now trump a person’s constitutional rights.” 

The runoff is the nation’s final supreme court race of the year. Thirty-two states held elections for their high courts earlier this year, resulting in a muddled picture, with liberals and conservatives each gaining ground in different places, Bolts reports. 

Mississippi’s runoff outcome will heavily depend on turnout and the composition of the electorate. In the Supreme Court’s central district, voters split very narrowly between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump in the presidential election on Nov. 5, but the runoff is just two days before Thanksgiving and will likely see a large drop-off in turnout. Branning received 42% of the vote in the first round, and Kitchens received 36%, with three other candidates making up the rest. 

There will also be a runoff the same day in the Gulf Coast area between Amy Lassiter St. Pé and Jennifer Schloegel for an open seat on the state Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals hears both criminal and civil cases that have been appealed from lower courts. The Mississippi Supreme Court can hear cases directly on appeal or can assign cases to the Court of Appeals.

Observers agreed that against the national legal backdrop, neither a Kitchens victory nor a Branning victory would lead to a seismic change since neither outcome would flip the court’s conservative lean. Still, a modest shift could impact some of the most controversial cases, such as a rare 5-4 decision that upheld the death sentence in Willie Manning’s case. 

A Kitchens win, coupled with Sullivan’s upset earlier this month, would deal the Republican Party rare setbacks in a state where it has been dominant and could put moderate forces in a position to grow their numbers further in future elections. 

“You might end up with a normal conservative court,” law professor Yeargain said, “instead of one of the most conservative courts in the country.”

The story has been updated to reflect the latest count of the Nov. 5 ballots in Mississippi’s first supreme court district.

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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.

With the state’s Republican officials refusing to expand the program as provided by the Affordable Care Act, leaving hundreds of thousands in the lurch, Taylor had hoped that a ballot initiative powered by the signatures of tens of thousands of citizens would break the logjam, as it had in other states. “We wanted to take it out of the hands of the legislators and put it into the hands of the people,” recalls Taylor, who leads the state chapter of the NAACP. “I felt confident that it was going to pass.”

His hopes were dashed by the court. At issue: The state constitution requires that a citizen-led initiative collect signatures in all five of the state’s congressional districts; the language was adopted in 1992, before Mississippi lost a congressional seat in the 2000 reapportionment, and it now only has four. The court said in May 2021 that, since there were no longer five districts in which to collect signatures, no initiative could be valid.

The ruling was as literal as it gets; “it stretches the bounds of reason,” complained a dissenting justice. Nevertheless, it brought the petitioning to expand Medicaid and other efforts like it to a screeching halt. And state officials have not fixed the issue in the intervening years. Many GOP leaders have said they want to revive initiatives; but the schemes they’ve proposed have been restrictive—requiring that initiatives receive a supermajority and prohibiting them from ever affecting abortion, for instance—and even those haven’t passed.

This year, again, lawmakers spent months debating bills that would have brought back initiatives in this watered-down form. But the effort faltered for good this week. 

A legislative deadline passed on Tuesday that confirmed that all these bills are dead for the year. David Parker, a Republican senator who chairs a key committee, had indicated two weeks ago that the chamber was done considering the issue in 2024.

As a result, Mississippi will spend at least one additional year with no initiatives, despite the state constitution’s promise that residents shall have a right to direct democracy.

“We desperately need a citizen-driven process to put something on the ballot,” Taylor said. “Citizens being able to have the ability to exercise their rights, being able to impact law when possible, is crucial.” 

Lawmakers still haven’t expanded Medicaid. Legislation to do so is closer than ever in the current session, with each chamber passing its own bill, but obstacles remain. Taylor regrets that it’s been impossible all these years to just ask voters if they want this. “The coverage gap is just truly a life and death issue,” he said. “More lives can continue to be lost unnecessarily.” 

The halting of initiatives in Mississippi for the past three years adds to the recent erosion of direct democracy, typically at the hands of GOP politicians. Republicans have recently made it far harder to qualify measures for the ballot in at least Arkansas, South Dakota, and Utah. Similar proposals are on the table right now in Arizona, Idaho, and Missouri. 

In addition, Bolts reported that Republican attorneys general in several states like Arkansas and Montana are routinely using procedural tricks to delay petition drives; Democratic city leaders in Atlanta used similar tactics over the last year to stall a local referendum on the so-called Cop City police training center. Republicans have also tried to raise the threshold needed to pass an initiative once it reaches voters, unsuccessfully in Ohio and South Dakota over the last two years. 

In most of these instances, the GOP was retaliating against ballot measures the party opposes on high-profile issues like abortion, Medicaid, and redistricting. In Mississippi, the 2021 lawsuit that ended up striking down initiatives was aimed at Initiative 65, a measure voters overwhelmingly adopted in 2020 to legalize medical marijuana. 

This year, Mississippi’s two legislative chambers each passed a bill to bring back initiatives. The House approved Concurrent Resolution 11 in January; it died in a Senate committee on Tuesday, which was the deadline for a bill originating in one chamber to get out of a committee in the other. The Senate, meanwhile, approved Senate Bill 2770 in March; a procedural motion killed it within days.

Democracy advocates who talked to Bolts are frustrated that there won’t be a solution in 2024, but they’re not upset at the failure of these specific bills: Rather than restore the process in place as of 2021, the measures would have revived initiatives only to make them exceedingly difficult to qualify and pass, using the same limitations that Republicans have introduced in Arkansas, Ohio, and elsewhere. 

They would have banned ballot measures from addressing abortion, suppressing the issue that has sparked massive progressive organizing. They would also have prohibited citizens from amending the state constitution, which would have left a large swath of other issues out of bounds. For instance, Mississippi’s harsh rules on felony disenfranchisement are codified in its state constitution; changing them, a priority for voting rights groups, requires a constitutional amendment. 

The bills would have also required organizers to collect more signatures than used to be the case, ramping up the money and resources needed to qualify a proposal. Finally, they would have dramatically increased the threshold a measure must clear at the polls to be adopted. The House set it at 60 percent, up from 50. The Senate would have gone even further and set it at an unusually high 67 percent.

“It was a scam,” said Paloma Wu, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice who works on democracy cases. “They tried to give the people a cheap ass version of what their powers were.”

Jarvis Dortch, executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi, called the bills to revive the ballot measure process “absurd” and “a joke.” He told Bolts that they would have made it “very much impossible for somebody to be able to get a ballot initiative through.”

Two Republican lawmakers who shaped this year’s legislative debates—Parker, who chairs the Senate’s Accountability, Efficiency and Transparency Committee, and state Representative Fred Shanks—did not respond to Bolts’ requests for comment. 

Parker made the decision to not move the bills in the Senate, saying they lacked the votes to pass. He also supported changes like implementing the 67-percent threshold. He said that he wanted to balance his support for initiatives with preventing out-of-state funders from bankrolling policy changes in Mississippi.

Shanks expressed disappointment at Parker’s decision to drop the issue. “The House stands on pushing the ballot initiative back to the people,” he said last month. In shepherding his measure through the House, he supported adding restrictions like a ban on bringing up abortion. 

Many Democratic lawmakers objected to the new limits. They pushed for a clean solution instead: legislation to bring back the process as it existed in 2021, simply changing the state constitution’s assumption that the state has five congressional districts to reflect the number it currently has. 

Hannah Williams, policy director of Mississippi Votes, a state advocacy group that has played a leading role in trying to fix this issue, says her organization will continue pressuring lawmakers heading into 2025 to bring back ballot initiatives. 

“We need more individuals to help us lobby their legislators, to make sure that the things that we want to be able to put on the ballot are protected,” Williams said. Her organization’s goal, she says, is to educate the public as to who is responsible for this predicament and why the proposed solutions were so inadequate.

She hopes to show lawmakers that this is not a partisan issue, since initiatives can be a tool for groups with any political goals. 

“I feel like sometimes it gets wrapped up in a ‘this is a left versus right’ thing,” she said. “But the conservative people that we work with, they have issues that they want to be able to put on the ballot too, and us not having a process is hindering really everybody’s right to democracy across the board.”

The state’s GOP leaders have paid lip service to the goal of restoring direct democracy, including during the 2023 elections that saw Republicans retain full control of the state government. But for Dortch, the legislature’s behavior this year is yet more confirmation that politicians just aren’t sincere about wanting to revive an initiative process. 

“No one wants to come out and say they don’t want one,” he said.

Mississippi lawmakers are not up for reelection until 2027. This year, the three justices who dissented in the 6-3 decision striking down initiatives in 2021 must run for reelection this fall, though only one of them—James Kitchens—drew any opposition. Justice Dawn Beam, who joined the majority, is also seeking reelection. 

Mississippi holds its elections in the shadow of other restrictions on democracy. Just this week, the state House killed a bill that would have set up in-person early voting; the state is one of only four with no early voting. Mississippi also strictly limits how to vote by mail. “If you’re not there from between 7am and 7pm on Election Day, it’s going to be pretty difficult for you to vote in our state,” Dortch said. 

In addition, Mississippi has one of the nation’s highest rates of individuals banned from voting due to a felony conviction; the state’s rules on lifetime disenfranchisement were designed in 1890 during an explicitly white supremacist constitutional convention. 

Taylor, the NAACP director, says that the refusal to revive ballot initiatives is part and parcel of the broader schemes that are suppressing people’s voices. “This is 100 percent intentional.” 

“The state of Mississippi, as long as there’s been a state, there has always been a segment of people that have been disenfranchised,” he added. “You have people who want to carry this into future generations.”

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The final result: Democrats won five additional legislative seats this year, Bolts calculated in its second annual review of all legislative elections. 

That’s a small change, since there were more than 600 seats in play this year. But it goes against the expectation that the party that holds the White House faces trouble in such races. In 2021, the first off-year with President Biden in the White House, the GOP gained 18 new seats out of the roughly 450 seats that were in play, according to Bolts’ calculations. (Three special elections will still be held in December, but none is expected to be competitive.)

It also mirrors Republicans’ disappointment in 2022, a midterm cycle that saw Democrats defy recent history by flipping four legislative chambers without losing any. They pulled off a similar feat this year: Democrats held off GOP hopes of securing new chambers in New Jersey and Virginia and instead gained one themselves in Virginia, the fifth legislative chamber they’ve flipped in two years.

Still, these aggregate results mask regional differences, with Democratic candidates continuing their descent in much of the South. That too is an echo of 2022, when the GOP’s poor night was somewhat masked by their surge in a few red states like West Virginia, where Democrats still haven’t hit rock bottom; this year, Republicans surged in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Districts are not all created equal, with vast differences in the populations they cover in different states; the seats Democrats gained correspond on average to twice as many residents than those Republicans gained. 

The results of the 2023 cycle have been dissected at length for any hints as to who will fare well in the far-higher profile races in 2024.

The encouraging case for the GOP, as laid out last week by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is that Republicans overperformed in Virginia compared to the last presidential race, even as they failed in their bid to win the legislature. But they also came close to suffering much greater losses in the state, the Center for Politics notes: Virginia’s seven tightest legislative elections this fall were all won by the GOP, all by less than two percentage points.

The encouraging case for Democrats is the national view: They’ve overperformed in special elections throughout the year—as documented by Daily Kos Elections, their nominee improved on President Biden by an average of 6 percentage points across 34 special elections—a measure that has had predictive value in the past. They also did very well this fall in Pennsylvania, the only presidential battleground that hosted a significant number of elections. 

But the results of the 2023 legislative races matter first and foremost for themselves—not for what they signal for other, future elections. Just as the Democratic gains last year in Michigan and Minnesota opened the floodgates to major progressive reforms in both states, the newly-decided composition of legislative chambers will shape power and policy within Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Below are four takeaways from the elections.

1. The GOP’s state goals flail, with one major exception

These legislative races, alongside three governor’s elections, decided who will control state governments over the next two years.

Democrats denied the GOP’s bids to grab control of Virginia and Kentucky by winning the House and Senate in the former, and the governorship in the latter. In addition, Republicans hoped to break Democrats’ trifecta in New Jersey, pointing to supposed voter backlash against liberal school policies and trans students to fuel talk that they may flip the Assembly or Senate; instead, they lost ground and now find themselves down a 24-seat hole in the lower chamber.

The GOP’s best results came in Louisiana, where the party flipped the governorship to grab the reins of the state government, a result that will likely open the floodgates of staunchly conservative policy. Republicans also retained their trifecta in Mississippi by holding onto the governor’s office.

2. Abortion mattered, again 

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, tried to win the legislature for his party by selling his constituents on new abortion restrictions. His failure has been widely held up since Nov. 7 as the latest evidence of voter alarm about the bans that have multiplied since the Dobbs decision. But abortion also mattered in New Jersey’s campaigns this fall, with Democratic candidates arguing that their continued majority would protect abortion rights and funding.

The question, Rebecca Traister writes in NY Mag, is what Democrats do next after winning on the issue and what affirmative policies they adopt. Earlier this year, Democrats who run the Virginia Senate adopted a constitutional amendment to codify abortion rights; the measure died in the state House, which was run by the GOP but just flipped to Democrats. Scott Surovell, Senate Democrats’ incoming leader, confirmed this month that he plans to advance the amendment again now that his party controls the full legislature. 

Virginia Democrats can advance the amendment while circumventing Youngkin but it would be at least a three-year process. The legislature would need to adopt it in two separate sessions separated by an election to send it straight to voters—so they’d have to do it now, then defend their legislative majorities in the 2025 elections, then pass it again in 2026, and then win a referendum that fall. 

3. GOP attacks on crime fell flat, again

The GOP in both New Jersey and Virginia banked that it would make inroads by attacking Democratic lawmakers on crime, repeating a strategy that already did poorly in the 2022 midterms. Democrats won swing districts in both states in which Republicans assailed their opponents for endangering public safety.

Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, stresses that these elections took place in the wake of New Jersey adopting major criminal justice reforms, which the GOP tried and failed to turn against the party electorally. “New Jersey is the nation’s leading decarcerator, reducing state prison populations by more than 50 percent since 2011, and we’ve shown that decarceration is possible and crime rates across all major categories continue to decline,” he told Bolts. 

Still, he wishes the lawmakers who passed the reforms would have been bolder in defending them on the trail given recent evidence they’re not politically harmful. “The lesson for candidates running in 2024 and 2025 is that reforming unjust systems and promoting public safety are not at odds with one another.”

Since their wins on Nov. 7, Virginia Democrats have chosen two new legislative leaders with a history of supporting criminal justice reforms. Incoming Speaker Don Scott is an attorney who spent years in federal prison, a fact that GOP strategists have tried using against Democrats, and he has championed issues like ending solitary confinement. Surovell, Democrats’ new Majority Leader, was a force behind the criminal legal reforms Democrats passed while they controlled the state government in 2019 and 2020. He played the lead role within his party this year in calling out Youngkin’s administration for making it harder for people with felony convictions to vote, Bolts reported this spring.

4. Competition evaporates in Louisiana and Mississippi

Just six years ago, the GOP held 86 legislative seats in Louisiana (out of 144) and 106 in Mississippi (out of 174). After the 2023 elections, they’ll hold 101 in Louisiana and 115 in Mississippi, a surge born not just from election results in recent cycles but also party switches. 

Both legislatures are also disproportionately white, and both drew attention this year for targeting underrepresented Black communities. (Black voters in both states vote overwhelmingly Democratic.) 

Gerrymandering is contributing to these dynamics, even if white Republicans also dominate statewide races in both states. A coalition of civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against Mississippi’s current legislative maps for diluting the voting power of Black residents, saying that both House and Senate maps lacked enough Black opportunity seats; the lawsuit argues that the state should have drawn seven more Black-majority districts across Mississippi’s two chambers. In Louisiana, the legal battles have revolved around the congressional map, which a federal appeals court recently struck down for violating the Voting Rights Act; Democrats raised similar concerns about Louisiana’s legislative maps.

“When you gerrymander people’s power away, you can’t elect candidates of choice,” says Ashley Shelton, executive director of Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a Louisiana organization that focuses on voter outreach. “We understand the power of gerrymandering: It’s not that Black people don’t care or don’t want to vote, it’s that the power of their vote has been lessened.”

Gerrymandering this fall contributed to a startling dearth of competition: Not a single legislative race in either state was decided by less than 10 percentage points between candidates of different parties. (That’s out of 318 districts!)

In fact, many districts didn’t feature any contest at all. No Democrats were even on the ballot in the majority of districts in each of Louisiana and Mississippi’s four chambers, mathematically ensuring that the party couldn’t win majorities before any vote was cast. 

In Louisiana, some critics of the state Democratic establishment also faulted the party for neglecting to mount a proper campaign this fall. “I didn’t see any get out of the vote effort,” one progressive lawmaker told Bolts after the October primary, which saw the Democratic Party spend very little money. 

Shelton told Bolts last week that the state’s traditional establishment similarly didn’t work to turn voters out in the lead-up to Saturday’s runoffs, which featured statewide elections for attorney general and secretary of state as well as a scattering of legislative runoffs; she saw little noise and outreach outside of nonprofit groups like hers and their partners. 

“When I think about the political machines, there’s no money being spent to engage voters,” Shelton told Bolts. “We can certainly create the energy that we can, but there’s something to the bigger momentum and energy that comes from the machine actually working.” She added, “It’s very quiet in the state of Louisiana, and that’s crazy to me.” 

The post Democrats Held Off the GOP in Legislative Races This Year, Again Bucking Expectations 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.

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In this guide, Bolts introduces you to ten elections that are coming up this month that will impact how local officials administer future elections, and how easily people can exercise their voting rights. 

Voters this month will select the secretaries of state of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who’ll each be the chief elections officials within their state. They will choose a new supreme court justice in Pennsylvania, a swing state with looming election law battles, and dozens of county officials who’ll decide how easy it is to vote in Pennsylvania and Washington state next year. And some ballot measures may change election law in Maine and Michigan.

All these elections are scheduled for Nov. 7, except for Louisiana’s runoff on Nov. 18. 

As we cover the places where democracy is on the ballot, our staff is also keeping an eye on the other side of the coin—the people who are excluded from having a say in their democracy: Three of the eight states featured on this page have among the nation’s harshest laws barring people with criminal convictions from the polls, and our three-part series highlights their stories. And beyond the stakes for voting rights, our cheat sheet to the 2023 elections also lays out dozens of other local elections this November that will shape criminal justice, abortion access, education, and other issues. 

Kentucky | Secretary of state

Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, has vocally pushed back against the false conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election, and he has touted his efforts to facilitate mail and early voting during the pandemic. He survived the GOP primary this spring by beating back election deniers who wanted to replace him as the state’s chief election administrator.

Buddy Wheatley, Adams’ Democratic challenger and a former lawmaker, says the state should go much further in expanding ballot access. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the candidates disagree on whether the state should institute same-day registration and set-up an independent redistricting commission, two proposals of Wheatley’s that Adams opposes. 

The election is unfolding in the shadow of the governor’s race, in which Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear is running for reelection four years after restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of people who had been barred from voting for life. (Adams and Wheatley have both said they support the executive order.) Voting rights advocates regret that the order still leaves hundreds of thousands Kentuckians shut out from voting and that the state hasn’t done enough to notify newly-enfranchised residents; Bolts reports that a coalition led by formerly incarcerated activists has stepped into that void to register people.

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

In trying to appease election deniers since the 2020 presidential election, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin weakened Louisiana’s voting system and gave a platform to election conspiracists. His successor will be decided in a Nov. 18 runoff between Republican Nancy Landry, who currently serves as his deputy, and Gwen Collins-Greenup, a Democratic attorney. Each received 19 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on Oct. 14, but Landry is favored in the Nov. 18 runoff since much of the remainder of the vote went to other Republican contenders.

Not unlike Ardoin, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals but she has also echoed unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities, Cameron Joseph reported in Bolts. The next secretary of state will have to deal with continued pressure from the far-right, Joseph writes, while making critical decisions regarding the state’s outdated voting equipment: The state’s efforts to replace the equipment have stalled in recent years amid unfounded election conspiracies about the role of machines in skewing election results.

Maine | Question 8

Since its drafting two centuries ago, Maine’s constitution has barred people who are under guardianship from voting in state and local elections. Then, in 2001, a federal court declared the provision to be invalid in response to a lawsuit filed by an organization that protects the rights of disabled residents.

Mainers may scrub this exclusionary language from its state constitution on Nov. 7, S.E. Smith explains in Bolts: Question 8 would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.” While Mainers under guardianship can already vote irrespective of this constitutional amendment due to the 2001 court ruling, Smith reports that the referendum could spark momentum for other states with exclusionary rules to revise who can cast ballots and shake up what is now a complicated patchwork of eligibility rules nationwide. 

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

Three Michigan cities will each decide whether to switch to ranked-choice voting—a system in which voters rank the different candidates on the ballot rather than only opting for one—for their local elections. If the initiatives pass, residents in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak would join Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021.

But there’s a catch: Even if voters approve ranked choice voting, it will not be implemented until the state of Michigan first adopts a bill authorizing the method statewide. The legislation to do so has stalled in the legislature so far.

Many cities have newly adopted ranked-choice voting in recent years, and some will use the method for the first time this November; they include Boulder, Colorado, and several Utah cities such as Salt Lake. Other municipalities this fall will also consider changing local rules: Rockville, Maryland, in the suburbs of D.C., holds two advisory referendums on whether their city should lower the voting age to 16 and enable noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Mississippi | Secretary of state

Republican Michael Watson spent his first term as secretary of state defending restrictions on ballot access. He stated he worries about more college students voting, rejected expanding mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and championed a law that banned assisting people in casting an absentee ballot (the law was blocked by a court this summer). He is currently fighting  a lawsuit against the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising people with some felony convictions.

Watson is now seeking a second term against Democrat Ty Pinkins, an attorney who only jumped into the race in September after the prior Democratic nominee withdrew for health reasons. Pinkins has taken Watson to task for backing these restrictions, and he says he is running to expand opportunities to vote, such as setting up online and same-day voter registration. Pinkins this fall also teamed up with Greta Kemp Martin—the Democrat challenging Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is currently representing Watson in the lawsuit against felony disenfranchisement—to say that the state should expand rights restoration for people with felony convictions.

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

Pennsylvanians will fill a vacant seat on their state’s high court, where Democrats currently enjoy a majority. The outcome cannot change partisan control but it will still shape election law in this swing state, Bolts’ Alex Burness reports. For one, a GOP win would make it easier for the party to flip the court in 2025, affecting redistricting. It may also make it easier for the GOP to win election lawsuits next year: Voting cases haven’t always been party-line for this court, especially ones that revolve around how permissive the state should be toward mail ballots. Recent rulings made it more likely that mail ballots with clerical mistakes get tossed, an issue that now looms over the 2024 election.

Burness reports that Republican nominee Carolyn Carluccio has echoed Trump’s attacks against mail voting, implying an unfounded connection to election fraud, and she appeared to invite a new legal challenge to a state law that expanded ballot access in 2019. Dan McCaffery, her Democratic opponent, has defended state efforts to make voting more convenient, telling Bolts, “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes.”

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

Pennsylvanians are electing the local officials who’ll run the 2024 elections, and the results will shape how easy it is for millions of people to vote next year in the nation’s biggest swing state. Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts that counties have a great deal of discretion when it comes to the modalities of voting by mail, and local voting rights attorneys warn that if more counties adopt tighter rules, tens of thousands of additional ballots may be rejected.

Bucks County stands as the clearest jurisdiction to watch, Nichanian writes. Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019, part of a firewall against Trump’s efforts to game the following year’s election. The county commissioners made it easier to vote by mail, attracting legal challenges from Trump.  Now, they’re now running for reelection, but the Republican Party is hoping to gain control of this swing county’s commission. 

Also keep an eye on the Democratic efforts to retain majorities in the other Pennsylvania counties they gained in 2019, often for the first time in decades: Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Monroe. The GOP would also gain control of the board of elections in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, if it scores an upset in the county executive race. Sam DeMarco, who signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, is already certain to sit on Allegheny County’s board of elections.

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

Will any Pennsylvania county try to stall the certification of elections next year, in a repeat of Trump’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race? The results of next week’s elections will determine which are susceptible to try out such a strategy, Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts. Election attorneys told him that this would be a dereliction of duties on the part of county commissioners but that it may still cause some legal and political upheaval. Already in 2022, the Republican commissioners in three counties resisted certifying results because they insisted on rejecting valid mail ballots; they’re now all seeking reelection.

The Democratic challengers running in Berks County—the most politically competitive of these three counties—say this is a key issue in their race. “The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” one of them told Bolts. But they’re also running on a platform of easing mail voting by installing more accessible ballot drop boxes, and instituting new policies to notify residents if their ballots have a clerical error. Also keep an eye on Fayette and Lancaster, the other counties that tried to not certify the 2022 results, and in the many red jurisdictions where candidates with ties to election deniers made it past the Republican primaries.

Virginia | Legislative control

Since Virginia Republicans gained the governorship and state House in 2021, they have passed bills through the lower chamber to repeal same-day voter registration and get rid of ballot drop boxes, among other restrictive measures. Until now, these bills have died in the Democratic-run Senate. But will that change after Nov. 7, when Virginians elect all lawmakers?

The GOP is hoping to gain control of the Senate while defending its majority in the House, Bolts reports, a combination that would hand them full control of the state government and open the floodgates for the party’s conservative agenda on how the commonwealth should run elections. Inversely, if Democrats have a great night—flipping the House and keeping the Senate—they may have more oversight over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic curtailment of rights restoration and over his administration’s wrongful voter purges; still, those matters are decided within the executive branch, and the governor’s office is not on the ballot until 2025.

Washington | King County director of elections

Only one county in the entire state of Washington is electing its chief administrator. It just so happens to be King County, home to Seattle and more than 2 million residents—in a race that features a staunch election denier, no less. Doug Basler has sowed doubts about Washington state’s election system since the 2020 election, alongside others on the far-right, and he has helped a lawsuit against its mail voting system.

Basler is a heavy underdog on Nov. 7 in his challenge against Julie Wise, the Director of King County Elections. This is a heavily Democratic county, though there will be no partisan label on the ballot, potentially blunting the effect of Basler’s Republican affiliation. Still, Cameron Joseph reports in Bolts that the spread of false election conspiracies—even when they are defeated at the ballot box—is fueling a threatening climate. “It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise told Bolts.

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights 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.

Most of these elections are playing out in the South, where Republicans could secure three more trifectas than they currently have—that is, control of the governorship and both chambers of their state legislature. 

The biggest and most suspenseful battle is taking place in Virginia. Despite Democrats’ gains in the state since the 2000s, the GOP just needs to flip a couple of seats in the state Senate to grab full control of state government. Republicans are also aiming to gain control of Kentucky and Louisiana, in each case by flipping the governor’s mansion. All three states currently have divided governments. 

In Mississippi, the GOP is defending its existing trifecta. 

Democrats don’t have the opportunity to gain a new trifecta this fall, but they’re aiming to keep control of the state government in New Jersey, the most populous of these five states. And in a bonus addition to the fall’s calendar due to a single special election in New Hampshire, they have a shot to keep eroding the GOP majority in the nearly-tied state House, though they won’t be able to quite erase it for now.

These elections are a final messaging test for the parties before 2024, but they’ll also profoundly affect public policy around critical rights within these states, with measures ranging from LGBT rights in Louisiana and new abortion restrictions in Virginia hanging in the balance.

Below, Bolts guides you through each of the states electing governors or legislatures this year as part of our coverage of the 2023 local and state elections around the country. Much more is on the ballot in these states and many others, from a supreme court election in Pennsylvania—the only such race this year—to referendums in Maine or Ohio. 

Kentucky 

Current status: Split government, with a Democratic governor and Republican control of both legislative chambers

What’s on the ballot: The governorship

No matter what, the GOP will retain control of the Kentucky legislature heading into 2024 after very comfortably retaining majorities in the state House and Senate in 2022; those seats are not up for grabs until November 2024.

Republicans also have the votes to override vetoes by the governor, in a rare state where that only takes a simple majority, and they’ve rarely blinked. This year, the GOP-run legislature overrode Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of 15 bills, ramming through a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and major abortion restrictions.

Still, Beshear has flexed his executive power during his first term, issuing public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic and winning a legal fight against GOP lawmakers who sought to block them. He also issued an executive order in 2019 that restored the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians who were permanently disenfranchised. And last year, he issued other executive orders to allow some people to access medical marijuana, drawing condemnation from Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is now challenging Beshear for the governor’s office; Beshear’s order eventually pressured state lawmakers into legalizing medical marijuana through legislation this spring. 

The ensuing clashes have put November’s race between Beshear and Cameron on track to break fundraising records.  

Louisiana

Current status: Split government, with a Democratic governor and Republican control of both  legislative chambers

What’s on the ballot: The governorship, and both chambers of the legislature

All legislative seats in Louisiana are on the ballot this year, but we already know who will run the legislature come 2024 before a single vote has been counted. 

Only Republican candidates filed to run in the majority of districts in both the House and the Senate, guaranteeing GOP majorities in each chamber. Still, the fall’s elections will determine whether they can easily pass their priorities in coming years. 

John Bel Edwards, a Democrat has occupied the governor’s mansion over the last eight years, and he has vetoed many Republican bills in that time. Just this summer, he vetoed a barrage of legislation, including laws that criminalized getting too close to an on-duty police officer and banned discussion of sexual orientation in a classroom. Republicans have made major gains in the legislature during Edwards’ tenure, and earlier this year they finally clinched supermajorities in both chambers after a longtime Democratic lawmaker switched parties, giving them the power to  override vetoes. But veto overrides have remained unusual in Louisiana; Republicans this summer held a special session to take up just a few of the bills Edwards vetoed, and while they passed a bill to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, they could not muster the votes for other legislation.

Edwards is now barred from running for re-election due to term limits. If the GOP flips the governor’s office, it would gain unified control of the state government and no longer have to worry about vetoes. The front-runner is Jeff Landry, the state’s ultra-conservative attorney general, who is worlds apart from the outgoing governor on criminal justice policy. 

And even if Democrat Shawn Wilson pulls off an upset victory to become governor, the state’s legislative elections will determine the size of the Republican majority. Democrats have said they hope to break the GOP’s new supermajority, though the party has suffered from dysfunction, undercutting its preparation. Republican leaders, meanwhile, would like to grow their edge even more to make it easier to override vetoes.

Mississippi

Current status: Republican trifecta

What’s on the ballot: The governorship, and both chambers of the state legislature

The GOP is vying to keep unified control of Mississippi’s state government, which should be easy on the legislative side: Republican candidates are running unopposed in most Senate districts as well as in just shy of a majority of House districts, shielding them from any big surprise at the polls in November.

But Democrats have zeroed in on a scandal involving misspent welfare funds that has engulfed Republican Governor Tate Reeves, who is running for re-election and banking on the state’s red lean to prevail. He faces Brandon Presley, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission and a well-known politician in the state, who is aiming to hand Democrats’ their first victory in a governor’s race since 1999. Like past Democratic candidates in the state, Presley has vowed to expand Medicaid if he is elected, a reform Reeves has opposed; Mississippi remains one of only ten states that hasn’t expanded the program as provided by the Affordable Care Act, even though the expansion would cover more than 200,000 Mississippians.

The elections are unfolding in a tough landscape for voting rights and restrictions that depress participation, including a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of many felonies—a policy that disenfranchises more than one in ten adults in the state, including sixteen percent of Black residents. And even though a new law meant to criminalize assistance with mail-in voting was blocked by a judge this summer, it has still left local organizations in a difficult position as they mount turnout efforts. 

New Jersey

Current status: Democratic trifecta

What’s on the ballot: Both chambers of the state legislature

Democrats walked into the 2021 elections confident they would easily keep unified control over state government, but they only barely survived with Governor Phil Murphy’s securing re-election in a surprise squeaker. 

Two years later, the stakes are considerably lower since the governorship is not on the line, but all legislative seats are up for grabs. And although the GOP, which gained seven seats in 2021, once made noise about 2023 being the year they flip a chamber for the first time in two decades, the party has already hit most of its obvious targets and it would have to reach into districts that are firmly blue. According to calculations by the New Jersey Globe, President Biden carried 25 of the state’s 40 legislative districts by double-digits in the 2020 presidential race. Even when Murphy survived statewide by three percentage point in 2021, he carried the majority of legislative districts by at least five percentage points. That gives Democrats a clear roadmap to retaining their legislative majorities this fall. 

Unified Democratic control hasn’t meant that those in the party always see eye to eye, though. Relationships between the legislature’s Democratic leaders and the more progressive governor have been difficult at times since Murphy’s first election. Senate President Steve Sweeney’s shock election loss in South Jersey in 2021 removed one of the state’s more centrist politicians, but progressive priorities like same-day voter registration have still died in the chamber.

Virginia

Current status: Split government: a Republican governor and House, and a Democratic Senate

What’s on the ballot: Both chambers of the state legislature

Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin badly wants his party to seize control of the Virginia legislature, which would give him far more control over the affairs of the state. Alongside Youngkin’s victory in 2021, the GOP also flipped the state House. But the Senate was not on the ballot that year and remained Democratic, and since then it has frustrated conservative ambitions on many issues, including abortion rights, criminal justice, and voting rights. 

Senate Democrats over the last two sessions have killed a barrage of Republican legislation, including bills that would have banned access to abortion at 15 weeks, ended same-day voter registration, enacted new voter ID requirements, and restrained the discretion of reform prosecutors to drop low-level cases.

If the GOP gains the Senate and keeps the House in November, it would open the floodgates for such bills. To get there, they need to flip two Senate seats (out of 40), and not lose more than one House seat compared to the state’s last elections. These margins are tight enough that Democrats are hopeful they’ll be the ones celebrating on Nov. 7 if they manage to not just retain the Senate but also flip the GOP-run House. 

And there are many competitive seats; 14 House districts and 7 Senate districts were within 10 percentage points in the last governor’s race, according to a review of data supplied by the Virginia Public Access Project. (The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics reviews the specific districts that are the likeliest to decide the majority.) Both parties are pouring in large amounts of money to win them, with many ads focusing on abortion access.   

These legislative races are the first general election since Youngkin dramatically tightened voter eligibility in March by ending his predecessor’s practice of automatically restoring the voting rights of people who leave prison. Many Virginians are unable to vote as a result. 

Bonus: New Hampshire 

Current status: Republican trifecta

What’s on the ballot: Just one state House seat

In the entire state of New Hampshire, only one state House district around Nashua is up for election in November. But with the state House nearly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, that election carries great symbolic weight. 

Big gains in the 2022 midterms left Democrats within three seats of a majority in the state House and they made further gains in special elections this year, most recently on Sept. 19 by flipping a district in Rockingham County. That cut Republicans’ edge to just one seat, 198 to 197, putting Democrats on track to tying the chamber with an even number of representatives per party ahead of Nashua’s Nov. 7 special election, which is taking place in a district that leans strongly blue, according to Daily Kos Elections. 

Then, on Monday, a House member announced that she would quit the Democratic Party, leaving her former party two seats behind heading into Nov. 7. 

Practically speaking, the exact number of seats held by each party wouldn’t at this stage change the bottom line: The GOP’s hold on the chamber is already tenuous. This is the largest legislative body in the U.S. by far, and lawmakers have other jobs since they’re only paid $100 a year. This means that chronic absences make the chamber difficult to predict and manage on any given day. Expect more vacancies, and party switches, over the next 15 months.

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But even with all these hurdles, a cadre of advocates, nonprofits, churches, and community-minded elected officials have shown up year after year for decades, working hard to protect the right to participate in democracy—especially for Black and other minority voters, who are often the most affected by voting restrictions. 

“We have organizations across the state that are part of the Civic Engagement Roundtable that’s organized by One Voice,” said Representative Zakiya Summers, a Democrat in the state house, referencing a Jackson nonprofit focused on policy advocacy. “These organizations are on conference calls every month. They have created voting rights guides and information that partner organizations can distribute in their community to get people educated and engaged.”

In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections in August, these advocates were gearing up to contend with the latest obstacle that Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature had thrown their way: Senate Bill 2358. The bill, which passed in the spring and went into effect on July 1, prohibits anyone from assisting another voter in handling and returning a mail-in ballot unless they are an immediate family or household member, a caregiver, or authorized election worker or mail carrier. Anyone caught violating the law could face up to a year in county jail and a fine of up to $3000.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised the bill when he signed it into law, saying that it would protect against “ballot harvesting,” or the practice of collecting ballots en masse, a fear that is central to the unfounded conspiracies about voter fraud that conservatives around the country latched onto since the 2020 election.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or other fraud in Mississippi elections, the bill has threatened to limit the number of volunteers and advocates involved in get-out-the-vote efforts from sending or retrieving ballots on behalf of voters they don’t live with. More importantly, it could impede ballot access for people who count on this kind of assistance. 

“It just seemed like another barrier that would prevent people with disabilities from being able to vote autonomously,” says Jane Walton, the communications officer for Disability Rights Mississippi, which includes voting access among their advocacy work. “The bill in question dealt with whether or not someone can have a person assist them. Really, it’s an issue of whether a person with a disability has the autonomy to choose to vote in a way that is most accessible to them.”

Soon after it was passed, groups including Disability Rights Mississippi and Mississippi’s League of Women Voters sued the state in federal court to block the law, stating it “impermissibly restricts voters with disabilities from having a person of their choice assist them in submitting their completed mail-in absentee ballots.” On July 26, a federal judge sided with them and temporarily blocked the law, saying it disenfranchised voters with disabilities and violated the Voting Rights Act.

The decision blocked enactment of SB 2358 just in time for the Aug. 8 primary, and will also prevent it from taking effect ahead of the general election in November, when Mississippians will vote on nearly every major office, including governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and representatives in both legislative chambers. Polling indicates that Republican incumbents who supported the bill—including the embattled Reeves, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch—are favored to win in this deep red state.

But no matter who people cast their vote for, advocates are more concerned about some residents being able to cast a vote at all. The suspension of SB 2358 offers some temporary relief, but these advocates fear that the threat of similar legislation still looms.

“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring legislation that [has]pretty much been pushed by the Secretary of State every year to deal with ballot harvesting, Jarvis Dortch, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Mississippi, told Bolts. ”That makes it harder to return a ballot by absentee, especially individuals with disabilities.”

Before the passage of this bill, advocates already had their hands full navigating existing restrictions that make it harder for citizens to vote, and for Black candidates to win. 

The state requires eligible voters to register 30 days before elections, one of the earliest deadlines in the country. This means that often, advocates must find eligible voters early, and educate them on the importance of registering long before there’s any major discussion of elections in the media, because there’s no early voting or same-day registration options as a backup. And advocates must repeat this process every year thanks to Mississippi’s odd-year elections. 

But in order to even register, eligible voters must comply with a stringent voter ID law, passed in 2011 by way of a ballot initiative that established a strict list of acceptable forms of ID, including a birth certificate, firearms permit, driver’s license, college ID card, US passport, tribal ID, or Voter ID card. 

“Voter ID targeted vulnerable populations who may not have access to ID or may not have access to a birth certificate so they can get an ID. The law was written so strongly that the state was willing to provide a free Voter ID,” says Summers.

Voting absentee by mail is also an involved process in Mississippi. As opposed to the majority of states, which offer no-excuse absentee voting, mail ballots are only available to populations with qualifying characteristics, including those living out-of-state, students, people with disabilities, people over 65, and certain others. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted. 

“We make it harder than anyone else to get folks registered and make it hard for people to vote absentee,” said Dortch. We don’t provide early voting. Now, instead of making it easier for folks to vote, we’re trying to get people off the voting rolls… and make it harder for people to actually vote absentee. When we have one of the hardest processes to vote absentee in the country. It doesn’t make sense.” 

Mississippi has also had a longtime a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of certain types of felonies, a policy which has disenfranchised nearly 130,000 Black voters, or 16 percent of the state’s adult Black population. It’s one of only three states, alongside Tennessee and Virginia, where anyone stripped of voting rights loses it for their whole life. They can only regain it if they receive an exceedingly rare pardon from the legislature or the governor.

A federal appeals court this summer struck down that system as unconstitutional, calling it a “cruel and unusual punishment,” and denouncing Mississippi as “an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement.” The state appealed the decision in late August, and the rights of hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are still hanging in the balance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all these restrictions, Mississippi has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In the 2022 midterms, Mississippi ranked eighth from last, with roughly 46 percent of voters showing up. And turnout for non-white voters was even lower.

Democrats and progressives have historically championed an increase in access to voting options in the state, and have in turn looked to Black and other disenfranchised voters for support in elections. This upcoming race is no exception. Democrat gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, for example, is betting on bases of support in majority-Black enclaves around the capital city of Jackson, as well as pockets of white and immigrant progressive and moderate voters scattered around the Mississippi Delta in his long-shot bid to oust Tate Reeves.

Ty Pinkins, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is a recent addition after previous candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race for health reasons. While Pinkins has limited time to build name recognition before the contest, he’s hoping that a campaign message of easing the state’s restrictive voting laws will connect with voters.

“Making sure people can register to vote online makes sense, making sure that we have a way for people to do early voting—that makes sense, and not restricting access to the ballot for people with disabilities,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. 

SB 2358 remains on hold until further hearings are held and a final decision is handed down. And while advocates, voters, and progressive candidates can continue to move as if the law had never been signed, the landscape for voting rights remains difficult in Mississippi. But advocates are quick to mention that they will continue to work to make progress. 

“We along with our partners and our co-counsel are absolutely prepared to do everything that we can to protect the rights of citizens with disabilities,” said Walton. “Whatever that road looks like going forward, we’re prepared to fight for accessibility in Mississippi’s voting system.”

Correction (Sept. 14): An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the communications officer from Disability Rights Mississippi.

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

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Voters in the South will elect dozens of local prosecutors this November. But the proceedings are overshadowed by Southern state governments’ escalating maneuvers to undercut the will of voters in prosecutor races—fueled in part by Republican anger against some prosecutors’ policies of not enforcing low-level charges and new abortion bans. 

Mississippi this year removed predominantly white sections of Hinds County, the majority-Black county that’s home to Jackson, from the control of its Black district attorney. Georgia reacted similarly to recent wins by DAs of color: It cut off a white county from a circuit that had elected a Black prosecutor, and also set up a new state agency with the power to fire DAs. Last week, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Orlando’s elected Democratic prosecutor, citing disagreements with her office’s approach to prosecution, one year after he similarly replaced Tampa’s Democratic prosecutor with a member of the Federalist Society. 

These rapidfire events are exacerbating the question of what it even means to run for office when your win could be undermined so easily, or when your winning platform might be turned into a reason to remove you from office. 

Still, the electoral cycle churns on. There will be 123 local prosecutor races across  Kentucky, Mississippi, and Virginia—the only three Southern states voting on this office in 2023.

The lion’s share is in Virginia, a state that may soon experience its own version of this dynamic. Republican officials have wanted to crack down on reform prosecutors but have not been able to push their proposals through so far; they may try again in 2024 if they gain the legislature. In the meantime, these policy debates are playing out in a more usual place—the electoral arena.

In three populous Virginia counties, Republican candidates are defying three Democratic prosecutors who joined calls to reform Virginia’s criminal laws while their party briefly ran the state in 2021 and 2022. In making the case that crime should be prosecuted more aggressively, these challengers are mirroring candidates who already ran—and lost—against other reform prosecutors in the June Democratic primaries. 

Mississippi also features challenges to three Democratic prosecutors who have, to varying degrees, implemented some priorities of criminal justice reformers, such as expanding alternatives to incarceration or vowing to not prosecute abortion cases. Their opponents have indicated that they wish to reel back some of these efforts.

Kentucky has less to track this year: While there’s a strikingly large number of special elections, nearly all feature an unopposed incumbent. And Mississippi and Virginia have many uncontested races as well. Across the 123 elections in these three Southern states, only 24 will feature more than one candidate on November’s ballot. 

Below is Bolts’ guide to the 2023 prosecutor elections in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Virginia.

Two other states are electing prosecutors this year (many more will in 2024). Check out Bolts’ earlier previews of races in New York and Pennsylvania.  

Kentucky 

The state wasn’t meant to select any of its commonwealth’s attorneys in 2023 but the two most populous counties each scheduled special elections due to unexpected vacancies. In the meantime, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear appointed prosecutors in each, Gerina Whethers in Jefferson County (Louisville), and Kimberly Baird in Fayette County (Lexington). 

Whethers and Baird are now running to stay in their new offices and no one challenged them, ensuring they’ll easily win their first encounters with voters.

Appointed incumbents similarly face no challengers in four other circuits. Overall, this situation applies to counties that cover 1.5 million residents—roughly one third of the state’s population.

Only in Henderson County, a more sparsely populated county, is there a contested special election. It features two self-described conservatives: Democrat Herb McKee, who was chosen by Beshear to take over as commonwealth’s attorney when the longtime incumbent resigned last fall, faces Republican James “Bobby” Norris, an assistant prosecutor in his office. 

All Kentucky counties are hosting regular elections next year.

Mississippi

DA Doug Evans retired in June, after spending decades subjecting a Black man named Curtis Flowers to six trials for the same crime, earning a rebuke from the Supreme Court, and facing mounting evidence that he targeted prospective Black jurors. Voters chose his successor in last week’s primary, and it’ll be Adam Hopper, Evans’ assistant who took over in court in the waning days of Flowers’ prosecution to urge a judge to keep him in jail. 

Hopper, who’s running as a Republican, will face no opponent in November. Democratic DA Brenda Mitchell will also run unopposed in the Delta region after narrowly surviving a primary challenge against reform-aligned attorney Mike Carr. 

In fact, 17 of 21 DA races in the state only feature one candidate on the general election ballot. Of the remaining races, three involve Democratic DAs with a reputation for defending some criminal justice reform.

Scott Colom, a Democratic DA in northeastern Mississippi who drew national press for ousting a notoriously tough-on-crime prosecutor in 2015, hoped to be a federal judge by now: President Biden appointed him to the bench in 2022, but one of the state’s GOP senators is blocking his nomination. In the meantime, Colom is running for reelection against Jase Dalrymple, a Republican who vows a “more conservative approach” to prosecution and says Colom is too quick to use diversion tools. Colom’s 16th District leans Democratic.

The other two Democratic incumbents who face challengers this fall are Jody Owens, the DA of Hinds County, and Shameca Collins, who represents a rural district south of Jackson. Owens and Collins each signed a letter last year pledging to not prosecute cases relating to abortion, and they’ve each touted their efforts to expand alternatives to incarceration. 

In November, they’re running against independents Darla Palmer and Tim Cotton, respectively. The challengers have each indicated that their opponents are too focused on reforming the system. Palmer wants her campaign to send a message “that crime deserves punishment which includes incarceration,” she told Bolts this spring. Neither Palmer nor Cotton told Bolts whether they’d change the incumbent prosecutors’ approach to abortion.

The state’s fourth contested election, in the staunchly-red 14th District, is an open race that pits two assistant prosecutors, Republican Brandon Adams and Democrat Patrick Beasley.

Virginia

Eleven of Virginia’s commonwealth’s attorneys formed an alliance in 2020, called Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice, meant to promote criminal justice reform. The group asked lawmakers to end mandatory minimum sentencing, abolish the death penalty, ban no-knock warrants, and increase opportunities for criminal record expungement, among other changes. And this year, most of these prosecutors had to stand for re-election.

Two alliance members, Arlington County’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax County’s Steve Descano, went further than some of their colleagues in implementing changes like not charging marijuana without waiting for legislative change. They survived closely-watched Democratic primaries in June against opponents endorsed by local police unions. “If this election was a referendum on reform, our voters emphatically responded that they will not go backward,” Dehghani-Tafti told Bolts the night of her primary victory.

Neither Dehghani-Tafti nor Descano face another opponent in November. 

But three Democrats who joined them in the statewide alliance in 2020 still stand for re-election in contested races this fall in populous Prince William, Loudoun, and Henrico counties.

In Loudoun County, Democrat Buta Biberaj faces Republican Bob Anderson, who served as the county’s prosecutor from 1996 to 2003. Biberaj announced earlier this year her office would not prosecute misdemeanor offenses like trespassing and petty larceny to prioritize violent offenses,  a policy that Anderson has attacked as “unconscionable.” Loudoun voters have shifted massively to the left since Anderson’s tenure, from voting for George W. Bush for president by double-digits in 2000 to opting for Joe Biden by 25 percentage points in 2020, a year after Biberaj’s first election.

A similar debate is unfolding in Prince William County, where incumbent Amy Ashworth faces Republican Bob Lowery, who vows on his campaign site to “prosecute cases involving not just violent offenders, but all offenders.” Ashworth told Bolts, “As prosecutors, we have a duty to look at the bigger picture and attack the causes of crime to prevent it from occurring in the future, instead of blindly prosecuting all people to the fullest extent of the law.”  In blue-leaning Henrico County, finally, Democrat Shannon Taylor faces Shannon Dillon, a former assistant prosecutor in the county who is echoing her fellow Republicans in saying the office “refuses to prosecute the criminals” and blames Taylor for antagonizing law enforcement 

Besides those three traditionally partisan races, only one other county of more than 100,000 residents has a contested general election: Chesterfield County’s GOP incumbent Stacey Davenport faces independent Erin Barr, a former prosecutor who has focused her criticism of Davenport on a locally controversial decision to not prosecute a megachurch pastor for sexual solicitation. 

Fifteen far smaller and often rural counties in Virginia also have contested prosecutor races. 

Bolts reached out to non-incumbent candidates running in those counties to learn how they propose to change their county. Most who responded said they’d want to approach the office with a more independent spirit, or else emphasized a desire to ramp up sentences or foster closer relationships with the police. Running in Smyth County, for instance, independent candidate Paul Morrison said that people convicted of repeat offenses should be more likely to receive active jail sentences. 

One exception was James Ellenson, running in Southampton County and Franklin City against longtime incumbent Eric Cooke. Ellenson emphasized his own credentials as a criminal defense attorney and said Cooke is “just way too tough.” But he didn’t answer follow-ups on specific practices he’d want to change.

Ellenson last year was the defense attorney of a six-year old child who shot a teacher at school, a case that drew attention to the fact that Virginia has no minimal age under which children can’t be criminally prosecuted. 

What other elections to watch in the South 

Plenty of other elections beyond prosecutorial races will shape the region’s criminal legal system this November. Kentucky’s governor’s race could unwind the state’s approach to rights restoration for people with felony convictions. Louisiana and Mississippi are electing nearly all of their sheriffs, the officials who run these states’ local jails. 

And in Virginia, dozens of legislative races will decide whether Republicans win unified control of the state government; such a gain would strengthen Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares’ hand in their attacks against local officials who are pursuing reform policies. This will be the first general election in Virginia since Youngkin rescinded his predecessor’s policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights when they leave prison. 

Alex Burness contributed reporting.

Explore Bolts primers of the other prosecutor elections in 2023

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