Gascón and Price’s backgrounds are starkly different—he’s a former beat cop who left his job as San Francisco DA to run in LA; she’s a longtime civil rights attorney—but both came into office vowing to use the power of the DA to redress the harms, abuses, and disparities of mass incarceration. Both issued ambitious policy proclamations that involved keeping young people out of the adult criminal system, ending the use of the death penalty, holding police accountable for wrongdoing, and tamping down on harsh sentencing. And both became the target of intense and sustained opposition campaigns from virtually the day they stepped into office. Reform DAs “are being watched so closely, not only by their constituents, but by people all around the country with big pulpits,” Mona Sahaf, the director of the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me back in January. 

In 2020 and 2022, Gascón and Price represented a new chapter in counties where decades of top prosecutors embracing harsh sentencing had led to extensive racial disparities without making residents feel particularly safe. Gascón’s election was fueled by the George Floyd uprising that summer; Black Lives Matter’s LA chapter had protested every week outside his predecessor Jackie Lacey’s office. Describing the sentiment that led to Price’s win two years later, Ella Baker Center political director Jose Bernal said, “We want community members to thrive. We want to feel safe walking on the street. And in order to do that, we need to address the root causes of these social problems.” 

Voters embraced the vision that both candidates laid out—a vision of racial justice, restorative justice, second chances, and accountability for police who abuse their power. But this time around, many of those same residents have rejected the two prosecutors.

“We all have a lot to learn here around how to get past the policy-politics divide,” Sahaf told me when we spoke again on Wednesday. “There’s no evidence that the reforms that Gascón and Pam Price and other reform candidates promote don’t work,” she said, but “what’s very real is people feeling that they are not safe, people feeling that they’re not being heard, people not understanding how these solutions are going to actually make their lives better. That’s where we have a lot of work to do.”

The election results have left reformers asking where the progressive prosecutor movement goes from here. Sahaf cautioned against interpreting the losses as a referendum on the movement’s viability. “I do see wins outside of California for the same exact policies that Gascón and Price put forth,” she said. In Orlando, for instance, Democratic prosecutor Monique Worrell won her job back after Governor Ron DeSantis removed her and installed a Federalist Society member instead. In Austin, reform DA José Garza beat back tough-on-crime challengers in the March primaries and again on Tuesday to hold onto his seat. 

“I think this is about a much larger bucket of frustration that people have with government that they feel is not providing for them,” Sahaf said. But, she added, “it is also that larger frustration that opens up this environment where justice reform is an easy target.” 

The repudiation of Price and Gascón was part of a broader shift in California politics. This week, residents also voted down a ballot measure that would have outlawed forced work in prisons and passed another to increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes, functionally repealing a landmark 2014 sentencing reform that helped reduce severe prison overcrowding. 

This didn’t happen in a vacuum: Since 2020, right-wing politicians, corporations, and police associations have waged a coordinated backlash campaign that has successfully capitalized on people’s fear and anguish during a devastating pandemic. And Democratic leaders in the state and across the nation have responded by shrugging off the mantle of prison and police reform, ramping up the criminalization of homelessness, endorsing tougher penalties for retail theft, and even in some cases directly undermining local Democratic officials elected on a reform platform. In 2020, reform DAs were held up as a solution—perhaps an unrealistically quick fix for decades of mass incarceration. In 2024, they were left holding the bag.

“It was really left on the backs of the people, of grassroots organizers, to push for Gascón,” Black Lives Matter LA co-founder Melina Abdullah told me. “The Democratic Party should have been pushing for Gascón.” 

In the intervening years, the fountain of money that fueled progressive wins back in 2020 has slowed to a trickle: Democratic megadonor George Soros spent nearly $2.5 million on Gascón’s initial election, only to avoid the race entirely this time around. Meanwhile, both candidates’ campaign promises to prosecute abusive and violent cops spurred police groups into action: All 14 law enforcement associations in Alameda County endorsed the Price recall, and at least eight donated to support it. In LA, local and statewide sheriff, police, and prison guard associations gave over $2 million to support Hochman, Gascón’s challenger. Both DAs were opposed by the deputy prosecutors in their office, sparking embarrassing lawsuits and bolstering a narrative of internal turmoil. 

And with the successful ouster of reform DA Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022, recalls were ratified as a viable playbook for monied interests seeking to unseat democratically elected candidates whose policies they opposed as quickly as possible. Gascón, for his part, survived two recall attempts before his defeat at the polls. In Price’s case, a petition urging her recall circulated as soon as a month after she took office, and an official recall committee was organized within seven months. The campaign ultimately raised more than $3 million, receiving hefty donations and loans from the same donor who spent big to recall Boudin. 

“When you’re doing recalls, you gotta have some money somewhere,” Brenda Grisham, the public face of the Price recall movement, told me. “Somebody’s got to pay for those signatures.” 

Price and Gascón were widely seen as flawed leaders who made strategic missteps while in office. They both struggled to rise to the challenge of transforming calcified bureaucracies staffed with people who broadly opposed the sort of change they heralded. Gascón disappointed many by backing away from nearly all of his blanket policies to varying degrees, and by failing to more vigorously prosecute police officers responsible for a number of high-profile shootings that outraged Angelenos. Alex Trantham, secretary for the LA public defenders’ union that endorsed Gascón in 2020 but withheld its endorsement this year, told me that the DA was “definitely an improvement from under Jackie Lacey, but he still, as many elected officials can, changed his policies based on public perception of what was going on with certain cases.” 

Price didn’t have much time to disillusion her supporters. “She had it tough going in…I don’t think she got a lot of support,” Bernal said. From the start, the DA contended with community anger over youth crime and demands for harsher punishment, which clashed with her platform for juvenile justice, which prioritized rehabilitation and keeping young people in the youth system rather than transferring them to adult criminal court. 

But Bernal also noted that the high staff turnover that characterized the office under Price gave the appearance of dysfunction: “It’s not a good look, that many transitions while in office.” He added that Price would have benefited from doing more and better community outreach. Both DAs failed to effectively communicate their accomplishments to the broader public, were prickly and at times hostile to media, and could come off as tone-deaf when dealing with crime victims’ families. 

“You gotta have allies—and she doesn’t feel she needs to,” Grisham said of Price when we spoke in May.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is now responsible for selecting an interim DA, a task with high stakes considering the appointee will be in office for at least two more years, as much time as Price has spent in office; voters won’t select a DA to serve out the remainder of her six-year term until 2026. (Meanwhile, the president of the Oakland City Council will serve as interim mayor until a special election is held to replace Thao.) Bernal noted that the passage of Proposition 36, which will reduce funding for mental health services in Alameda County, only raises the stakes for the DA appointment. He urged that the board “really look at someone who’s going to continue to really prioritize mental health for our community members, expand mental health courts and pretrial diversion.” 

Grisham, who pushed for the recall, said she hopes the next DA will eschew blanket policies for young people who commit crimes and be more open to working with victims’ families.

In LA, Hochman has vowed to overturn all of Gascón’s blanket policies, including what has been the least controversial and only blanket policy Gascón has stuck to during his first term: his prohibition on seeking the death penalty. Trantham with the public defenders’ union also worries that a return to widespread use of sentencing enhancements and prior “strikes,” both of which Hochman has vowed to revive, will strain the public defender’s office and coerce defendants into unfair plea deals. “You’re forcing people to plead because they’re so afraid of the total maximum time they could be facing,” she said. 

While Gascón walked back his blanket prohibition on charging young people as adults, the office currently only seeks transfers to the adult system in cases of murder. The public defenders’ union believes that Hochman may begin seeking adult prosecutions of young people for a wider variety of crimes. The DA-elect has pledged to seek a “hard middle” that doubles down on long punishments for repeat offenders but preserves second chances for first-timers, but both Abdullah and Trantham say they’re skeptical. 

“No such thing as a hard middle,” Abdullah told me. “What Hochman threatens for Los Angeles County is a new era of lock ‘em up—and devastating and decimating Black communities especially.” 

After we spoke, Tranthem sent me a follow-up message: “We hope that we are wrong about Hochman and that he proves to us that he sees our clients as human beings who deserve a chance at rehabilitation.” 

“The loss of Gascón and that seat is devastating,” Abdullah said. She still thinks it’s worth focusing on DA offices as an important lever of power, but noted that Gascón’s election, and the policy vision he outlined, was always a response to community demands. “An electoral strategy is an important strategy, but it’s also only one strategy,” she said. “November 5th was for voting…I think the answer for November 6th is to organize. To keep the movement going, to redouble our efforts.”

The post Voters Dismiss Two of California’s Leading Progressive Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s not all. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And many of these election officials are elected themselves. 

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

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

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

But we also wanted to hear from you. For “Ask Bolts,” our ongoing series in which we tackle reader questions, we asked you what you wanted to know about these upcoming elections. 

As always, you came through with many thoughtful questions. Today I tackle six of them—a fun opportunity to introduce you to our team’s elections reporting and research in a new way.

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

What are the interesting referenda in November?
Jump to our answer.

What is a state auditor, and why should I care?
Jump to our answer.

What’s the best way to find out about nonpartisan judges? So many people tell me they have no idea and leave the ballot blank.
Jump to our answer.

I have a lot of friends who say, “I live in D.C., it’s not like my vote matters that much.” What downballot races can I advocate for?
Jump to our answer.

What’s the most unusual office that’s having elections?
Jump to our answer.

Where can people get involved as poll monitors? I can travel.
Jump to our answer.

Stay tuned for more before election day. And if you have a question, it’s not too late to share it!

What are the interesting referenda in November? — @tomwwhittington, on BlueSky

Lucky for you, our cheat sheet lists dozens of state and local ballot measures, ranging from abortion rights and labor to criminal justice and election rules. You may have heard of the biggest ones: Arizona and Florida could reverse abortion restrictions. Ohio may switch to independent redistricting, which would undo GOP gerrymanders by 2026. Alaska could repeal ranked-choice voting, two years after Sarah Palin blamed it for her loss.

But many important measures remain under the radar. Take Arizona’s Prop 134: The GOP hopes it’ll squash future citizen-led initiatives, as their party is frustrated that progressives have used this to sponsor reforms like an increase to the minimum wage. This is happening beyond Arizona, too. If Measure 2 passes, North Dakota would become the only state where a measure has to pass on two separate election days within the same year to become law.

Conservatives are pushing many other big changes. North Dakota could also become the first state to eliminate property taxes if it passes Measure 4, a proposal put forth by a right-wing organization that calls property taxes “immoral.” A Kentucky measure could greenlight public funding of private schools. In Washington, a pair of referendums could undo a capital gains tax and environmental regulations. An initiative in Colorado may make it harder for people with long prison sentences to be released.

Some of the most interesting progressive efforts are happening at the municipal level. Memphis is defying Tennessee’s GOP lawmakers with a gun control measure. Some cities are looking to create new funds to boost affordable housing; many others, like Columbus and Nashville, are asking voters to hike local taxes to pour more money into public transit. I’m also watching a pair of local measures in California that would expand the franchise: Albany may lower the voting age to 16, and Santa Ana may allow noncitizens to participate in local elections. At the state level, will Nebraskans mandate paid sick leave from employers?

My list could go on, so let me end with: California and Nevada are voting on removing language from their state constitutions that allow “involuntary servitude” for incarcerated people. This would have the major ramifications in restricting forced prison labor, we reported recently. 

What is a state auditor, and why should I care? — from @rutiregan, on BlueSky

Auditors, or controllers as they’re known in some places, are meant to check that government agencies are working properly—that they’re implementing programs as they should, that they’re allocating funds where they should. So it can make a difference whether an auditor believes in the basic mission of the public services they’re supposed to be assessing. 

But auditors also have the discretion to set the priorities of their office, based on which agencies and programs they believe are most in need of supervision. And their political outlook matters here. In 2022, Bolts covered the unusual candidacy of Kenneth Mejia, who won the office of Los Angeles controller on a vow to audit the police department after a campaign in which he raised questions about the scope of the LAPD’s $3 billion budget. He has since released a critical review of their large helicopter program. And while Mejia was running for a municipal office, state-level auditors can similarly direct their office’s resources where they think there’s a need. 

This year, two states are holding competitive auditor races (North Carolina and Pennsylvania), and a common thread stands out in each: The GOP candidates are saying that state elections systems need auditing, amid conservatives’ broader rhetoric questioning election integrity. 

Pennsylvania Auditor Timothy DeFoor, a Republican running for reelection, launched a review in mid-September of the state’s program to automatically register eligible voters when they interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Republicans have pushed a false narrative this fall that noncitizens are participating in U.S. elections, with Pennsylvania at the center of their efforts given its role in the presidential race. DeFoor’s Democratic challenger, state Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, accused DeFoor of “paving the way for Trump’s Big Lie 2.0” and “provid[ing] cover for dangerous conspiracies and election denialism.” DeFoor has said he was not motivated by partisan purposes in launching this review.

In North Carolina, the GOP’s auditor nominee Dave Boliek wants to create a division in charge of investigating voter rolls and voting equipment. “There’s a tremendous amount of distrust in the election process,” he said in the GOP primary. Boliek faces Democratic Auditor Jessica Holmes, who was appointed to the office last year after a prior auditor resigned in scandal. 

What’s the best way to find out about non-partisan judges? So many people tell me they have no idea and leave the ballot blank. — @IndyDeVoe, on Twitter | How can I find out the party affiliation of judges running for office? — Eliz, in California

Far and away, some version of this question is what we heard from you the most—where can I possibly learn more about judicial elections? 

Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s very difficult to find the information you’d want. Depending on where you live, you may see a dozen judicial races on your ballot at once, and in many states, these races are nonpartisan. You’re likely to find little about the candidates. Even if you come across their website or an interview with the press, which is by no means a given, they’re probably just promising to be fair and follow the rule of law. 

Some local publications prepare extensive voter guides for all local judges, looking into their backgrounds and records: I’m thinking for instance of Injustice Watch in Chicago, which just published its judicial guide this week. At Bolts, we cover some local judgeships, but our comprehensive coverage is reserved for state supreme court races. To explain the stakes, we identify recent cases, review who is backing the candidates, and ask how a change in membership would shift a court. 

So the first thing I’d recommend is to see if you have a newsroom in your backyard with such a guide. But as you can see from these examples, these projects devour a lot of time and resources. 

If you don’t find that, there may be local legal organizations that have issued assessments. But ideally there’d be several such reports to compare critically; such organizations may conceal biases of their own, and ignore the differences between candidates’ ideological commitments. 

Many judges insist they’re apolitical, even when their rulings reveal a consistent outlook. But you may find hints. For instance, who appointed them to the bench? But be careful to also learn if that official really has control over who they chose. In Florida, for instance, Governor Ron DeSantis has pushed the courts to the right with his nominations; his choice is technically constrained by the state’s nominating commission, but that body is now staunchly conservative. 

Even in an ostensibly nonpartisan race, judicial candidates often receive public endorsements from parties or financial support from partisan PACs. They may be part of groups like the progressive American Constitution Society or the conservative Federalist Society. And they may have a trail of statements that clarify their beliefs. For instance, in looking at the social media account of one of the candidates for Minnesota’s supreme court, I came across numerous comments supportive of Donald Trump and conservative legal positions.

And sometimes, you’ll find candidates who are open about their views while campaigning. They may be saying that they hope to reduce mass incarceration or combat criminal justice reform, that they support or oppose abortion rights, or that they’d combat gerrymandering. Judicial races always have consequences; these are just the cases where it’s easiest to see how.

I live in Washington, D.C., and I have a lot of friends who say something along the lines of, “Well, I live in D.C., so it’s not like my vote matters that much.” What downballot races can I advocate for? — Paige, in Washington, D.C.

I won’t lie to you: The D.C. ballot isn’t the most eventful this November. Most D.C. elections are settled in Democratic primaries, since Democrats are so dominant. Plus, the contests for mayor and attorney general will only be on the ballot in two years. And while some residents tried to force recall votes against Charles Allen and Brianne Nadeau, two progressive city councilors who backed criminal justice reforms, they failed to gather enough signatures.

In fact, the most interesting aspect of D.C.’s elections this year may be who gets to vote in them: The city has begun implementing a new reform that allows noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

Still, there is one big-ticket item on November’s ballot: Initiative 83. 

This measure would transform the way D.C. runs its local elections. If it passes, the city would still hold primaries to decide each party’s nominee, and then a general election. But two things would change: Independents would be allowed to vote in a party’s primaries. And primaries and general elections would be decided through ranked-choice voting. Proponents say this would ramp up competition and enable more people to participate in the typically-decisive primaries. The Democratic establishment is largely fighting it, arguing that the system is too complicated and that parties should have the right to restrict their primary electorate. 

But when it comes to national politics, the voices of D.C. residents continue to be devalued: They have no representation in Congress, a situation with a long and racist history. Democrats in the U.S. House passed a bill in 2021 that granted statehood to D.C., but the bill faltered in the Senate. 

“D.C.’s lack of congressional representation in the year 2024 is unconscionable,” Ankit Jain told me this week. Jain, a voting rights attorney, is running this year to be one of the district’s two shadow senators. These are officials elected by residents as though they are a senator; they do not get a seat in the chamber, but they take an active part in the city’s advocacy for more representation. (Jain, a Democrat, is heavily favored against GOP nominee Nelson Rimensnyder.)

“We are American citizens who simply want the same right as every other American citizen—the right to vote and to influence our own government,” Jain said, denouncing “the injustice and racism of denying the right to vote to 700,000 tax-paying American citizens, a majority of whom are people of color and a plurality of whom are Black.” He added, “I cannot help but think that if our population was whiter that getting statehood would be much easier.”

What’s the most unusual office that’s having elections? — Paul, from New York

There’s a bevy of riches when it comes to elections that people don’t think of. Did you know Florida elects public defenders, or that, in Montana, contests for a local government study commission have become a key test for housing affordability?

For this question, I’ll pick a little-known office: Vermont’s high bailiffs. Each of Vermont’s 14 counties elects this obscure position with limited formal powers—technically, their role is to arrest the sheriff, and to act as sheriff when the sheriff is incapacitated. But in 2020, two progressives ran, and won, races for high bailiff in Addison and Windsor counties on the idea that they could leverage whatever visibility the office has to help reduce incarceration.

Dave Silberman, a drug decriminalization advocate who became Addison County high bailiff, told me at the time that people should get creative in using whatever levers of power exist in their areas to make a difference. “It’s up to me as an activist, as a person who’s looking to change the system, to use the tools at our disposal to make our society better,” he said. 

I recently caught up with Silberman to talk about his first four years in the office. Silberman, who actually briefly served as acting sheriff in 2022 when the sitting sheriff was arrested over sexual assault charges, said he is wielding his bully pulpit to promote the idea that Vermont should altogether eliminate sheriffs, and has repeatedly pressed that case at the state legislature. “What we’re seeing across the country, but also here in Vermont, is that the entire construct of elected sheriffs is dangerously prone to corruption and serious abuse,” he told me. 

Silberman, a Democrat, is running for reelection this fall against Ron Holmes, a Republican who has repeatedly run for sheriff and has made it clear that this is his driving ambition, in stark contrast with Silberman’s position that the office ought to be abolished.

Where can persons available to serve as poll monitors be best enlisted? I can travel. Do some states require you to be a resident to be a poll monitor? — @duanehere, on BlueSky

I took your question to Jeanette Senecal, who for the last 25 years has worked at the League of Women Voters, one of the nation’s chief civic engagement organizations. Her overarching message: “It’s never too late to engage in the election process.” The increase in threats and harassment against election officials since 2020, she says, ramped up a chronic need for workers, observers, and volunteers. 

If that interests you, broadly speaking, you’re allowed to engage in two ways. 

First, you could be a poll worker: You’d staff the local elections office to help them run a polling place or process ballots. This is crucial, Senecal says, so “voters have the staffing and support that they need when they go to the polling places.”

Many jurisdictions already have staffed up, but some say they still need help. As of publication, for instance, Arizona says that four of its 15 counties are looking for assistance. Senecal advises people to get in touch with their local elections office, or input their information in Power the Polls, a program the League helps run that connects people to election offices.

Second, you could be an election observer. Observers monitor that processes are compliant; typically, they don’t intervene. Observers can increase public trust, Senecal says. “You become a trusted messenger within your own network to help improve confidence within your networks.” But there are also concerns that people who echo Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud will fill monitor roles and act in ways that intimidate election workers.

What this all means concretely varies greatly from place to place. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a comprehensive guide that lays it out for each state. And the Brennan Center has a series on the rules in the major battleground states. Senecal says people should start by getting in touch with a local organization with an established observation program.

Can you travel to fill any of these roles? That depends. Many states require poll workers and/or election observers to reside or even be registered to vote there. But some don’t; you don’t have to be a resident of Wisconsin to be an observer there, for instance. But for anyone who wishes to get involved away from home, Senecal stresses, “there’s a lot of get out the vote activities that people can support in jurisdictions that are not their own.”

The post What’s on Your Local Ballots: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

His election victory last year was a landmark win for a burgeoning organizing movement known as Bozeman Tenants United, which emerged from protests in the summer of 2020, as thousands spilled into the streets of this lily-white, affluent, outdoor sports-obsessed college town, following the murder of George Floyd. 

“Me and a few other organizers thought, OK, there’s a lot of energy—how do we get names and phone numbers and turn this into something that lasts?” Emily LaShelle, Tenants United’s organizing director, told me in July from the group’s church-basement headquarters. 

Though protests provoked by police violence may not at first seem obvious venues for discussion of housing policy, LaShelle and colleagues found residents kept bringing up the city’s increasing unaffordability.

In conversations with neighbors during and after the protests, the organizers posed a simple question: What does public safety mean to you? “Was it having a third of the city budget being spent on the police force? Was it the military tank that Bozeman police has?” LaShelle said. “Time and time again, regardless of what people felt about the police, people said they couldn’t afford to live here, and that was making them less safe. It was resounding.”

Morrison, a co-founder of Tenants United, became an early test of the viability of this new progressive movement when he ran for the city commission in 2021 on a platform of economic justice. He lost by 24 percentage points. But then he ran again two years later, this time for mayor. In this city of roughly 60,000 residents, a campaign team of more than 100 volunteers knocked on some 15,000 doors, and Morrison wound up unseating a 13-year incumbent, nearly doubling her vote share.

Placing one of their own in the mayor’s office was a major step in the movement’s march toward a more equitable and accessible housing market in Bozeman, where about 60 percent of residents are renters. The Tenants United movement has been pushing policy to, among other things, restrict second-home vacation rentals, do less policing of homelessness, and set up publicly funded eviction legal defense. 

This summer, the movement scored a significant win: Bozeman voters overwhelmingly approved the creation of a study commission to examine possible changes to the city’s local government structure. 

Organizers with Tenants United worked hard to secure that result. Every ten years, the residents of all Montana cities and counties decide whether they want to revise their city charter, but this is the first time Bozeman has approved a review since 2004.

Morrison, LaShelle, and their growing corps of allies made the case this year that meaningful advances on affordability and economic justice require fundamentally rethinking how the city is governed: Currently, local leaders are paid around $20,000 for what can often amount to a full-time workload. This makes it too difficult, they said, for people who aren’t wealthy to hold city office. They want a study commission to advance structural reforms that would make Bozeman’s local institutions more inclusive of people who have been traditionally locked out of local politics.

And now that voters have set the study commission in motion, they’ll next decide in November exactly who will sit on the commission—and Tenants United has a few ideas for what the victors should do. 

They want the study commission to consider reforming city government elections so that leaders are elected by districts—they are all currently elected at-large—which would upend a system that has, for at least thirty years, seen every single city commission seat won by a candidate who lived on the more upscale south side of Bozeman, according to a review conducted by Tenants United.

They want it to consider expanding the city commission from five members to seven or more, and then paying those members more money. They want it to consider stripping some power away from the office of the (unelected, but still massively influential) city manager and transfer it over to elected officials. 

It’s a focus not just on individual laws, but on the conditions that determine how those laws get made. “We’re playing chess and checkers at the same time,” LaShelle says.

But no structural changes will be made if the study commission declines to recommend a reset. That makes the next step for these organizers quite important. 

On November 5, Bozeman will hold an election that is as down-ballot as down-ballot can be: voters will select five people, from a candidate pool of 15, to make up the actual members of this commission. These are the five people who will solicit input and eventually recommend changes to the city charter; any proposals would then have to be approved by voters in November of 2026.

Who gets elected in this obscure race will go a long way toward deciding if the study commission will have any appetite for the sort of fundamental reforms Tenants United is yearning for.

“It’s a weird little thing we’ve got going on down here, this process of electing our neighbors to determine our structure and function of government,” Morrison told me this summer, over coffee downtown. “It’s ironically the thing that is going to make the biggest difference to people in terms of material impact on our lives, but it is also going to be the thing that gets the least attention from voters.”

In a city where only about 30 percent of voters participated in the last mayoral election, it will be, and already is, a struggle to pique voter interest in a 15-way race for something so under-the-radar. But Tenants United sees opportunity. Like in other small cities, it is not necessarily money, but rather grassroots campaign tactics—yard signs, door-knocking, op-ed columns placed in the local paper—that can make all the difference in Bozeman elections.

“It’s so unsexy,” LaShelle tells me, almost cackling. “It’s gonna be really fun.”

It’s often said that states are laboratories of democracy, and this is arguably no more true anywhere than in Montana, because it’s the only state that regularly asks all its citizens to actively choose whether to amend, or even overhaul, their municipal and county government structures. The state constitution requires every municipality and county in the state to vote on a ballot measure, in the fourth year of every decade, to decide whether to undergo a review of their respective local governments.

These reviews, if approved by voters, do not concern granular policy questions, but rather structural ones: Should a city or county seize more local-control power, or rather align itself with what the state legislature commands? Is it better to elect a mayor with strong executive power, or to spread that power among other officials? How many people should serve on a local governing body, and should they be elected to represent districts or their entire jurisdictions?

“The reviews people vote on are basically generic calls to study how local government works,” Dan Clark, director of the Local Government Center at Montana State University, told me when we met just off-campus. “It’s a test of whether there is a sense of discontent within the community, or people feel there’s something that can be improved upon.”

There is, evidently, substantial discontent with local government in Bozeman, as the city grows in size and exclusivity. Its population has more than doubled since 2000, and the median new home price here is nearly $1 million. Many who love the city now are squinting to recognize it, and voters leapt at the opportunity to consider a local government review when it was on the June primary ballot; the measure passed 68 percent to 32 percent.

“It’s a gut feeling of betrayal, of losing home, when the favorite record store in town gets bought out and turned into a Lululemon,” says LaShelle, 26, who was raised here. “It’s a looming threat, constantly. I’m watching friends’ houses that used to be working-class set-ups of a bunch of younger folks living together getting turned into Airbnbs.”

LaShelle lives in a large, historic home near downtown with eight roommates. She pays $640 a month, the cheapest rent she knows of among her friends. The adjacent property was recently redeveloped into two units that each sold for $2.2 million. LaShelle thinks it’s a matter of time until something similar happens on her plot. “It feels very precarious,” she says.

Most of the rest of Montana is not so eager for structural change as Bozeman: 84 of the 127 municipalities that voted this year on whether to undergo local government reviews declined the offer. So, too, did 44 of 56 counties. 

Passing the review measure does not itself change anything. It simply kicks off a process: The 43 municipalities and 12 counties that did approve reviews will each now elect their own study commissions in the fall. The commissions will draw up and then carry out community engagement programs intended to gather feedback. Those programs will likely comprise in-person events, online surveys, and perhaps other forms of outreach, though it will be up to each commission to decide its course. The commissions are tasked with using the feedback they gather to inform their decisions to place structural reforms on the ballot in 2026. 

Most places never make any changes at all during the decadal review; in 2014, when this last happened, just four places, out of the 39 municipalities and 11 counties that had approved reviews, ended up passing something on the 2016 ballot, according to Clark.

It’s a long game, then, for Tenants United and anyone else hoping to use this vote to catalyze policy change. 

Clark, who is widely seen as the state’s preeminent expert on this review process, said that the stage Montana is in now—the study commission elections—has never been a headline-maker. He’s not aware, he told me, of a single candidate for a study commission anywhere in Montana who has raised money to run a serious campaign.

“In many cases, in the smaller communities, no one files to run at all, and they have to find people by pulling teeth,” said Clark, who, before moving to Bozeman, was once the mayor of the small Montana town of Choteau.

He said he’s rarely seen as much interest in a study commission as has popped up this year in Bozeman, where there are three times the number of candidates as the number of available seats. There’s massive interest, too, in Gallatin County, where Bozeman is located, which also approved a review in June and now has 22 people vying for its commission.

These study commission elections, which are nonpartisan, have usually not been very heated, Clark tells me, because candidates have traditionally sought to position themselves as mere facilitators of community debate, as opposed to political actors.

That is not the dynamic in Bozeman this year, however. With fifteen candidates running for five slots under one ballot heading, the county Republican Party has endorsed five people: Roger Blank, Deanna Campbell, Emily Daniels, Harrison Howarth, Stephanie Spencer. Tenants United has endorsed a competing slate of four: Carson Taylor, Rio Roland, Jan Strout, and Barrett McQuesten. Six more candidates are running without endorsements from either of these wings.

There is a good chance that Bozeman’s study commission will be open to considering structural reforms no matter who is elected. A recent forum hosted by Tenants United, in which 10 of 15 candidates participated, revealed that most attendees—including some backed by Republicans—support increasing pay for city leaders and expanding the number of seats in city government.

Morrison said he’s relieved that Tenants United has no organized opposition in this election from the home-owning liberals who have long controlled City Hall. He said he’s more worried that Republican-endorsed candidates will win seats and fail to center class justice once seated on the study commission. 

McQuesten, one of the study commission candidates, who is also an organizer with Tenants United, said that he wants a study commission that urgently feels Bozeman government should be more diverse. He said he’s running not to be a fly on the wall for community conversations about representation in government, but to help advance specific reforms to the 2026 ballot. He supports expanding the city commission and electing members by district instead of at-large.

It’s not that he won’t be an open-minded listener if he wins in November, he said, but rather that he’s seen too much in his 11 years in Bozeman to have his mind changed, on certain issues.

McQuesten, a 29-year-old paraprofessional educator, told Bolts, “I saw really, really solid educators who weren’t making enough to be able to live here. When I managed a McDonald’s, I had employees forced into homelessness because their rent went up. It’s kind of heartbreaking.”

He adds, “I want to be empirical where I can be, but there are some things that haven’t been working that need to be changed.”

Morrison says he regards the proposal to elect city commissioners in districts as most important because it will necessarily disrupt the long-term power center of Bozeman’s wealthier south side.

“It forces the opportunity of representation,” he says. “We need easier access to more diverse representation across our city, which will consequently mean differences in class, age, experience.”

He notes, correctly, that people all across the city are already free to run for the city commission. But he says there are at least a couple of big reasons why homeowners from the same part of town almost always win: For one, working-class people usually can’t afford to even consider seeking the job. But, perhaps more importantly, the south side holds on to power because those voters actually turn out to vote in municipal elections.

A basic rule of municipal elections in Bozeman, former Mayor Carson Taylor told me, has been that people on the south side tend to vote “regularly,” that people in the northeast vote “less often,” and that people on the west side, which is home to most of the city’s recent growth, “tend not to vote very much.”

I met with Taylor, who is 78 and now running for the study commission, at a cafe on the south side of town. He’s retired, he owns a home that he’s been told would sell for about $1.5 million, and he has lived in the city long enough to be on a first-name basis with all of its power players. He says he endorses the changes Morrison and allies seek, including the move to by-district municipal elections. 

Bozeman, Taylor told me, cannot continue operating as it has, with so many of the people who live here worrying about housing stability, falling homeless, or just moving out of the city entirely. 

“If you leave it to chance, we’re screwed, in my humble opinion,” he said. “You have houses that are built for people that have a lot of money, you have less affordability, and the worry is that we’re going down that road and we’re not getting off of it fast enough.”

Taylor hopes structural reforms in Bozeman will not only produce more diverse representation, but also inspire a more diverse electorate. He and others believe that it would make a big difference if people from all over town knew they had a neighbor at City Hall. 

“When you knock doors,” LaShelle said, “you’ll talk to folks on the south side who know the former mayors. You go to the northwest side of town and people say, ‘No one in this city gives a fuck about me.’ They’ll tell you that no one tells them anything about when a new development is coming in, or when an intersection is changing.”

Everyone from Clark to Morrison to Taylor seems to agree that electing city commissioners in districts does not itself promise any course correction. Plenty of other places with housing affordability crises elect city leaders this way, and most of Montana’s biggest cities, including Great Falls, Billings, Helena, and Missoula, already do, too. 

That’s why Tenants United doesn’t see this November’s election as a final step, just as it did not allow itself too much satisfaction with Morrison’s mayoral win. 

After all, what good is an overhauled government structure to this movement if it can’t produce policy change that prioritizes housing affordability? 

But there is a key difference, LaShelle believes, between Bozeman and other cities in Montana, and beyond, that have adopted some of the reforms that the study commission could consider. “An underlying issue in all these places is that working-class people have not been organized,” LaShelle said. “And here, they are getting organized.”

The post To Tackle Housing Crisis, These Organizers Want to First Change How City Hall Works appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever since the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a near-total abortion ban this month, pro-choice advocates have rushed to reverse it. They’ve pushed the GOP-run legislature to repeal the law, to no avail so far. They’ve defended the Democratic governor’s order blocking enforcement of the ban from legal pushback. And now they’re close to placing a constitutional amendment protecting abortion on the November ballot. 

If these statewide solutions fail, though, they’re at least eying Arizona’s local prosecutors as the backstop to an outcome they dread: the prospect of people facing criminal charges—and prison terms—over abortions.

“The least our county attorneys can do is commit that they would not prosecute those cases,” said State Representative Analise Ortiz, a Democrat whose district covers parts of Maricopa County. “They absolutely should do that to bring relief to the millions of people who are scared by this decision.”

Whether such a backstop materializes in Maricopa County—a giant jurisdiction home to more than four million residents in Phoenix and its surrounding areas—is going to come down to November’s prosecutor race.

Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican who is up for reelection this year, reacted to the ruling with a statement vowing that women would not be “prosecuted for receiving an abortion,” and especially calls out that she would not prosecute abortions that stem from rape, incest, or molestation. The statement did not, however, address whether she would prosecute doctors who provide abortions. Just days prior, Mitchell had said she’d enforce Arizona’s abortion law “whatever that law is.” She has also denounced as unlawful a gubernatorial order barring county attorneys like herself from prosecuting abortion. 

Mitchell’s only Democratic challenger, Tamika Wooten, promises she won’t pursue such prosecutions if she becomes county attorney. 

“I will not prosecute a woman for her personal health care decisions, nor will I prosecute the medical provider who performs that,” Wooten, a former local prosecutor and defense attorney, told Bolts. “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider, and it’s not my business.”

Mitchell’s office on Monday declined to answer questions from Bolts about whether she would prosecute doctors that provide abortion, only referring Bolts to her April 9 statement that does not mention medical providers. “That statement, in its entirety, is the information being provided at this time,” said a spokesperson for the office. 

Arizona’s revived ban, which dates back to 1864, mandates two to five years in prison for doctors who provide an abortion except when it’s to save a patient’s life.

In 2022, the GOP passed a separate law banning abortions after 15 weeks; that law also makes it a felony for doctors to violate those restrictions. 

Even if Arizona repeals the 1864 law, that would still leave in place this 15-week ban and its share of criminal penalties.

Wooten criticized Mitchell for not ruling out charges against medical professionals. “If you say you’re not going to prosecute the woman but you’re not quite sure if you’re going to prosecute the medical professional, licensed medical professionals are going to be wary of that,” Wooten said. “That’s gonna force a woman to go to a back alley. Now we’re subjecting women to all kinds of unsafe, unsanitary procedures… because our licensed professionals are afraid that they’re going to be prosecuted.” 

Wooten added, “We need to make sure that the people who are licensed and able to perform these can do it confidently without fearing felony prosecution or prison.”

In the GOP primary in August, Mitchell first faces a rematch against Gina Godbehere, a conservative who used to work as a prosecutor in the county attorney’s office; Godbehere did not reply to Bolts but has echoed Mitchell’s position on abortion in the past. 

Arizona’s 14 other counties also elect their chief prosecutor this year, but a statewide analysis by Bolts found that most of these races aren’t even contested, and among those that are, Maricopa County is unique in featuring a stark contrast on the issue of criminalizing abortion. It’s the only Arizona county where there’ll be at least one candidate on the ballot this year pledging to not prosecute abortion, and at least one candidate who hasn’t made that assurance. 

This single race, though, will have outsized resonance, since it’s playing out in the county that by itself is home to most of the state’s abortion clinics and the majority of Arizona’s population.

Mitchell was just a line prosecutor in the Maricopa County prosecutor’s office in 2018, when she was tapped by U.S. Senate Republicans to interrogate Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In 2022, the same year Kavanaugh voted to strike down federal protections for abortion in the Dobbs decision, Mitchell was appointed Maricopa county attorney after her predecessor’s surprise resignation.

Mitchell then prevailed in a 2022 special election that closely mirrored the upcoming election. In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs ruling, she defeated Godbehere in the Republican primary and then beat another pro-choice Democrat by six percentage points.

The state supreme court’s shock decision this month to trigger Arizona’s Civil War-era abortion ban has once again underscored the stakes of who occupies the local county attorney offices with a hand in enforcing it. Still, the exact role these county attorneys will play in either protecting or prosecuting abortion remains unsettled.

Statewide Democratic officials are currently trying to block county attorneys from targeting abortion. Governor Katie Hobbs issued an executive order last year that transferred all abortion cases to Attorney General Kris Mayes, who has pledged to never prosecute them. Combined with Mayes’ promise, Hobbs’ executive order moots the threat of criminal prosecutions for abortion—at least on paper.

But this guardrail is far from ironclad. Hobbs and Myers, who each won very narrow races in 2022, are both up for reelection in 2026. Were they to lose to anti-abortion Republicans in the future, their replacements could revert these cases to county attorneys or bring charges.

More urgently, many county attorneys, including Mitchell, are arguing that Hobbs’ order is invalid and say the governor lacks the legal power to give their cases to the attorney general. 

“It is a substantial overreach to suggest the governor may strip away prosecutorial discretion from local, elected officials,” Mitchell wrote in a letter to Hobbs last year. Jeanine L’Ecuyer, chief of communications for her office, reasserted Mitchell’s position this week, telling Bolts that county attorneys “are not supervised, nor do they report to, the attorney general.” (Wooten, her Democratic challenger, told Bolts she disagrees with Mitchell, and approves of Hobbs’ order.)

If a county attorney challenged or ignored Hobbs’ order, it would trigger a legal showdown—and the state supreme court may be the final arbiter, again. Aadika Singh, a senior attorney at the Public Rights Project, a national organization that was involved in the recent case against Arizona’s abortion ban, told Bolts this uncertainty will deter abortion care providers.

“The promises from the governor and her executive order, the attorney general’s statements, don’t help that doctor feel confident that she won’t be prosecuted by some rogue local prosecutor,” Singh said. 

Such a case could emerge from Yavapai County, home to Prescott and Sedona. Republican County Attorney Daniel McGrane jumped into the recent litigation to ask the state supreme court to revive the 1864 ban and has signaled his interest in prosecuting people for abortion.

When Bolts contacted the Yavapai county attorney’s office with questions about their policies, an employee told Bolts to contact the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious organization opposed to abortion that represented the office in court during the litigation over the 1864 ban. When Bolts clarified that it had questions about what McGrane would do in light of the court’s decision, and not just about the litigation, his executive assistant replied in an email, “I understand your request, and I have been directed to refer all inquires [sic] to the ADF.” 

The Alliance Defending Freedom did not answer Bolts’ question on how they were advising the Yavapai county attorney’s office, though they did share a generic statement celebrating the court’s ruling.

Asked about the Yavapai office deferring to the Alliance Defending Freedom, Singh told Bolts, “I think it’s very troubling when governments delegate their positions, their jobs, to ideological antichoice groups.” 

Singh’s organization is now fighting to get Arizona courts to delay the implementation of the 1864 ban; the attorney general said last week that the law would not be in effect until June 8 at the earliest. 

In the meantime, Democratic lawmakers made some progress toward repealing the ban altogether in the Senate last week despite Republicans’ narrow majority, but the odds of repeal are even lower in the House. Speaker Ben Toma, a Republican who controls what the chamber votes on and opposes repeal, said on the floor last week, “I would ask everyone in this chamber to respect the fact that some of us believe abortion is the murder of children.” 

Organizers are also championing a constitutional amendment that may end up on the ballot in November; in securing broader abortion rights in Arizona, the measure would overturn both the 1864 and 2022 bans.

“That is the most durable protection we can have here in our state,” said Chris Love, a spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access, the organization that’s pushing for an initiative to be voted on in November. The organization has already collected well above the required number of citizen signatures to qualify the measure, and they’re continuing to gather signatures to be safe. 

Obstacles remain, however. Proponents of the measure worry, for instance, that state courts may step in and strike down the initiative even if it passes, as happened a few years back with a state ballot measure to raise taxes to boost education funding. 

The composition of the state supreme court is not set in stone, though. Two of the justices who ruled to uphold the abortion ban this month, Clint Bolick and Kathryn King, are up for retention elections this fall; these races will decide whether they still sit on the bench next year to hear any challenge to the constitutional amendment if it passes. 

A progressive organization on Monday launched a campaign to urge Arizonans to vote “no” on retaining Bolick and King, the Arizona Republic reported, saying it would raise money toward that goal.

Arizona voters have never ousted a supreme court justice before, and several progressive Arizonans told Bolts last week that they were still unsure of how much attention these races would get. Ortiz, the Democratic lawmaker from Maricopa County, says these judicial races could double as a referendum on abortion rights. “If voters take that power to reject these judges, they’re going to send a really strong message,” Ortiz said. “I do think that it would be a worthwhile effort.” 

If the November measure protecting the right to abortion fails or is struck down, or if a court overturns Hobbs’ order preventing prosecutions, the state’s 15 county attorneys would inherit the authority to go after abortion providers within their jurisdiction. Twelve of the 15 current officeholders joined the letter opposing the governor’s executive order last year, though many have also dodged questions about whether they’d enforce the 1864 ban since the supreme court revived it. 

And while all county offices will be on the ballot this year, in most places, voters will have little choice on offer: Just four counties besides Maricopa even drew multiple candidates for prosecutor—Coconino (Flagstaff), Pima (Tucson), Pinal, and Yavapai counties, all of which will be resolved in the August primaries. 

In Coconino and Pima counties, all four candidates are Democrats—deputy prosecutor Ammon Barker and public defender Gary Pearlmutter in Coconino, incumbent Laura Conover and former deputy prosecutor Mike Jette in Pima—and all four told Bolts they would not prosecute abortion cases against either patients or doctors.

“The threat of prosecution will have a chilling effect on the medical administration of this state unless prosecutors in this state can give women and their medical providers clear assurance that this law will not affect them,” said Barker. Pearlmutter added that he also wants to shield “organizations who perform or assist a woman in receiving an abortion,” as well as “a family member or friend who assists a woman in transporting or obtaining an abortion.”

It’s the mirror image in the other two contested races, Pinal and Yavapai counties. Those only drew GOP candidates. 

Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer and his primary challenger Brad Miller did not respond to Bolts’ questions. Volkmer’s office also dodged questions by the Arizona Republic. Miller is a staunch conservative who describes himself as pro-life on his website.

David Stringer, a Republican running in Yavapai County against McGrane, said he was “disappointed” in the court’s decision to uphold the 1864 abortion ban, sharply breaking from McGrane, who championed the ruling. Stringer, a former state lawmaker who resigned in 2019 over scrutiny into racist remarks, told Bolts that people should have access to an abortion “in the very early stage of pregnancy.” But he did not rule out prosecutions for abortion. “I would want to see how my colleagues in other county’s handle this very sensitive issue,” he said via email. 

Stringer suggested that it may breach a prosecutor’s duty to refuse to enforce a law that’s in the books, telling Bolts, “A County Attorney is sworn to uphold the law—even laws they may not like.”

Ortiz, the Democratic lawmaker, insists that it does fall within county attorneys’ purview to refuse to prosecute abortion. She points out adultery is a crime under Arizona law and yet prosecutors aren’t going around hounding cheating spouses with criminal charges. 

“Prosecutors have the full discretion to determine which cases they’re going to file charges on and which cases are going to be dismissed, and they make those decisions every single day,” Ortiz said. “It is fully within their authority to say, ‘I am not going to prosecute cases that involve abortion under this unjust law.’”

Still, abortion rights advocates also warn that this emerging patchwork of policies—with some counties open to prosecuting abortion while others are not—is insufficient to protect abortion access even in places with favorable prosecutors. What happens in one county is bound to bleed into the rest of the state, they say, which is why their priorities are amending the constitution and defending Hobbs’ statewide prohibition on enforcement.

“If a few county attorneys decide to aggressively prosecute, it could result in doctors and other providers in other counties deciding not to provide abortion services, due to the lack of statewide consistency in how reproductive health services should be provided,” said Pearlmutter, the Coconino candidate, to explain why he supports the governor’s effort to block a “fractured approach” to enforcement.

In some states led by Republican executives, the drive for statewide consistency has gone the other way. GOP officials have cracked down on prosecutors who refuse to enforce abortion bans, exposing them to heavy retaliation. In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis went so far as to remove Tampa’s elected prosecutor from his job, ostensibly over such a pledge. 

Some prosecutors working under a broader ethos of criminal justice reform have also announced they won’t file criminal charges against a larger array of behaviors than just abortion—an approach known as declination. They have said these offenses are a matter for public health professionals, rather than for courts. For instance Julie Gunnigle, Democrats’ unsuccessful nominee in Maricopa County in 2020 and 2022, had pledged to not prosecute low-level drug possession and sex work.

Maricopa Democrats’ candidate this year, Wooten, did not name any type of charge besides abortion that she would decline to prosecute during an interview with Bolts, though she said she wanted to increase alternatives to incarceration for people with addiction or mental health issues in order to “address the underlying issue, as opposed to just throwing everybody in prison.” 

But Wooten drew a line in the sand against enforcing a law that is about “taking constitutional rights away from women.” She invoked Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement’s legacy of civil disobedience.

“Sometimes you may have to bend the rules in order to make a greater good for America,” she said.

The post Arizona Will Elect County Prosecutors in Shadow of Abortion Ban appeared first on Bolts.

Bob Harvie was thrust on the national stage in late 2020 when Donald Trump, in an effort to find any angle to cling to the presidency, unsuccessfully sued Bucks County, a populous suburb of Philadelphia, demanding that thousands of mail ballots be thrown out. 

As one of the two Democrats on the three-member county commission, Harvie was responsible for the county’s voting procedures and he wanted people to vote safely during the pandemic. With his support, Bucks County installed ballot drop boxes and notified roughly 1,600 voters that they had made a clerical mistake on their mail ballot such as forgetting to date their envelopes, giving them the opportunity to correct it—a common procedure known as ballot curing.

“The Republican Party and the Trump campaign wanted things done a certain way, we didn’t do things the way they wanted to, so they sued us. Clearly we’d followed the law because we won all these suits,” recalls Harvie, who is running for reelection in two weeks. The race will determine what party controls Bucks County’s commission during the next presidential election.

Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019 for the first time in decades, one of five flips in eastern Pennsylvania counties with more than 2 million residents combined. The results gave Democrats near total control of the ring of counties around Philadelphia. Their new majorities approved relatively expansive voting procedures, and in late 2020 they effectively created a suburban firewall against Trump’s efforts to get officials in blue counties to throw out ballots and resist certifying the results. 

Pennsylvania leaves county officials with a lot of discretion to decide how to run elections. They have tremendous leeway in particular when it comes to deciding the modalities of voting by mail. The state provides little binding guidance on whether a county needs to have a ballot drop box, let alone how many drop boxes to have or how accessible they should be. County officials also decide whether to notify voters whose ballot risks being rejected because of a minor mistake. 

This has produced a disconcerting patchwork of policies. “You can have boards of elections that are 15 minutes apart and yet the rules are so different,” says Kadida Kenner, executive director of New PA Project, an organization that focuses on boosting voter registration and turnout. 

In the lead-up to the 2020 and 2022 elections, many counties adopted more restrictive rules, including not installing drop boxes and not letting voters correct mistakes on their envelopes. The decisions did not always fall neatly on partisan lines, and voting rights organizations have targeted Democratic boards for tossing out too many ballots, including in the city of Philadelphia. But, by and large, Republican politicians since 2020 have been more likely to oppose procedures that facilitate mail voting. Even Dauphin County (the bluest county under GOP control) has not allowed ballot curing, offering a glimpse into what the voter-rich suburban ring around Philadelphia would have looked like had Democrats not made major gains in 2019.

Harvie points to the rules in place in other parts of Pennsylvania to lay out the stakes of his county’s Nov. 7 elections. 

“If Republicans are in control of the board of elections in 2024,” he told Bolts, “I don’t have any doubt that a lot of the things we put in place will be gone.” 

If the county reversed its approach on curing, he says, officials would likely reject thousands of mail ballots without first reaching out to voters to say there was an issue with their ballot. “The dangerous part is that people won’t know that their votes aren’t counted,” he says. “You’re gonna think, ‘Oh, I guess I voted, I didn’t do anything wrong.’ You wouldn’t even know that you had been denied.”

Voters in other counties will also be deciding the shape of their county governments on Nov. 7, which means that they’ll also be choosing who will run next year’s elections in this critical swing state—and under what policy. 

Republicans could flip closely divided counties like Bucks, but they’ll also test Democratic gains in counties like Chester that have swung dramatically blue since 2019 after staying faithful to Republicans for decades in local elections. Democrats, meanwhile, have some opportunities to gain ground, for instance in Dauphin and Berks. 

The results will shape how easy it is for millions of Pennsylvanians to vote—especially by mail—and the odds that their ballot will be rejected. 

“If newly elected county governments in Pennsylvania remove drop boxes, if they remove the ability for voters to cure their ballots, they’ll make it even harder for eligible voters to have the votes counted,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that promotes wider access to voting. 

“That could impact tens or hundreds of thousands of voters in the 2024 election and change the result of the election,” Hensley-Robin added.

The results will also inform which counties are susceptible to not certify next year’s elections. Plenty of commissioner candidates who’ve amplified Trump’s false claims of widespread irregularities advanced past the GOP primaries, often in staunchly red counties, Bolts reported in May. 

Among them are Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera, the two Republican commissioners who run Berks County, a jurisdiction of more than 400,000 people located 50 miles west of Bucks County. Last year, they refused to certify their county’s election results because they wanted to exclude some valid mail ballots from their counts; a state court ultimately forced them to certify the results.

Leinbach and Rivera are now facing Democratic challengers Jesse Royer and Dante Santoni, who told Bolts in separate interviews that they’re worried about 2024: They think the GOP incumbents, if they remain in control, could once again placate election deniers next year and try to toss out results.

“The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” Santoni told Bolts. “When the election is over, we accept the results. We think that that distinguishes us from our opponents. We talk about a lot of issues—roads, economic development—but without democracy, all those issues don’t mean a whole lot.” 

Leinbach and Rivera did not reply to requests for comment. GOP commissioners are also running for reelection in Fayette and Lancaster counties after similarly stalling certification of the 2022 primaries.

Royer and Santoni, the Democratic challengers in Berks, also laid out how they would ease mail voting. Both want to notify voters if their ballots have an error; Berks County’s Republican commissioners defeated a motion earlier this year for the county to provide such information to voters. “We need to make sure that people who are trying to cast their ballots are given every opportunity to do so,” Royer said.

Both Democrats also want to increase the number of ballot drop boxes set up in the county; Royer pointed out that it’s critical to make them widely accessible given that the county has poor public transportation. Both also oppose the county’s current policy, unusual in this state, of stationing armed sheriff’s deputies at ballot boxes; they warn that this may intimidate some voters, a position that Common Cause and other civil rights groups share. 

Unlike in Berks County, voters in Bucks County currently do not have to interact with armed law enforcement to cast a ballot. Harvie, the Democratic commissioner, says he wants to keep it that way. 

Harvie also worries that Bucks County could go the way of Berks County in terms of objections to election certification. He stresses that the Bucks County Republican Party is chaired by Pat Poprik, who became a false presidential elector for Trump in December 2020 and has clout over local GOP politics. Conservatives have recently taken the county by storm with major upheavals to local public schools via book bans and restrictions on LGBTQ+ students, and Democrats are tying these far-right gains on local school boards to the commissioner race.

The Republican candidate who is vying to join and flip Bucks County’s commission, County Controller Pamela Van Blunk, did not reply to a request for comment.

Voting rights attorneys in Pennsylvania told Bolts that they are less anxious about counties not certifying results than they are about thousands of mail ballots being tossed, since state courts are likely to intervene in the former scenario. County officials are not meant to have discretion to reject valid results, says Marian Schneider, who works on voting rights policy at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. She says that their task is merely “ministerial,” but that the ACLU will be vigilant. 

Still, Hensley-Robin of Common Cause is worried that Trump, should he be the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2024, would seek to weaponize delays and confusion in a replay of 2020. “When we see individual counties delaying certification or messing with voting machines, that spreads distrust in the election system, and that builds misinformation, which can result in moving to overturn an election,” he says.

Another fake Trump elector, Sam DeMarco, is currently a county commissioner in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county. He holds an at-large seat that’s effectively reserved for the GOP, which makes it certain he will win a new term on Nov. 7. Should Republicans also win the unusually heated race for county executive, this would give them control of the county’s board of elections, which is made up of the county executive and the two at-large members. 

The Republican nominee for county executive, Joe Rockey, has distanced himself from Trump. But any small voting policy change in this populous county—where Biden won 150,000 more votes than Trump, double his statewide margin—would have important ramifications in 2024.

Pennsylvania in 2019 enacted Act 77, a bipartisan law that greatly expanded the availability of mail voting, but it did not set statewide guidelines for how counties should approach vital questions related to mail-in voting, including how to deal with clerical errors made by voters. Schneider regrets, for instance, that “there really is nothing in the election code that addresses what happens if a mistake has been made on the outer envelope.” 

State courts have stepped into this void since 2020, but in ways that have only compounded the importance of what county officials decide with regards to ballot curing. 

For one, Republicans have won legal battles ensuring that mail ballots with small errors will get tossed if they aren’t fixed in time; in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, the supreme court ordered officials not to count a ballot if the voter forgot to write a date, even if the ballot arrived on time. “There are new things that can disqualify you,” Hensley-Robin warns. Due to this higher standard, he says, thousands of ballots risk being tossed in 2024 that would not have been in 2020—unless voters get to cure them first.

Pennsylvanians are also electing a new state supreme court justice this fall, with the two candidates staking very different opinions on how permissive courts should be toward mail voting.

Moreover, courts have confirmed that there is no statewide rule regarding whether counties must help voters correct their mistakes. In 2022, they rejected a Republican lawsuit demanding that all counties stop the practice of ballot curing altogether. The decision was a relief for voting rights advocates since it meant boards could still choose to let voters cure their ballots, but it also entrenched the current status quo that  leaves the matter entirely to counties’ discretion.

Advocates for ballot access are deeply frustrated that the state has been reduced to this mosaic of disparate policies. Policies should not differ so starkly from one county to the next when it comes to the ease of mail voting, they say. “This patchwork from county to county really confuses voters and makes them unsure of the rules in the system,” says Hensley-Robin.

Kenner, of New PA Project, says this fragmentation also stands as a big obstacle for organizations like hers that are working on the ground to drive up turnout. 

“It gets very confusing for a statewide organization to be able to subscribe to the various rules that board of elections have in each county,” she told Bolts. “As we’re preparing to do our GOTV efforts, we have to make sure that all scripts are different for each county… It also makes it tough when we’re doing voter registration, and we’re dropping off completed voter registration forms to various boards of elections and they all have different rules.”

For Hensley-Robin, the remedy cannot just be persuading individual county commissioners throughout the state of Pennsylvania to ease ballot access. He is advocating for the state to adopt House Bill 847, which would impose new statewide mandates, for instance when it comes to guaranteeing that counties give all voters a chance to correct their ballots. 

“Ballots should not be disqualified for failure to meet a clerical or technical standard,” says Hensley-Robin. “If voters make a small mistake in terms of failing to date a ballot or put a signature or have a secrecy envelope, they should have an opportunity to fix those. There needs to be a requirement for all counties to notify voters actively within 24 hours of receipt about one of these defects so that they have an opportunity to cure it immediately.”

Without such mandates, the Nov. 7 elections have graver stakes than anyone wishes on them.

“Where you live shouldn’t determine whether you have an opportunity to have your vote counted,” he added.

The post Pennsylvanians Are About to Decide Who Will Oversee the 2024 Elections appeared first on Bolts.

“People know that our shower list fills up quickly,” Beddis said. She says the drop in center is one of only two places unhoused people in Kensington can consistently take a shower. Visitors can also pick up safer use supplies like drug testing strips, get clean clothes and snacks, or simply hang out—lounging and chatting under the center’s neon purple lights and framed posters of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

“It really is a community,” Beddis said. “If somebody spills their coffee, we have our regulars that will jump up and be like, ‘Just give me the mop. I’ll take care of it,’ you know what I mean?”

Kensington and the people who live, work, and use drugs in this small neighborhood on the city’s northeast side have drawn scrutiny in the run up to Philadelphia’s May 16 Democratic primary, which will likely decide the city’s next mayor.

In a tightly-run race animated by issues of crime and public safety, debates on substance use have honed in on Kensington’s opioid crisis and significant unhoused population. All five of the leading candidates say the city needs to end what’s widely described as an “open-air drug market” and increase policing in the neighborhood. At least two of these candidates also propose raising the police budget. 

But local critics of a law enforcement-first approach to substance use worry that it may elevate overdose risks and perpetuate harm against people who use drugs, especially in Black and Latinx communities that already experience more policing. Instead, they hope the city’s next mayor will embrace harm reduction—a set of public health and social justice strategies aimed at protecting the dignity, autonomy, and rights of people who use drugs.

The city government’s response to substance use and the overdose crisis has thus far involved a complex patchwork of departments including police, public health, behavioral health, and homelessness services, and dozens of others, with guidance from the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, grassroots organizers in the city are locked in a years-long battle with state and federal officials to create a space for safer drug consumption. The proposal, championed by a nonprofit called Safehouse, has enjoyed some support from city officials since 2018 but has been delayed by lawsuits and now state legislation, even as similar sites have appeared in New York City. 

The next mayor will oversee the city’s response to the ongoing overdose crisis and shape its policies, wielding powers like its budget proposals, executive orders, or appointing the police commissioner. The mayor’s position on an overdose prevention site may also make or break the proposal in light of some state politicians’ ongoing efforts to preempt the sites. 

“The next mayor must take research about the effectiveness of harm reduction techniques seriously,” said Shoshana Aronowitz, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing who studies racial equity in substance use treatment and works with several harm reduction organizations across the city. 

A skyrocketing overdose crisis

Over 1,200 Philadelphians died of accidental overdoses in 2021—the highest number ever recorded. The potent opioid fentanyl has found its way into stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine, and an increasingly unpredictable drug supply, plus a lack of adequate prevention resources are driving up overdose rates citywide, especially in its Black and Latinx communities. A 2021 city report recommended using the phrase “overdose crisis” rather than “opioid crisis” to more adequately capture this impact. 

Much of Philadelphia’s current response infrastructure dates to 2017, when Mayor Jim Kenney convened a task force to determine how to “combat the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.” The task force’s final report called for easier access to medication assisted treatment, in which doctors prescribe drugs called methadone and buprenorphine to relieve withdrawal symptoms and reduce the risk of overdose. It also advocated increasing access to naloxone, which can help reverse overdoses, expanding drug treatment court, and providing additional resources for housing and jobs training. 

As fatal overdose rates continued to increase, however, Kenney declared an “opioid emergency” in Kensington and directed law enforcement to reduce “open-air drug use and sales.” Since then, the police have increased foot patrols in the neighborhood, seizing cash and drugs and making over 2,500 arrests in 2022 alone.

Since 2020, a harm reduction program within the city’s department of public health has been distributing naloxone and fentanyl test strips through street-based outreach and training Philadelphians on how to spot and reverse overdoses. The city also funds some of the work of a Kensington-based harm reduction nonprofit offering syringe exchanges. And the department of health has committed to reducing overdoses that involve stimulants 20 percent by the end of 2023, according to its strategic plan. 

All five leading mayoral candidates have expressed some vision of treatment for people who use drugs, but Rebecca Rhynhart and Helen Gym’s proposals most resemble this existing plan. Both have expressed support for medication assisted treatment. 

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate would “improve prevention, [drug] testing, and treatment outreach,” especially in “underserved Black communities in North, Southwest, and West Philadelphia, where overdose rates are rising.”

Candidate Jeff Brown has advocated for drug treatment through the criminal legal system. 

“Drug court [is] a very effective way to have a good outcome, because you monitor their substance use. If they fall off the wagon, they have a choice. Do you want to go to jail for your crimes, or do you want to go back to treatment?” he said at a recent candidate forum about public health.

But Aronowitz warns that not all treatment options are created equal. “We know what doesn’t work,” Aronowitz said, “And that is expecting people to just quit cold turkey and be fine, because we know that that’s associated with extreme overdose risk.” 

“When a politician says we need more access to treatment, that’s not enough,”she continued. “We need to know if they’re going to fund the things that work and defund the things that not only don’t work but are potentially harmful.” 

The battle over Safehouse

Advocates doing harm reduction work in Philadelphia are pushing the city government to expand its focus on keeping people alive, beyond offering treatment, and they have fought to establish an overdose prevention site in Philadelphia, an effort the city government nominally supports. Such sites, also known as safe drug consumption sites, are places people can use pre-obtained drugs more safely, in the presence of staff trained to spot and reverse overdoses. 

As of July 2022, more than 120 overdose prevention sites existed in ten countries across the world, and no fatal overdoses had ever taken place in one. But they remain controversial in the United States. So far, only two such sites exist in the country, both in New York City, where staff have reversed more than 700 overdoses in the less than two years since they were created. Rhode Island legalized the creation of a pilot site in summer 2021 and is set to open one in early 2024. California governor Gavin Newsom last year killed legislation that would have allowed San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles to establish their own sites. 

In Philadelphia, efforts to open such a site have been caught for years in a protracted battle pitting harm reduction advocates and some city officials like DA Larry Krasner against the U.S. Justice Department, some state politicians, and opponents in law enforcement, business, and residential communities across the city. 

The struggle dates to a recommendation from Mayor Kenney’s 2017 opioid crisis task force to explore creating a space for safe consumption. In 2018, a nonprofit called Safehouse launched with the aim of opening a site in the city. But soon after, a U.S. Attorney appointed by President Donald Trump sued Safehouse invoking a federal law which prohibits “maintaining drug-involved premises” where criminalized drugs are manufactured, distributed, or used. 

In February 2020, the federal judge’s ruling in Safehouse’s favor led the group’s leaders to announce the site’s imminent opening in South Philadelphia. But after vehement opposition from neighbors, the plans folded in just two days. In 2021, a federal appeals court reversed the ruling that had cleared the way for Safehouse to open, relaunching the legal battle.

The plan remains uncertain at this time. Settlement talks between Safehouse and the U.S. Justice Department have been ongoing for over a year. Local opposition exploded last month, when a group including the police union and business associations filed a petition to step in as party plaintiffs in the lawsuit, fearing that the Biden Administration would reverse its position. 

Opponents to the site scored a decisive win earlier this month when Pennsylvania’s state Senate voted to ban overdose prevention sites anywhere in the state on a bipartisan 41-9 vote.

The bill was sponsored by Democratic Senator Christine Tartaglione, whose district includes parts of Kensington. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she opposes “prolonging and allowing a system of state-sponsored addiction in Pennsylvania.” 

The bill now sits in the state House’s Judiciary Committee. If it passed the chamber, it would move on to Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has indicated he opposes safe consumption sites.

Meanwhile, five Philadelphia city council members introduced a local bill on May 11 that would prevent an overdose prevention site from being created anywhere in their districts, an area amounting to about half the city. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, whose district includes Kensington, led the effort, saying that such a site would only worsen the neighborhood’s struggles with drug consumption. 

“We cannot continue to allow them to find ways where they can continue to remain in the same cycle,” she told Inquirer. The bill would still need to get a committee hearing and be voted on by the entire city council—a process that may not happen before the council’s summer recess beginning in July—before going to the mayor to be signed. 

In public statements and court filings, Kenney’s administration has supported efforts to open an overdose prevention site, and remains supportive even in light of the new city and statewide bills. Whether the next mayor supports Safehouse would likely be critical to its chances given that the proposal is assailed from many quarters.

Among mayoral candidates, Helen Gym, a former teacher and city council member embraced by activists on the left, is the only one to have directly stated support for an overdose prevention site, though she did so before the protracted legal battle over Safehouse. 

“[Safe injection sites] are among the most promising new approaches to come forward while we work to end the opioid crisis. I support establishing one in Philadelphia,” Gym said in 2017. Her statement at the time added momentum for the proposal by giving it a prominent supporter on the city council. Gym has recently offered more circumspect answers in public comments, and did not respond to Bolts’ question about whether she currently supports opening a site in the city.

Another leading candidate, former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart, expressed measured support for the proposal. “I won’t take a tool that experts say saves lives off the table,” she told Bolts. “But I would not put a safe injection site in any neighborhood that does not want one.”

“I think that the debate over safe injection sites in Philadelphia has clouded the bigger issue which is what is the comprehensive plan for dealing with the opioid crisis in our city,” she added. 

Three other major contenders—real estate mogul and former councilor Allan Domb, grocery store magnate Jeff Brown, and former councilor Cherelle Parker—all oppose the sites. Parker has been a strident opponent since Safehouse’s efforts to open a site in early 2020, when she participated in the city council’s mobilization against the opening. 

“We should not be participating in a ‘I know what’s best for you’ decision making where we use safe injection sites as solutions,” Parker said in a debate on April 18.

Policing a public health crisis

The role of policing has proved broadly divisive in the mayoral primary, and yet the five leading candidates support increasing police presence on the ground in Kensington, distancing themselves from advocates who worry it would exacerbate criminalization. 

Gym and Rhynhart each said they would do so by reallocating existing police funds to prioritize Kensington, while increasing the police budget overall is a central component of both Domb and Parker’s platforms.

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate will take a “public health and resident-focused, community-led response,” mentioning a focus on neighborhood improvements, trauma support, and mobile crisis units, but did not detail how increased policing will fit in. 

Rhynhart’s campaign website states that she will attempt to disrupt public drug use by focusing on dealers, with a mix of warnings for “non-violent dealers” and arrests for “those committing violent acts.”

Sheila Vakharia, who helps lead research at the Drug Policy Alliance, warns that the line between people using drugs and people selling drugs is much more fluid. 

“There’s this idea that there is this big bad demon-ish seller and this poor victim user and oftentimes the seller is racialized. The victim is also racialized, but differently,” Vakharia said. “And oftentimes all of this can create heroes and villains.”

To both Aronowitz and Beddis of Savage Sisters, ending the overdose crisis requires a solution beyond what has been proposed by any candidate in the Philadelphia mayor’s race: addressing the toxicity of the criminalized drug market. They argue instead for access to a safe supply of criminalized drugs in a way that clinical and community-led programs have modeled across Europe and Canada, but which has not been piloted in the U.S.

“The way we regulate alcohol is safe supply,” Aronowitz said. “We make sure it’s not poison, and that when you take a drink, you can reliably know how much alcohol is in it.” 

But even if those goals are still far off, at the very least, they say, the city government should meet communities impacted by the overdose crisis with resources and care—not criminalization.

“Our friends have necrotic limbs. Can’t access treatment. Can’t access housing. Can’t access compassionate pain management. Can’t even get a shower,” Savage Sisters’ founder and executive director Sarah Laurel wrote on LinkedIn last month.

“It’s time we respond to this public health crisis accordingly.”

The post How Will Philadelphia’s Next Mayor Tackle the Overdose Crisis? appeared first on Bolts.

The conservative politicians in charge of Tennessee’s state government have relentlessly aimed in the last year to diminish the political power of the state’s most populous and liberal-leaning city by curtailing Nashville’s representation in Congress, shrinking the size of its Metro Council, investigating the operations of its district attorney, and now attempting to interfere in its electoral processes.   

Most recently, Republican state Representative Jason Zachary and Senator Brent Taylor proposed a bill that would, if passed, ban runoffs in all municipal elections within the state. 

For solidly-liberal Nashville, the bill’s passage could have meant an upheaval for the upcoming mayoral election this August. The city’s elections are nominally nonpartisan, but Democrats have consistently won the mayor’s office for decades. Runoffs are common in the city’s mayoral elections, where the vote is often split between several Democrats and a few Republicans. Traditionally, after a consolidated voting bloc emerges following eliminations in a first round, a Democrat carries the mayoral election handily. The elimination of runoffs in Nashville’s mayoral elections would have opened the door for a Republican to win the position based on a plurality, even if the majority of votes go to Democrats.

Senate Bill 1527 was initially filed with placeholder language, but just before a hearing in the Senate’s State and Local Government Committee on March 14, Taylor brought two amendments explicitly banning local runoff elections. The entire bill was tabled before the amendments were approved and it has been deferred to the committee’s first 2024 convening, where it’s likely to resurface.  

But even though this year’s election remains unaffected by this proposed change, candidates for mayor, Democratic legislators, and local activists within Nashville have been loud in their opposition to the measure, and remain wary of similar moves being made in the 2024 session and beyond.

They point to the proposal as part of an alarming trend of conservative legislative attacks that threaten Nashville’s ability to be represented earnestly, and demonstrate a new approach for red states to skirt the voting rights of resistant communities in blue localities. They warn that this pattern, which has begun to reverberate throughout the region, signals a new era for voter suppression in the Deep South.

“This is not an isolated incident. This is an abuse of power,” said Senator Charlane Oliver, a Democratic lawmaker who represents Nashville. “This is about control.”

Before it was delayed, SB 1527 had amassed significant support among Tennessee Republicans, including vocal backing from state party chair Scott Golden, who claimed that the bill’s passage would “get local races in line with the rest of the state.” Taylor, one of the bill’s sponsors, had pointed to the state’s troubled history as a reason for advancing the legislation. “Runoffs are a relic of the Jim Crow South. They were designed to prevent minorities from winning elections,” Taylor told the Nashville Banner.

Taylor is right in pointing out this history—runoffs were initially introduced in Southern states as a way to prevent Black voters from winning elections based upon pluralities, with the runoff stage therefore allowing white majorities to consolidate behind a single, often anti-civil rights, candidate. However, scholars have pointed to Black voters’ integration into the political system to argue that the era’s context matters, and that in most contemporary elections—and in Tennessee’s in particular—this runoff disadvantage no longer seems to occur. Runoffs today are common in local elections throughout the state, especially in its three largest cities of Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville. All three cities currently have Democratic mayors.

Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Democrat who represents Nashville in the legislature—and who recently announced his candidacy for mayor—sees this bill as undermining the city’s elections, especially considering that Nashville is Tennessee’s most racially diverse city. “The problem with this bill, like so many election bills in recent years, is that there’s an attempt to change the outcomes of local elections, as opposed to changing the process,” he told Bolts. “This bill seems aimed at achieving partisan ends more so than democracy.”

“Any bill that is designed to eliminate an entire election procedure, by design, is voter suppression,” said Oliver. She recently won her seat in the state senate after a notable career as a voting rights and racial justice activist, co-leading The Equity Alliance. In the legislature, her experience as an organizer has shaped her perspective. “These efforts to stifle opposition and silence voices are an attack on democracy.”

SB 1527 comes on the heels of a number of legislative measures that would increase the state government’s authority over Nashville’s local proceedings and hamstring the city’s ability to elect officials that align with the city’s political makeup. 

In the 2020 presidential election, Democratic nominee Joe Biden got nearly twice as many votes as Republican Donald Trump in Davidson County, which contains Nashville. Shortly after, in the 2020 redistricting cycle, Tennessee Republicans eliminated Nashville’s congressional seat, splintering the city into three new congressional districts, all favoring the more conservative rural communities outside of the city. The 5th District, which contains the largest chunk of the city, is currently represented by U.S. Representative Andy Ogles, who is the first Republican to represent Nashville in Congress since 1875. 

In early March, Governor Bill Lee signed into law a reduction of Nashville’s city council size, cutting the council in half from 40 members, to 20. The measure, which sped through the legislature, does not name Nashville explicitly, but was still designed to target the city, which is the only one that currently has more than 20 members. It also overrides a 2015 referendum in which Nashville residents voted overwhelmingly to maintain the size of the Metro Council. The city government immediately sued to have it blocked, but if it is allowed to stand, it will impact the upcoming city council elections, also taking place this August. 

Additional bills currently moving through the legislature would eliminate funding for Nashville’s convention center and offer authority to state officials to oversee the Nashville airport. 

At the same time, state Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, has opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Glenn Funk, the Democratic District Attorney of Davidson County over whether his team violated state wiretapping laws with cameras that were placed around the office. This investigation comes months after Funk said that he would not prosecute abortion after Tennessee’s abortion ban took effect in the wake of the Dobbs decision. 

“This is a coordinated attack,” said Oliver. “We have to sound the alarm. And this isn’t just an attack on Nashville—if you can do it to Nashville, who’s next? Memphis?” 

The actions of Tennessee politicians follow a pattern of other states with conservative legislatures using their authority to exert control over the policies of growing liberal cities and counties. This happens by way of preemption, a doctrine that allows state governments to restrict or overrule the powers of local governments. Preemption has at times been used to maintain equality and uniformity of application of environmental or labor laws, for instance. But states have more recently wielded preemption as a political tool to strip municipalities of their autonomy and representation—blocking local ordinances dealing with everything from housing and minimum wage to immigration and, since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion access and reproductive rights.

“Unfortunately, what Nashville is facing is not unique,” said Marissa Roy, the legal team lead at the Local Solutions Support Center, a national organization working to strengthen local democracy and combat abuse of preemption. “Increasingly, state preemption has aimed at ideological outcomes without considering the long-term consequences for local governance.” Roy points to a bill being considered in Florida that would allow companies to sue local governments over measures they disagree with, and another in Texas that would wrest away local governments’ regulatory powers over agriculture, labor, and other areas. 

“Preemption is both bad governance and anti-democratic. Laws that reduce the size of the Nashville City Council, for example, impede more community-based representation,” she added. “Ultimately, these laws undermine the will of voters, who should be the ones to choose their representatives and vote for the policy platforms they support, without the risk of state reversal through preemption.”

In southern states in particular, preemptive legislation has taken aim at voting and criminal legal systems. In Mississippi, the legislature is considering a bill to create a separate court system for the city of Jackson, empowering white state officials to oversee criminal proceedings in a city that boasts one of the highest percentage of Black residents in the country. In Missouri, conservative legislators are attempting to strip St. Louis’s control of their metro police force, instead shifting authority to the state’s governor. 

“The playbook has always been there,” said Oliver. “The Southern strategy never left.”

In Nashville, these legislative attacks on enfranchisement and political autonomy go hand in hand with efforts to change local identity, and have tangible impacts within the community. In early March, following the governor’s signature on a bill banning public drag performances and gender-affirming healthcare for minors, white supremacists unfurled a banner in Nashville’s city center displaying a swastika and transphobic slurs, explicitly thanking Lee for “[securing] a future for white children.” 

Sharon Hurt, an at-large council member for the city of Nashville, and current candidate for mayor, traces the city’s current tension in its relationship with the state, back to the Nashville Metro Council’s decision last year to reject state GOP officials’ bid to have Nashville host the 2024 Republican National Convention. 

“They’re using their power because they’re upset that we did not vote to bring the Republican National Convention here,” said Hurt. “They felt like Democrats were denying Republicans from coming [to Nashville]. They’re now attacking us to show the power that they have.”

As Nashville continues to grow both in population and in national profile, the tension surrounding efforts to court the 2024 Republican National Convention highlights both the state’s interest in shaping Nashville’s image as a major conservative urban center, and local leaders’ and activists’ united resistance against this portrayal. Nashville has a history of being a locus of progressive activism in the South—going back to John Lewis and Diane Nash’s infamous 1960 lunch counter sit-ins. 

“Cities develop their own political cultures,” Yarbro said, “and Nashville is conditioned to have these wide-open debates that ultimately turn into coalition-building exercises… That’s really conducive to good politics and the kind of coalition-building that a mayor needs, not just to win a runoff election, but to lead a city. [However], there’s a dangerous national trend to advance minoritarian politics, where a cohesive minority can achieve disproportionate political power and control.”

Looking ahead to the upcoming mayoral election, recently spared from the threat of eliminated runoffs, Hurt sees the time between now and 2024’s legislative session—the period in which SB 1527 could resurface—as an opportunity to convince the legislature to change course. 

“It gives us time to change their perspective,” said Hurt, emphasizing that the change will only occur if the Nashville community puts up a fierce fight between now and then. “One thing that I love about Nashville is that in the most catastrophic and challenging times, is when the best of our city comes out. This bill may be a divisive move, but it is not our destiny. There is hope. I don’t care how bleak it looks.”  

Nashville’s representatives fear that more hits may be coming but say they’ll keep speaking loudly against these moves by the state government, urging organizing efforts, and looking for allies in the court system. 

“When you’re outnumbered [in the legislature], there’s really not much you can do other than speak out in hopes that the courts will step in,” said Oliver, who is one of only six Democrats in the 33-member Senate. Oliver and other Senate Democrats are vocal on social media about these bills—often posting direct clips and videos from committee hearings to emphasize the state of play. 

“We have to begin to really start to talk to one another and strategize together to fight these bills off from a selfless place,” she said, “because if it’s not me tomorrow, it’s you today.”

The post How the Tennessee GOP is Trying to Mute Music City appeared first on Bolts.

“This is the first time in the history of Chicago and in the history of the United States that Black and brown people have been given a democratic option to say who polices their communities and how their communities are policed,” activist Frank Chapman said of the new police oversight body. 

Chapman, now 80 years old, led the grassroot movement that prompted the city council to pass the Empowering Communities for Public Safety (ECPS) ordinance in 2021, creating the district councils.

These councils, the culmination of decades of activism for increased police accountability, represent Chicago’s boldest attempt to give residents direct input over policing practices. Councils will hold forums and monthly public meetings to hear residents’ concerns and discuss topics like police interactions with youth and undocumented residents, community policing, and restorative justice initiatives.

Each district council will operate with three positions; a chairperson, a community engagement coordinator, and a member who serves on the nominating committee for another citywide police oversight board. All members of a council must be a resident of the district for at least a year, and none can be active members of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), although former officers can be elected if they left the department at least three years prior to the date on which they would assume office.

While these duties and responsibilities outlined in the ECPS ordinance are fairly clear, much about the members’ day-to-day responsibilities has yet to be determined. “We are building the plane while we’re flying it,” is how Julia Kline, a candidate for the 2nd District police council who is also a voting rights activist and former Chicago Public School teacher, described it. 

Over 100 candidates are now running for the 66 council seats. They come from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences—young people of color and Chicago Public School teachers to retired CPD officers and practicing attorneys—and many have not held elected office before. 

As the inaugural members, the winners in Tuesday’s election will likely chart the direction of future district councils and have a hand in shaping how they handle common community complaints such as lengthy response times or patterns of misconduct like stop-and-frisk. Although the practice was reined in under a 2015 federal consent decree, stop-and-frisk is nevertheless still occurring to Black and brown youth, according to at least one district council candidate. But if candidates with pro-police and reform-minded views end up on these councils, any nominations, policy recommendations, and initiatives that emerge will be contingent on the ability of these factions—who have historically been at odds—to share power. 

Most crucially, the district councils will help decide who gets nominated to serve on the seven-member Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), another accountability body with more direct and wide-ranging powers over CPD’s policies and budget. This city-wide oversight commission, which was also created by the 2021 ordinance, can also remove the head of the Citizens Office of Police Accountability (COPA), which has existed since 2017 and is tasked with conducting its own investigations into police misconduct and releasing reports and body-cam footage that result from those investigations. 

COPA has faced public criticism after the police killing of Harith Augustus in 2018, the botched raid on social worker Anjanette Young’s home in 2019, and the fatal shooting of Adam Toledo in 2021. In these cases and others, Chicago residents took issue with the length of time it took COPA to release its disciplinary recommendations, and for its hesitancy to release all available body-cam footage from the incidents, not just those videos deemed most relevant.

The Commission can also cast a vote of no confidence for Chicago’s police superintendent, forcing both City Council hearings and a public response from the mayor which could lead to their possible ouster. It also gets to draft the shortlist of candidates whenever a vacancy arises.

Asked how these reforms were achieved, Chapman said, “We built a grassroots movement in the neighborhoods going door by door, block by block, district by district. And after we built up a big groundswell of support, we actually forced the city to the negotiating table to negotiate this history-making ordinance.”

But the roots of the movement extend back much further than this most recent election cycle. Calls for community control of policing trace back to the Black Panther Party and Illinois deputy chairman Fred Hampton Sr., who brought the first multicultural Rainbow Coalition together in the late 1960s around this very issue. But the reform effort failed, according to Chapman, in the face of concerted opposition from Chicago’s political machine helmed by longtime mayor Richard J. Daley. (Hampton was later killed by Chicago police, in conjunction with the FBI.)

Nevertheless, the 2012 killing of Rekia Boyd by off-duty police detective Dante Servin, and his subsequent acquittal on the charges of involuntary manslaughter, reignited calls for police accountability. It also prompted the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) and other organizers to host a meeting that was attended by around 150 community members, many of whom had previously experienced police violence, who then decided to build a movement demanding elected police councils, according to Chapman.

High-profile police killings and scandals in subsequent years have added strength to the movement and garnered significant public support for substantial reform measures—like the killing of Laquan McDonald, who was revealed to have been shot 16 times after police attempted to cover up details of the shooting; revelations about the widespread extent of police torture committed by former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and his associates leading to a landmark reparations ordinance; and the still-unfolding corruption scandal involving former Sgt. Ronald Watts, which prompted the largest wave of exonerations in the history of Chicago.

Following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May 2020, thousands in Chicago and millions across the United States took to the streets to protest police brutality. This gave leaders of the police accountability movement, backed by alderpersons Jeanette Taylor, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Roderick Sawyer of the Black Caucus, leverage to negotiate the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance with the mayor’s office. The police district councils were the signature policy of that ordinance, which passed the city council with a 36-13 vote, because they extended community input and democratic control over individual police districts. 

For reform-minded candidates running for those district councils, increasing the number of restorative justice and alternative public safety interventions could pave the way to reducing police budgets. “If we can figure out how to keep each other safe in such a way that nobody needs to call the police into our neighborhoods, we will all be so much better off,” Kline, the 2nd District candidate, said. “And then maybe the police can shrivel in the way that they need to do.”

Meanwhile, some candidates have ties to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which has spent more than $25,000 backing specific candidates in these races, and supports increasing CPD’s budget and hiring more officers, according to the Chicago Reader. On February 11, the FOP endorsed 19 candidates across 11 of the 22 district council races. This move came after the Chicago FOP chapter said on Twitter that the city’s police accountability measures “support criminals over victims.”

Perry Abbasi, a FOP election lawyer who’s been accused of posting misogynist and racist social media posts, was tapped by the FOP to run in the 25th District race after they failed to find a candidate who aligned with their interests. 

Abbasi confirms that he has been paid $15,000 by the FOP since September 2022 for work getting several pro-police candidates on the ballot and for filing challenges against slates of progressive candidates in the 19th, 20th, and 24th District races. Abbasi argued that these candidates shouldn’t be on the ballot because they filed their ballot petitions as a group rather than individually. 

Per a decision by the Board of Elections and affirmed by the Circuit Court that rejected his argument, the candidates remain on the ballot. Abbasi’s argument was once again rejected by the Illinois Court of Appeals, he says, and so the slates of progressive candidates will not be disqualified.

“[Police] have a First Amendment right to participate in the political process, and they’re doing so,” Abbasi told Bolts.

By running their own slate of candidates, activists think the FOP is trying to undermine this new oversight mechanism from the start. 

“This is the height of hypocrisy,” Chapman said. “You’re not in favor of this law, so…why do you want people in the district councils? So you can gum them up, so you can block progress. That’s the only reason.”

CAARPR encouraged more than 50 candidates to run for their desire to achieve greater accountability for police misconduct and plan to explore alternatives to policing like sending mental health workers in response to crisis calls. 

Because so many of the candidates are working class, Chapman said that “they can’t afford to buy this election.” For that reason, CAARPR has been assisting them with canvassing, printing campaign materials, and other field operations.

One of those candidates backed by CAARPR is Coston Plummer, a home care worker who’s championed disability rights and is running for the 2nd District council. Plummer brings a different perspective on policing than the FOB-backed candidates as brother of a Burge torture survivor who remains incarcerated to this day, and is an ardent supporter of police accountability measures. He wants to bring an end to stop-and-frisk measures and no-knock warrants, and he sees the recent objection by the interim CCPSA to the new CPD gang database as evidence of how the elected oversight commission can influence policy. 

Carisa Parker, a survivor of domestic violence at the hands of her partner who was a CPD officer and mother of a current officer, has a complex relationship to policing in the city. She is running in the 22nd District and plans to “focus on the systemic issues that cause those disciplinary issues.”

“Are we hiring people with a military mindset and not people who are going in as guardians?” Parker asked. “​​I really see this body as being a really important piece of proactive accountability.”

Organizers from across the country have journeyed to and camped out in Chicago in the dead of winter to learn from the ECPS campaign about the district council model. They came from cities such as New York, Washington DC, and Silver Spring, Maryland, and even places as far away as Dallas and Seattle.  

They are looking to Chicago’s new model of popularly-elected councils with cautious optimism after seeing their own cities’ efforts at police accountability through civilian oversight boards stunted by lack of staffing, inadequate funding, limited powers, or a combination of constraints. In Dallas, for example, where citizen oversight body members are appointed by city council, some have been criticized for having too close ties with police. In Fort Worth, after the city council voted down a proposal for a civilian oversight board, the police chief recently put forth his own proposal for a model in which he’d handpicked a majority of the members.

Chicagoans are also familiar with oversight reforms that raise hope only to be dashed against stonewalling by the police department and foot-dragging from the mayor’s office. But the city does have a track record of success with accountability measures; COPA, unlike its peer institutions in other cities, is well-staffed, adequately funded, and conducts its own misconduct investigations. 

Additionally, the level of transparency is somewhat higher in Chicago given that the public has full access to data from Chicago police disciplinary records through the Citizens Police Data Project, which was unparalleled when first launched in 2015. Two years after New York’s state legislature repealed Section 50-a in 2020, making police disciplinary records publicly accessible in that state, the Legal Aid Society created an NYPD misconduct dashboard.

Chapman isn’t optimistic about reform efforts that focus on persuading the police of the need for change from within: “the sad news is that has never worked.” Nevertheless, he was more sanguine about putting power in the hands of the ordinary citizens: “Once we learn how to mobilize the people and demand the changes that we want…that always works.”

The post Chicago Election Puts Police Oversight in Voters’ Hands appeared first on Bolts.