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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But voters by and large rejected election denier candidates while embracing measures that expanded access to the ballot in places like Michigan and Connecticut. Outside of elections, states and municipalities saw big policy shifts around democracy and voting procedures—some of it expanding voting access, like North Carolina restoring the voting rights to tens of thousands people on probation and parole, and a lot of it threatening to curtail and criminalize voting, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s new elections police force. 

In the coming year, expect these fundamental conflicts around democracy to remain at the forefront, so we here at Bolts have identified ten key questions that will shape these issues in 2023. They range from the continued threat of election denialism in state governments to the power of state supreme courts over the gerrymandering of congressional maps—and Bolts will be watching it all for you. 

1. How will the election deniers who won secretary of state act once in office?

Election deniers largely failed in their efforts to take over election administration offices during the midterms, with the exception of four candidates in deeply red states—Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. As they now prepare to enter office as the elections chief of their respective states, these incoming officials will have the clout to push for significant changes to election procedures.

The stakes are clear in: Alabama

Wes Allen, who won the secretary of state race in Alabama, already seems to be making good on his promise to remove the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national organization that assists states in maintaining accurate voter rolls and has become a target of right-wing conspiracies. Shortly after he was elected, he released a statement saying that he informed the organization that he would end Alabama’s membership as soon as he is inaugurated in January. 

Member states—including Alabama—have relied on the ERIC program to detect voter fraud. Outgoing secretary of state John Merril defended the system, saying that the program helped Alabama detect 12 instances of voter fraud in 2020. Despite this, Allen has said that the state will be able to maintain its own voter rolls using drivers license records, death records, and change-of-address information from the US Postal Service. 

Also keep an eye on: In South Dakota, Monae Johnson has expressed her distrust of vote tabulation machines and has already said she would encourage county election officials to do a hand-count audit of election results. In Wyoming, Chuck Gray has maintained that he wants to ban ballot drop boxes. 

2. Where will conservatives ramp up policing of elections and expand criminal statutes around voting? 

Trump’s lies about fraud fueled a raft of GOP-crafted state laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing criminal penalties around voting. As Bolts has reported, those laws are part of a larger effort in red states to police elections and criminalize voting under the pretense of cracking down on fraud. That includes an entire new state agency designed to investigate elections in Florida. Heading into 2023, conservatives are already gearing up to set up new tripwires that could ensnare more people in the criminal legal system.

The stakes are clear in: Texas 

The last time the Texas legislature gaveled into session in January 2021, it was less than a week after a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had been fanned by many top GOP officials in the state—including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and even rallied Trump supporters in Washington D.C. hours before they rioted on Jan. 6. Conservative leaders then used Big Lie rhetoric to make ‘election integrity’ a top priority, ultimately ushering in the passage of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping elections law that raised new threats of criminal penalties around assisting voters and election workers. 

Now Texas Republicans are once again pointing to the most recent elections to justify more policing of elections. GOP lawmakers say problems voters experienced at the polls around Houston on election day—polling places that opened late and shortages of ballot paper—inspired them to file a bill that would direct the secretary of state to appoint state police officers as “election marshals” to investigate voting. Republicans have also proposed legislation ahead of the session that would impose harsher penalties for election crimes and expand Paxton’s ability to initiate prosecutions for voter fraud. 

Also keep an eye on: The administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis this summer arrested people for allegedly voting when they were barred from doing so, despite evidence that state officials told them they were eligible. Judges have since tossed out some of those cases, but many remain to be adjudicated in 2023—and Florida’s new election police force has the authority to launch new prosecutions. Other cases involving people prosecuted for voting are ongoing elsewhere in the country, such as Crystal Mason‘s in Texas.

3. Will more states curtail felony disenfranchisement or enable voting from prison? 

In 2022, 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting due to a felony conviction—a number that’s high but also considerably down from just four years ago, before a wave of reforms ended or curtailed felony disenfranchisement in more than ten states. Will more states join the efforts to restore people’s voting rights in the coming year?

The stakes are clear in: Oregon

Since 2018, the states that have expanded the franchise have largely acted to restore the rights of citizens who are already out of prison. In states that had already done that, activists have focused on also enabling people to vote from prison, though so far those bills have mostly stalled. (After a milestone 2020 reform, D.C. joined Maine and Vermont as the only places that strip no one’s rights.) Such a push failed in Oregon earlier this year. But a new legislative effort on the issue is coming in 2023, a state advocate confirmed to Bolts. 

The stakes are also clear in: New Mexico 

New Mexico is a rare blue state that bars people on parole and probation from voting, and a bill to enfranchise anyone who is not incarcerated failed last year in chaotic circumstances and mutual recrimination among Democrats. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that they would try again; they have a short window in early 2023 given the state’s brief legislative session.

Also keep an eye on: Other states where bills to end or curtail felony disenfranchisement have been considered in recent years or may be introduced this year include Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Inversely, in Kentucky, the fate of an executive order announced by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear in 2019 that has restored the voting rights of most people who have completed their sentence may hinge on the results of the governor’s race in November.

4. Which states will further ease ballot access and voting procedures?

From automatic voter registration to universal vote-by-mail, specific policies meant to ease ballot access have snowballed in recent years, largely in Democratic-run states. In 2023, which states play catch-up and what new proposals emerge that push existing boundaries further?

The stakes are clear in: Connecticut

Connecticut is close to shaking off the distinction of being the bluest state in the nation with no in-person early voting. In November, residents approved a ballot measure that amends the state constitution to authorize in-person early voting, but the state legislature must adopt legislation to set up such a system before it can go into effect and change anything about how elections are actually run. In advance of the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers and advocates are now debating how long the early voting period should be, with disagreements already emerging between some officials and the state ACLU, which is pushing for a longer window.

The stakes are also clear in: Washington, D.C.

The city council of Washington, D.C., held a hearing in 2022 on a proposal that could, should it move forward next year, redefine common assumptions about the need for voter registration. The bill, as Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported in September, would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered. “Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” the bill’s chief sponsor told Bolts.

Also keep an eye on: Voting rights advocates in New York are pushing many reforms to ease registration and strengthen local administration. As Democrats take power in Michigan, they are eying possible legislation on election procedures and they will be in charge of implementing a voting rights package that Michiganders adopted in November. And Delaware lawmakers are back to square one after the state supreme court struck down their voting reforms this fall. 

5. Will more states pass voting laws restricting ballot access?

This year’s was Georgia’s first federal election since the passage of Senate Bill 202, a sweeping voting law passed by Republicans that introduced new restrictions to voting such as stricter ID requirements for absentee voting, restricting the availability of ballot drop boxes, and making it illegal to offer people standing in long voting lines food or water. The law, as Anoa Changa reported for Bolts, also created a critically short four-week runoff election period. But Georgia is not alone: SB 202 implemented a slew of measures that Republicans nationwide have used as a template for legislative changes, and more may come in 2023.

The stakes are clear in: Ohio

Republicans in the Ohio legislature pushed through a new bill this month tightening voter ID requirements for in-person voting, shortening the period for absentee voting, and limiting the number of ballot drop boxes per county to just one. The bill, which was originally intended to get rid of certain election days, was expanded to include these other provisions just before it was passed in both houses. The bill is now on Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s desk; Democrats have signaled they will bring a lawsuit next year if he signs it.

Also keep an eye on: Pennsylvania Republicans are eying stricter voter ID laws as a priority in the upcoming session. Since they lost control of the state House in November, they may be hard pressed to find the votes to succeed; but Republicans are looking to take advantage of multiple vacancies in the chamber to keep control until the spring, a chaotic situation that may give them a legislative window. In Texas, lawmakers have already pre-filled 66 bills having to do with election administration, some of which would shorten early voting and purge voter rolls. 

6. Will states change their rules around ballot initiatives? 

Facing popular referendums to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions or expand healthcare access, Republicans in many red states have tried to change the goalposts to make ballot measures harder to pass, including this year in South Dakota and Arkansas. Expect more states to try to raise the threshold for passing voter-initiated reforms next year. 

The stakes are clear in: Ohio 

Republicans in the Ohio legislature have been rushing to change the rules for constitutional amendments since activists began discussing a potential ballot measure to solidify legal protections for abortion in light of the state’s criminal ban. While abortion activists used the ballot initiative process to protect abortion rights in neighboring Michigan, the vote didn’t clear 60 percent, the new threshold Ohio Republicans now want to set for such changes in the future. 

The stakes are also clear in: Missouri

In Missouri, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly a dozen bills to increase requirements for ballot initiatives in the state—from raising the signature requirements to get a proposal on the ballot to increasing the threshold for approval from a majority to 60 percent. Those proposed changes come on the heels of voters legalizing recreational marijuana via the ballot initiative process in November and discussions among abortion rights advocates about pursuing a ballot measure to challenge the state’s criminal abortion ban. 

7. How will the politics of state supreme courts affect mid-decade redistricting?

While redistricting typically takes place at the start of the decade, new majorities in state courts can shift the balance of power and trigger new rounds of map drawing.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin is extremely gerrymandered, making it very unlikely that Democrats could win the legislature this decade under present maps. Could they get state courts to force fairer maps, as their peers in Pennsylvania did last decade? At the moment, conservatives enjoy a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, which ruled on those ideological lines last year to effectively preserve the skewed maps in effect during the 2010s. But a supreme court race looms in April that could transform state politics: Should a liberal candidate gain the seat, it would flip control of the court and likely change its outlook on the Republican gerrymanders.

Also keep an eye on: The GOP swept state supreme court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November, wins that are likely to deliver newly-robust conservative majorities and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering in each state. For different reasons, both states are required to redraw congressional maps by the 2024 or 2026 cycles, and now the Republicans who control the redistricting process will get to do so under friendlier judges than over the past two years. 

8. Will Harper vs. Moore throw a wrench in redistricting and other democracy debates?

If you are reading this, odds are you’ve heard of the “independent state legislature” theory, a largely obscure legal doctrine just twelve months ago that is now on the brink of receiving the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority. If not, Cristian Farias’s primer in Bolts has you covered: this is the “feverish idea is that state legislatures should have complete and unfettered control over how federal elections are run and regulated, shielded from the oversight of state courts,” Farias wrote in March. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court took a case, known as Moore v. Harper, that tests this doctrine, and heard it on Dec. 7.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court could rule in the case anytime between January and June, falling anywhere between a repudiation of the theory to an embrace of its strongest form, which would unleash state legislatures to regulate federal elections as they please. During the Dec. 7 hearing, court watchers observed that some conservative justices did not seem to support the theory’s strongest iteration but may be willing to fashion a weaker version. 

Also keep an eye on: Depending on how the justices rule, the outcome could unleash GOP lawmakers to ramp up voter ID rules, restrict voting procedures, or draw new maps without worrying about intervention from their state courts in places like North Carolina or Ohio where state judges have been a thorn on their side has been an issue for them. The conservative justices could also make it tougher for a new majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, should liberals flip it in April (see above), to have any effect on the congressional map. But if the justices is affirm some version of the independent state legislature theory, the consequences could also be felt in blue states where judges have constrained Democratic legislatures: Just over the past year, for instance, New York’s highest court struck down Democrats’ gerrymander of the state in 2021, and Delaware’s highest court threw out new laws enabling same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail voting—all moves that may be called into question by Moore v. Harper.

9. Will other cities move on democracy vouchers?

In 2022, Oakland, California, followed in the footsteps of Seattle in offering residents a novel way to more actively participate in local elections. Voters in November approved a ballot measure for a Democracy Dollars program, giving every Oakland voter four $25 vouchers to donate to a candidate of their choice in future city and school board elections. 

As Spenser Mestel reported for Bolts in July, the idea behind the program is to engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

The stakes are clear in: California municipalities

Advocates elsewhere in California are looking to Oakland as an example. Los Angeles and San Diego have each had their respective campaigns for democracy dollars in place for some time, and in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the editorial board offered up these vouchers as one of several tools that could be used to restore LA voters’ confidence in local government shaken by the racist comments made city council leaders on a leaked tape. 

Also keep an eye on: At a recent city council meeting in Evanston, Illinois, officials discussed democracy vouchers as one of two new proposals for using government dollars to fund campaigns. The discussion was tabled until February, when the proposals will go up for a committee vote. 

10. What is next for local initiatives to expand voter eligibility? 

Cities around the country are experimenting with ways to broaden their electorate. In recent years, some have passed reforms allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, and others have tried extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds. Watch for more of those efforts next year as well as pushback from conservative groups. 

The stakes are clear in: Massachusetts 

Several Massachusetts cities have in recent years passed ordinances allowing both 16-and 17-year olds and noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections. But to implement those reforms, the cities must get approval from the governor and the Democratic-run legislature, which have so far ignored their requests. As Bolts reported this year, proponents of expanding the franchise have hoped that a breakthrough in Boston would help push state leaders to finally act. Last month, Boston’s city council overwhelmingly passed an ordinance giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections, and GBH News reports that council members who also support noncitizen voting are pressing for the city to take up that issue next.

The stakes are also clear in: California

Conservative activists in California have sued to block expanding the franchise in the state since San Francisco voters in 2016 approved letting noncitizen residents vote in local school board elections. This past summer a judge struck down the ordinance, ruling that it violated the state constitution. While the courts allowed noncitizens to vote in the November election as the city appealed, it could be the last time depending on how the legal challenge shakes out. Meanwhile, Oakland seems willing to join the fight, with voters overwhelmingly approving a resolution last month that also seeks to allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. 

Also keep an eye on: Other legal fights over expanding the franchise include Washington DC’s attempt to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, which the DC council passed in October but Republicans in Congress have already vowed to block. New York City is also currently appealing a trial court ruling this summer that struck down the city’s attempt to authorize close to 900,000 noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. In Vermont, two cities implemented noncitizen voting in local elections, and where the incoming secretary of state says she supports expanding voting eligibility. 

The post Ten Questions that Will Shape Democracy and Voting Rights in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

Last year, 262 people were murdered in St. Louis, bringing the city’s homicide rate higher than it’s been in 50 years. Most of those cases are still open and unsolved. Those figures have made reducing violent crime one of the key issues in the city’s upcoming mayoral election. 

Activists have stressed that this shouldn’t mean ramping up policing, but addressing the root causes of violence instead. They’re hoping the next mayor will take an approach to public safety that embraces that vision.

The two candidates on the ballot on Tuesday have both promised some criminal justice reforms. City Treasurer Tishaura Jones and Alderperson Cara Spencer align on several issues like directing some 911 calls to mental health professionals instead of police and closing The Workhouse, one of the city’s notorious jails. Jones has also championed ending cash bail and the decriminalization of sex work.

But both candidates have also laid out plans for a violence prevention model called focused deterrence that runs the risk of becoming yet another punitive law enforcement tool.

This approach identifies people who police suspect are likely to commit violent crime and offers them social services couched in the threat of harsh prosecution if they break the law. Regardless of who wins the mayoral election, a focused deterrence strategy is on St. Louis’s horizon.

“Focused deterrence can end up being very police-heavy and I’ve seen it misused in those ways,” said Antonio Cediel, urban strategies campaign manager at the LIVE FREE Campaign, a faith-based movement to reduce gun violence and end mass incarceration. “I would really caution against simply viewing it as a more ingenious version of tough on crime.”

Focused deterrence strategies operate under the premise that a small number of people in “street groups” are responsible for much of violent crime in a city, and that there are people at risk of committing violence who can avoid it if given the right interventions. The idea is for public authorities to team up with nonprofits and community leaders to identify these individuals and groups. They do that by reviewing data on homicides and nonfatal shootings, information about people in crime-heavy areas who have criminal records, and also details about people in their social networks. 

Officials and community leaders then reach out to the groups to deliver a message that Spencer has described as a “carrot and stick.” They offer them tailored services and support, like housing, health services, or job training. But if someone commits violence, law enforcement and other agencies take targeted action against them. 

Some criminal justice reform advocates push back against the punitive threats this strategy relies on. As part of a focused deterrence strategy, law enforcement typically crack down not only on people accused of committing violence, but also on other people they are associated with. This can include arresting people on charges for unrelated offenses, and employing non-traditional enforcement actions like checking group members’ car registrations, fining them for housing code violations, or seeking to evict them from public housing. 

“We don’t want the rights of people trampled on while draconian measures are put in place,” Johnson Lancaster, a St. Louis resident and a member of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression, told The Appeal: Political Report.  Lancaster added that taking a more focused approach to violent crime and offering social services could be promising as long as it doesn’t lead to heavy policing that violates people’s civil liberties.

David Muhammad, who is the executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and has worked with cities across the country to implement violence reduction programs, says most places do not implement focused deterrence well. “It certainly should not be an enforcement-only strategy or enforcement-mostly strategy,” Muhammad told the Political Report. “It’s not carrot and stick. It’s not if you don’t take services you get enforcement. It’s if you continue to engage in gun violence there’s enforcement.” The emphasis, he said, should be on providing social services and involving community members in the decision-making process.

Other St. Louis initiatives aimed at stemming violence have given activists reason to treat focused deterrence with caution. For example, the city rolled out a Cure Violence program last year. It was supposed to involve hiring outreach workers and violence interrupters with strong ties to the community to mediate conflicts and connect people with services. But local activists say city officials ignored input from the community groups that brought the program to the city in the first place. 

And in 2017, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief John Hayden launched a strategy dubbed “Hayden’s Rectangle,” a form of “hotspot” policing that targets a particular geographic area of the city and increases the police presence in that neighborhood. Hayden measured success based partly on the number of arrests officers made, which flies in the face of the solutions that activists have called for. Lancaster said the city needs “a new vision of public safety that focuses less on arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating and more on addressing the root causes of crime in communities and building opportunities for these people.”

David Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities, is credited with developing some of the first focused deterrence strategies in the United States. He said concerns about focused deterrence are unsurprising, given communities’ past experiences with police. But ultimately, he sees it as a departure from other types of policing strategies that tend to crack down on low-level offenses or target entire neighborhoods. 

“People are right to be attentive to and skeptical about really bad criminal justice practices because these communities have forever been over-policed and under-protected,” said Kennedy. “But this is a way to not continue to do the damage that bad policing does.”

Studies have shown that focused deterrence can lead to reductions in gun violence, and proponents like Kennedy often point to Oakland, California, as an example where social services and community engagement have been prioritized over law enforcement. 

Oakland got a focused deterrence program called Oakland Ceasefire Strategy up and running in 2013. During the first five years of Ceasefire, gun-related homicides dropped in the city by 45 percent, although in the past year they’ve returned to pre-Ceasefire levels. Oakland’s model has been successful, proponents say, because the city made significant investments in the program by funding positions like outreach workers and life coaches, who make contact with individuals, connect them with services, and maintain a relationship to encourage them to stick with the life changes they are making and avoid violent behavior.

Efforts to reduce violent crime in St. Louis will fail if the focused deterrence strategy cuts corners, said Muhammad. “Some cities will say, ‘Oh we gave them some referrals to service providers.’ That’s not enough. You need to create positions so it’s people’s full-time job to be in contact with the highest-risk guys … there needs to be ongoing, structured, intensive engagement.”

Daniel Webster, director of the center for gun policy and research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said Baltimore failed to provide robust services and relied too heavily on law enforcement when rolling out a focused deterrence strategy. He said that in Baltimore there was little community involvement and on the city’s part “there was not enough support services and there was no ‘focus’ in the focused deterrence.”

Philadelphia’s focused deterrence strategy included heavy-handed, punitive measures, including turning off the utilities of people’s loved ones in response to shootings.

“I remember once talking to a U.S. attorney who was almost bragging about threatening to shut off the services, like that was some type of heroic move,” said Cediel from LIVE FREE.

Spencer and Jones told the Political Report they would not do this. Jones’s campaign said her strategy “would not use the deprivation of critical resources to St. Louisans to encourage participation.” Spencer said, “Turning off the utilities is often the first step in homelessness. Using that as a threat is not something my administration would do.”

Spencer has repeatedly cited Oakland as a model she would base her administration’s focused deterrence strategy on and said she aims to drive down the city’s homicide rate by 30 percent in her first term if elected. Spencer said although her model would involve law enforcement and prosecutors, hers would not be a heavily punitive program. The city would “partner with agencies that will connect people to the resources they need to turn their lives around,” she explained. 

Similarly, Jones said her focused deterrence strategy would involve police and prosecutors, but that would be coupled with other changes Jones seeks to make when it comes to public safety.

“Successfully implementing focused deterrence requires not just concentrated police attention on a small group of citizens, but also authentic relationships with credible prevention workers and robust social services available for those willing to avoid criminal behavior,” Jones’s campaign told the Political Report in an email. “The St. Louis focused deterrence version will integrate critical city services and access to nonprofits to assist with employment, substance abuse, mental health, and other services.”

While groups like the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression have yet to take an official position on the strategy, Lancaster sees what happened with the Cure Violence program as a cautionary tale: Although the coalition was involved in the effort to bring Cure Violence to St. Louis, it later bowed out of the initiative, as did others, citing concerns over the way it was being implemented. 

“That’s what happens when there’s a disconnect between the will of the people and the folks who implement the policies on a government level,” said Lancaster. “When they’d rather satisfy their political objectives as opposed to carrying out the will of the people. So we hope to avoid that with the next mayoral administration.”

The post This Anti-Violence Strategy May Be Coming to St. Louis, but Activists See Red Flags appeared first on Bolts.

When Kim Gardner and Mary Pat Carl first faced off in 2016 to be the chief prosecutor of St. Louis, Carl had endorsements from the retiring incumbent and the local police union. But Gardner, whose platform echoed some of the Black Lives Matter movement’s demands just two years after the nearby Ferguson protests, won by a large margin, becoming the city’s first Black circuit attorney.

Gardner faces a rematch against Carl in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary, but their contest is playing out on very different terrain. Nationwide political shifts toward criminal justice reform have emboldened activists to expect more from Gardner, and they have pushed Carl to soften her language compared to 2016.

Still, local activists view this race as a referendum on the fierce pushback that Gardner has faced since she took office. The primary, which will most likely decide the election in this Democratic city, may be an early window into whether this sort of pushback will prove successful in other jurisdictions where reform-minded prosecutors soon face re-election. 

Gardner has been under sustained fire from police unions and from Missouri’s GOP elected officials throughout her term, including for her handling of the high-profile case of former Republican Governor Eric Greitens. Earlier this year, state lawmakers proposed a bill to transfer some of her power to the state’s Republican attorney general. And in recent weeks U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, also a Republican, has repeatedly attacked her for not prosecuting Black Lives Matter protesters. 

Gardner’s supporters say these hurdles are the reflection of status quo interests fighting aggressively against a powerful Black woman in a way that other reform-minded prosecutors do not have to deal with. In January,  nearly a dozen elected Black female prosecutors from across the country— including Kim Foxx in Chicago and Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore—issued a statement in solidarity with Gardner, saying she was “fac[ing] an unprecedented campaign by the city’s corrupt and racist political establishment to destroy her.”  

“Progressives who challenge the status quo are going to get pushback, but for Black women it’s like quadruple the amount,” Tiffany Cabán, who narrowly lost her district attorney bid in Queens last year, told The Appeal: Political Report. Cabán now works as a national political organizer for the Working Families Party, which has endorsed Gardner for re-election. 

Carl, by contrast, believes the controversies that have surrounded Gardner’s tenure are evidence that she is unfit to lead. She says she would restore “competence and confidence” to the office, and she has criticized Gardner for a historically high turnover in her staff, a lack of public transparency, and a drop in the rate of trials that result in a conviction. 

And Carl largely lays the blame for the battles between Gardner and other law enforcement agencies on the incumbent and her practices, a perspective that is rejected by local activists wary of what they view as punitive backlash against reform efforts. 

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During her 2016 run, Carl enjoyed the support of the departing circuit attorney, Jennifer Joyce. Carl called herself “tough on crime” and she emphasized her experience as the city’s top homicide prosecutor. Carl qualified that moniker to say she would also be “smart on crime” when it comes to low-level offenses by using diversion programs and treatment courts as alternatives to jail time. 

This time around, Carl has scrapped her “tough on crime” language.

“I don’t think my policy stances have changed much from 2016, but I think I’m doing a better job of being able to communicate what they are,” Carl told the Political Report. She credits a nationwide wave of progressive prosecutors since 2016 with giving candidates like her a clearer roadmap to campaign on. 

Carl even says that Gardner has not been progressive enough on some issues, critiquing the incumbent for not steering enough people toward diversion and for continuing to use cash bail. 

Activists say they are working to figure out if there’s substance to Carl’s new statements, or if they’re largely rhetorical. 

John Chasnoff, the co-chairperson of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression in St. Louis, acknowledged Carl is “saying some of the right things these days” and credits the changing political landscape for pushing candidates leftward. “But I think our tendency is to stick with the candidate who was saying those things back when they weren’t quite so popular,” he added. 

Mike Milton, the Bail Project’s policy and advocacy manager in Missouri, also credits Carl for “listening” as St. Louis has become more “politically activated” around criminal justice. But “historically Mary Pat Carl has been the police candidate,” he said. 

Carl was endorsed by the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the majority-white police union, in 2016. This year, the SLPOA has not endorsed a candidate, though it is disparaging of Gardner. “We will let you know if/when we issue an endorsement,” said Jeff Roorda, the SLPOA spokesperson, when asked of the union’s plans. “Kim Gardner has proven herself unfit for public office.” 

Roorda has made a litany of more aggressive attacks against Gardner. He wrote a commentary in 2019 accusing her of declaring “war” with police officers; later that year, he said Gardner should be removed “by force or by choice.” 

Carl attributes these tensions with cops to Gardner’s style and policies. “I think you can hold the police accountable without going to war with the police,” she said in April. In her interview with the Political Report, Carl suggested Gardner’s combative relationship with the police compounded the city’s crime problems, pointing to the more than 60 St. Louis children who have been shot this year. “If we are spending the time fighting each other we’re not solving the problem,” she said.

But Carl also says she would support changing city policies to better address police misconduct. She is campaigning on creating a “duty to intervene” policy, which would require an officer to step in and prevent another officer from violating rules and laws.

Carl also says she would continue Gardner’s practice of maintaining a list of police officers with a history of corruption or lying whose testimony prosecutors should not rely on. (Gardner has dismissed many cases brought by officers on this list, angering the police union.) For some police, Carl said, misconduct would warrant “outright exclusion from testifying or from presenting cases to the circuit attorney office.” But she has not specified what sorts of behaviors would rise to this level. “I would publish the ethical criteria that an officer must follow, the things I will not tolerate, and I will work with the community to come up with that list,” she said.

Carl faulted Gardner for not releasing the names on her “do not call” list and pledged to disclose the identity of officers with serious charges against them to ensure police departments in other cities don’t make hires without “full knowledge of their history in St. Louis.” Carl thinks the police could be more open to her style of list-building than Gardner’s. “My selling point would be getting bad officers off the street is beneficial to all,” she said.

To Gardner, though, Carl’s orientation toward the police, including her “duty to intervene” proposal which assumes officers will call out wrongdoing, reflect naivety about the challenges of holding police accountable. “There are a lot of good police who sit in complicit silence,” she told the Political Report. “She does not understand that the ‘blue code of silence’ is real.”

In January, Gardner filed a lawsuit against the police union, among other entities, alleging a conspiracy to thwart her reform efforts, including her bid to rein in police misconduct.

Beyond Carl’s statements on taking a more cooperative approach with  the police, some local organizers have been troubled by her attitude toward the broader blowback against Gardner.

Action St. Louis, a group that promotes racial justice, asked the candidates in a questionnaire about efforts by the state’s attorney general and the region’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney to increase federal prosecutions in St. Louis, thereby wading into the jurisdiction of the circuit attorney. Over the last year, federal prosecutors and state officials have similarly impeded the authority of reform-minded prosecutors in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Gardner answered that the uptick in federal charges was “largely political,” she describes it as a pushback against her agenda, echoing how Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and Baltimore’s Mosby have criticized efforts to limit their power. By contrast, Carl’s reply attributed federal prosecutors’ involvement to understaffing in Gardner’s office, which “forc[ed] the US Attorney’s office to take responsibility for prosecuting violent crimes.” 

Kayla Reed, the executive director of Action St. Louis, told the Political Report she found Carl’s answer “really concerning.” She described the increase in federal prosecution, much like the legislative efforts to usurp control from Gardner, as retaliatory. “In my opinion, if you’re going to run on holding police accountable then you call that behavior out,” she said. “By not doing that, the rest feels performative.”  

—

Activists give Gardner credit for bringing positive change to St. Louis. For instance, she has stopped prosecuting standalone charges for simple possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana, and has expanded diversion options for people charged with low-level and nonviolent offenses as a strategy to reduce incarceration. Gardner has also pushed to release Lamar Johnson, whom her office says has not committed the murder for which he has been incarcerated for 25 years.

“We think she’s done a fantastic job of introducing a progressive agenda to St. Louis,” said Chasnoff of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression. “It’s a markedly different direction from her predecessor.” Milton of the Bail Project agrees that the previous circuit attorney, Jennifer Joyce, “had a deep relationship with incarceration” and applauded Gardner for going after the “root harms” of crime. 

There have been times, though, when activists felt Gardner resisted reform or moved too slowly. 

One was around closing the Workhouse, a St. Louis jail that the Board of Aldermen voted last week to shut down by the end of the year. A coalition of groups led a multi-year campaign to close the jail and bail out the people detained there. Although both Gardner and Carl campaigned this year on closing the facility, Gardner hadn’t previously supported this.

Reed said she could not explain why Gardner hadn’t supported the closing sooner. The Appeal reported in 2018 that Reed and other advocates were disappointed that Gardner was continuing to send people to the Workhouse, and seeking to hold them there pretrial.

Reed thinks disagreements with prosecutors come with the territory for “anti-carceral organizers,” as she looked ahead to pushing the office “over how and when change should occur.” Gardner told the Political Report she welcomes these conversations. “I look forward to talking to activists who may not agree with me,” she said. “I always say the system wasn’t built this way overnight, and it won’t be rebuilt overnight either.” 

Other advocates also hope to see more bold reforms over the next four years. Milton said he wants the prosecutor’s office to decriminalize substance use, keep the pressure on police, and  continue to reduce the reliance on cash bail.

Sara Baker, legislative and policy director at the ACLU of Missouri, said she was encouraged to hear both Gardner and Carl make new commitments to decriminalizing sex work at a debate held this month. Her group plans to hold the next circuit attorney accountable to those pledges. 

A year ago, Cabán’s commitment to decriminalize sex work in Queens pushed that issue into the national spotlight; months later, Chesa Boudin won in San Francisco on a similar promise. “I’d argue that candidates like myself, and Chesa Boudin, we ran on platforms to the left of folks like Gardner,” Cabán said. “But we could not have done so successfully without them going first.”

The post St. Louis Prosecutor Faces Voters, After Years of Sustained Fire from Police Union appeared first on Bolts.

Update (Aug. 4): Amendment 2, the initiative to expand Medicaid, has prevailed.

The opioid crisis has taken a particularly grim toll in Missouri, especially for communities of color. Two years ago, Missouri saw a 16 percent spike in fatal overdoses while the national average trended downward, and the state also has the third highest overdose rate among Black people.

On Aug. 4, Missouri voters will decide whether to expand Medicaid in a ballot initiative. If Amendment 2 passes, it would overhaul Missouri’s approach to addiction by steering more resources toward treatment programs that can counter criminalization. The expansion would also unlock billions in federal funding for health coverage and hospitals and provide coverage to an estimated 230,000 low-income adults and 40,000 children. 

In recent years, voters in a handful of red states have expanded Medicaid through ballot initiatives, overriding conservative officials who have refused to take advantage of the federal Affordable Care Act to extend health insurance to millions of residents. Last month, Oklahoma became the latest to join this trend when voters approved a referendum by 1 percentage point.

The stakes are similar across the board: Economic and racial disparities, coupled with a crisis in rural healthcare, make Medicaid expansion a life and death issue in every state that hasn’t grown the program. Now, nearly 600,000 people in Missouri have filed for unemployment insurance due to the coronavirus pandemic, which means the number of people who would benefit from Medicaid expansion could be even higher than previously thought, with outsized ramifications for anyone who would like to access programs for substance use.

The spread of illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a potent opioid, has hit Black communities in the postindustrial city of St. Louis especially hard. Last year, opioid-related deaths among Black men in St. Louis and St. Louis County increased by 17 percent, even though they dropped by 8 percent in that area overall, according to preliminary data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“In Missouri, we have deaths of despair,” Timothy McBride, a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis, told The Appeal: Political Report. “We have rises in deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide—it’s not a pretty picture, and it’s not getting any better.” 

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Robert Riley II knows firsthand how Medicaid expansion could make a difference for people struggling with drug use. He spent time in prison on drug-related charges before co-founding the nonprofit Missouri Network for Opiate Reform and Recovery, otherwise known as the MoNetwork, in 2012.

“My incarceration and substance use experience are my greatest assets today,” Riley told the Political Report. “It allows me to provide empathy and guidance on staying safe to someone actively using, but most of all, I view the person suffering as a human being. And that humanity is what I feel is missing in debates about healthcare, and that’s because of stigma in America.” 

Staff at the MoNetwork drive an old ambulance around St. Louis, distributing overdose-reversal kits, sterile syringes, and other supplies to people who use drugs and are unstably housed. Since the pandemic, they’ve added hand sanitizer, gloves, and masks among the supplies they give away for free. Riley and the MoNetwork have created an oasis of compassion and non-judgement for the communities they serve. 

In addition to supplying tools to prevent overdose and exposure to HIV and hepatitis C, the MoNetwork also refers people to treatment and recovery housing. But the Covid-19 pandemic has strained budgets, limited the availability of treatment slots, and, out of precaution, some facilities stopped admitting new patients, leaving many without the care they need. 

Organizations like MoNetwork can only provide so much support with donations and charity funding. Without a well-funded safety net, they’re left putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds.

“We know that within Missouri’s safety net substance use treatment programs, about 70 percent of people who present for treatment are completely uninsured,” Rachel Winograd, associate research professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told the Political Report. “Having a larger client population that has any type of insurance coverage, including Medicaid, allows programs to help more people.” Winograd said expanding Medicaid would ultimately reduce the number of uninsured people seeking help.

States that expanded Medicaid saw admissions for addiction treatment increase by 113 percent, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of Health Economics. The same study found admissions for medication treatments like methadone and buprenorphine increased by 105 percent. Both medications are considered “the gold standard” for treating opioid addiction and have shown to significantly reduce the risk of fatal overdose. A January 2020 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found fewer overdose deaths from heroin and illicit fentanyl in states that expanded Medicaid compared to those that did not. 

“Our results suggest that Medicaid expansion might have prevented between 1,678 to 8,132 overdose deaths in the 2015 to 2017 period in the 32 states that expanded Medicaid,” Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, the lead author of the 2020 JAMA study, told the Political Report. 

Medicaid expansion could also prevent incarceration. A high percentage of people incarcerated have a substance use disorder diagnosis and could benefit from treatment instead of going to jail. 

“If we treat substance use instead of punish people, we’ll see the number of people flowing through our criminal justice system drop. Preventive measures and treatment work better than incarceration, and it saves the state money,” Riley said.

Research cited by McBride found the same trend in other expansion states like Louisiana and Montana, which saw significant cost savings related to behavioral health and the criminal justice system.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to stigma,” Riley said. “We can talk about budgets and cost savings, but until more people have healthcare, better access to treatment, and are treated with dignity, it’ll keep being a struggle to save lives.”

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The push to expand Missouri’s public insurance through a ballot initiative is supported by groups like The Fairness Project, a nonprofit that successfully spearheaded similar campaigns in several other states. Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of The Fairness Project, said expanding Medicaid isn’t just about healthcare.

“It’s also an economic justice issue by removing one of the greatest stressors”—the cost of healthcare—“in a family’s life.” He added, “The pandemic has exposed America’s invisible workers now as ‘essential workers,’ and we’re trying to help them with Medicaid expansion.”

At the moment, Missouri has some of the strictest eligibility criteria for Medicaid in the country. Single men, single women, and married couples are not eligible regardless of their income. To be eligible for Medicaid in Missouri, one must be disabled and not working, or be a parent and earn a yearly income below 20 percent of the poverty line, which for a family of three is a paltry $4,000. 

Expanding Medicaid would drastically change who is eligible for coverage. With Amendment 2, adults ages 19 to 64 whose income is at or below 138 percent of the poverty level—which is $29,973 for a family of three—would qualify.

McBride calls the 190,000 adults who are currently left out of Medicaid in Missouri the “gap population.” He says they are working but are not offered employee health insurance and make too little to qualify for a plan from the federal Healthcare Marketplace. 

“Most of the uninsured are low-income people who have low wage jobs,” McBride, told the Political Report. “If you’re making $12,000 a year, one medical bill could kill you. One visit to the ER for $500, they can’t pay it. One drug they have to pay for is impossible.” 

Like in other states, people in Missouri are more likely to be uninsured if they live in rural areas, which is one of the main drivers behind rural hospitals shutting down across the state. 

“Many of our rural hospitals are hanging on by a thread,” Ryan Barker, the vice president of strategic initiatives at the Missouri Foundation for Health, told the Political Report. “We’ve lost 10 rural hospitals in the last six or seven years … and a lot of that is because they see a higher percentage of uninsured patients.” He added, “Hospitals are not only important access points for residents in rural Missouri, but are often the largest employers in rural areas. If you lose the hospitals, you also lose a lot of jobs.”

Roughly 45 percent of Missouri’s hospitals are located in rural areas. A study published in 2018 found that hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid were more than six times less likely to close than hospitals in non-expansion states. The effect of Medicaid expansion on hospitals was especially strong in more rural areas, where federal funding gave rural hospitals a stronger financial footing.

If Missourians vote to expand Medicaid to low-income and working people, it would become the sixth state where voters bypass Republican leaders through the ballot to expand public health coverage, after Maine in 2017, Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah in 2018, and Oklahoma last month.

A “yes” vote for Amendment 2 would write Medicaid expansion into Missouri’s constitution, limiting the possibility for Republican leaders to block implementation or add stricter eligibility burdens like work requirements. 

In 2017, voters in Maine, another state hit hard by overdose deaths, approved Medicaid expansion, but then-Governor Paul LePage refused to implement the program. The expansion wasn’t enacted until January 2019, after LePage lost his re-election bid to Janet Mills, a Democrat, who ordered the results of the referendum to stand. Mills cited the urgency of the opioid crisis in Maine and a lack of treatment capacity as some of the primary reasons to expand Medicaid. 

“Americans in even the reddest of states want healthcare, and they’re willing to put it in their constitution to protect it from political meddling,” Schleifer told the Political Report. “That’s why we put expansion on the ballot for the people to decide. We’re talking about life and death differences in expansion versus non-expansion states.”

The post Missouri Voters Could Expand Medicaid and Curb the Overdose Crisis appeared first on Bolts.

Cook County, Illinois: State’s Attorney Kim Foxx announced a shift to treating drug possession writ large (beyond marijuana cases) as a public health matter, with a default of no incarceration. “Incarceration is not treatment, and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office will no longer address the public health crisis of drug addiction in our criminal justice system,” she said in a Jan. 24 speech. “Diversion will be the presumption in drug possession cases.” In the same speech, Foxx launched a program to “pursue the expungement of all misdemeanor marijuana convictions.” What this means according to the Chicago Citizen is that people will be able to apply for expungement with her office’s assistance without paying an expungement fee, instead of going through the existing process that requires a payment. “Failing to take action that provides relief to those who already have a marijuana conviction is not justice,” she said. Illinois lawmakers are mulling legalizing marijuana, and advocates are pushing for such legislation to contain an automatic expungement process.

Baltimore City, Maryland: Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore state’s attorney, announced on Jan. 29 that her office would no longer prosecute marijuana possession no matter the quantity. She also said that she would act to vacate thousands of old convictions. In a 14-page white paper, her office laid out her rationale, detailing the “crisis of disparate treatment of Black people for marijuana possession and other offenses without any seeming regard for the possible adverse public health effects resulting from such enforcement.” Interim police commissioner Gary Tuggle said he will still arrest people. “If you are arrested for having and being in possession of a marijuana you will then be released without charges,” Mosby told NPR in response.

St. Louis County, Missouri: St. Louis County’s new prosecutor, Wesley Bell, issued a policy of no longer prosecuting the possession of under 100 grams of marijuana; he will still prosecute larger quantities if he is also accusing a defendant of an intent to sell. Bell’s decision echoes that announced in June by Kim Gardner, the chief prosecutor of the city of St. Louis.

One outstanding question is the persistence of modes of enforcement besides prosecution. In these Missouri jurisdictions, municipal officials can still issue citations that remain on one’s record and result in fines; this has limited the impact of local steps toward decriminalization in the past. When St. Louis made the possession of less than 35 grams of marijuana into an offense for which the police should issue citations in 2014, this has made no dent in the racial disparities in police enforcement. According to the Riverfont Times, 85 percent of people who were either arrested or issued a citation in the ensuing years were Black. This mirrors Baltimore’s past dynamics. In 2014, Maryland as a whole decriminalized the act of possessing under 10 grams of marijuana. But Black residents received 94 percent of the marijuana citations subsequently issued by the Baltimore Police Department between 2015 and 2017, according to the white paper from Mosby’s office; that is virtually identical to the share of people charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession in Baltimore during that period who were Black (96 percent).

Scott Hechinger, senior staff attorney and director of policy at Brooklyn Defender Services, warned more broadly that, absent legalization, marijuana will remain a pretext for heavy-handed policing. “The larger issue is that as long as marijuana is a crime on the books, it will be used by law enforcement as a justification to hurt people,” he said. “Marijuana is one of the primary justifications that allows law enforcement to approach, stop-and-frisk our clients. The claimed odor of marijuana is what makes already-pretextual car stops into full-blown car searches.”

Another matter for continued scrutiny is the manner in which prosecutors will implement their own stated policies. Raven Rakia reported in The Appeal in November that the Brooklyn district attorney, who had announced he would stop prosecuting most marijuana possession cases, was still prosecuting people caught with vaping marijuana oil.

Hechinger, who works in Brooklyn, said that one issue is the mismatch between rhetoric and practices on the ground, but also that prosecutors often leave “exceptions and carve-outs” in their decline-to-prosecute policies such as the amount possessed, whether the person stopped has a record, and the form of possession. If the reason prosecutors adopt decline-to-prosecute policies is the “known disproportionate law enforcement impact on communities of color,” Hechinger said, then it shouldn’t matter who you are and how much you have” because “these carve-outs tend to replicate pre-existing racial disparities” in the prosecution of marijuana possession. “It’s worth always questioning the rationales behind the carve-outs,” he added.

The post Prosecutors Announce New Marijuana Policy in Illinois, Maryland, and Missouri appeared first on Bolts.

Last week, I talked to Reverend Dr. Cassandra Gould, the executive director of Missouri Faith Voices, about her work in St. Louis and about what toppled the longtime prosecutor. 

The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

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How were you involved in the Ferguson protests and in this year’s election for prosecutor?

I’ve lived in the St. Louis area for more than 35 years. When Ferguson happened, I was there between August and the non-indictment [of Darren Wilson] on Nov. 24. I stayed a minimum 75 nights in the street, as a person who was part of the community. It was a situation where all hands had to be in deck. I became officially employed by Faith Voices in 2015.

I was very fueled by the events of Ferguson. Literally on the night of the non-indictment my prayer was I would have an opportunity to be directly involved four years later in changing history. Everybody figured Bob McCulloch would stay in office forever, more in less. Last year, we decided that this prosecutor race would be the biggest thing that we would work on this year. We held our first meeting on the role of the prosecutor training in 2017 so that ordinary citizens could understand how their lives are affected. We saw this race as being very pivotal in restoring hope to the community and in changing the course of history.

Bob McCulloch had been in office since 1991. What do you think made his loss possible in 2018 when he’d been winning for so long?

In 2016, there were [local] elections in Ferguson. It resulted in the same leadership that was already there prior to the murder of Michael Brown. One of the things that I realized was that despite the fact that there were grassroots organizations that were there for years, no one was actually coordinating organizing in the African American community specifically around criminal justice reform. In the city there were organizations working on police reform neighborhood policing for years, but in St. Louis County no one was specifically coordinating the organizing, particularly in African American communities. Our bet was that if we focus specifically on increasing the electorate by having conversations with voters of color and Black voters who don’t normally vote, we could increase turnout, and not just for the sake of one election. People could start taking ownership of their own community.

We were knocking on doors and talking to young people, particularly in Ferguson, and asking them what they wanted to be different. We discovered that there was a sense of hopelessness in the situation. They felt that the system was completely against them and that they didn’t have an opportunity to change it. But we talked to people and we listened; people really started to come on board and to re-imagine what their community could look like.

We made this big bet to do something different. Most campaigns focus on white swing voters, but we decided we wanted this to be the people’s campaign. We hired people who understood the criminal justice system. We had a young man run our canvassing campaign who was a formerly incarcerated person. We wanted people who had a stake in the game and understood the criminal justice system from the inside out.

How receptive did you find your audience to be, compared to in the past?

This receptiveness was not there before. It wasn’t there before at all, particularly in the St. Louis metropolitan area, when you go against this Democratic icon. It’s more than just a political trend, it really means that the people actually spoke, and the people started to work toward their own liberation. We had honest conversation that centered on the criminal justice system and the implications that race and racism have in the criminal justice system, and this really resonated with people. What we saw was people who didn’t come out before and thought whatever would happen would happen. We never actually endorsed Wesley Bell, we gave the people the information that they needed so that they could make informed decisions, and empower them to use their voice in the ballot box.

How did you collaborate with other organizations as part of this work?

Locally we coordinated specifically with the St. Louis Action Council, run by Kayla Reed, an activist who I met in the streets of Ferguson. And Color of Change, they were on the ground in Ferguson as well. The three of us, three organizations, Color of Change, Action St. Louis, and Missouri Faith Voices, we had one of our offices together in Ferguson, and that meant that we were dividing up turf, that meant that we were using different tactics and more people had opportunity to be reached. The three of us specifically focused on African American voters. Other organizations’ message was not the same because their audience was not the same.

We talked a lot about Mike Brown and murder with impunity, and how a system that has white supremacy as a cornerstone continues to ensure that African Americans will rarely get justice in a system like that. We’ll be dealt with unfairly in a system that has a cornerstone of white supremacy. We tied that with cash bail and high fees and fines, and we tied that with what it would mean to the African American community if things stayed the same.

What were the main messages you heard in your conversations during the campaign?

Particularly among young African Americans, it was about feeling harassed. I would say 98% of the people we talked to they had some personal involvement with police, with traffic stops, with fines and fees, or if it wasn’t them it was some family member who was impacted by the system in very negative ways. We heard a lot about the amount of time they spent in jail waiting for a hearing or trial.

Some people don’t know that, they don’t know what happens behind the curtain. Having people share those stories in public spaces made a tremendous difference. It was extremely eye-opening for [an all-white congregation at an event in the Eliot Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri] to have people from the African American community share their stories about how they were impacted by the criminal justice system. It was a very different audience, but them listening to the stories of people who were impacted also had an indelible effect in them in how they saw the prosecutor and the role of the prosecutor.

People who are impacted know it’s not just their stories. But rarely do they get to tell their story, and rarely do people care enough to listen to their story, and many of them are not accustomed to the power of their story. Using their voice and engaging in a democratic process, it’s also a way to lift their voice. We were able to connect the story of their pain to their opportunity to make something different happen, as opposed to keeping it to yourself but not ever bringing it to light.

What are some specific expectations you have now of Wesley Bell, and what do you think is the role of organizing going forward?

I would say that Wesley Bell’s camp cares enough about grassroots to stay connected by having a liaison to transition; grassroots organizations have met with the Wesley Bell Campaign almost monthly since he got elected. We expect that some things won’t change overnight. We do expect some sentencing changes, we expect diversions, so particularly in nonviolent cases instead of jail and cash fines and fees people would be able to have some alternatives to that. One of our goals in the next 18 months is to really work on eliminating cash bail in the state of Missouri, using the St. Louis area as a test case of that. We expect that Wesley Bell will lead the way,bail.

We want to have an ongoing relationship with the prosecutor’s office. We don’t want a staff position, but we want to be in conversation with him, and remind him of the pain of the people, remind him of why it was necessary to elect him so that things don’t stay the same. We don’t expect St. Louis County to be run the same way in two years that it was run over the past 27 years. We believe that ongoing engagement and commitment with the prosecutor’s office is extremely important.

I also believe that, even beyond the prosecutor in St. Louis County, we put elected officials on notice that the power still rests with the people. We believe this puts elected officials on notice that the people will have the last word, and they can no longer expect for the people to sit by and allow things to happen to them. We know that there is an awful lot of work to do, but we are also excited about the opportunities, especially as it pertains to the historical fight for African Americans in Missouri and around the country. We really want to be a model for change.

I want to say that I want to say we are a multifaith, multiracial organization, and one of the questions we ask our members was, What does your faith say about a justice system that is punitive for one race of people or one class of people? We approached it with our faith leading the way, and we had people in Springfield, and Columbia, which are hundreds of miles away, but participated in this prosecutor race whether it was phone-banking or other ways. It was a pivotal moment. It was a shared decision that this was the most important engagement this year. We made the case that this is about the liberation of all of us in that state, it was everybody’s fight.

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