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

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

Stackhouse was convicted and later incarcerated for 12 years. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kentucky: Democrats keep a foothold in a ruby red state

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia: Democrats grab full control of the legislature

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

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

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

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

Mississippi: Republicans hold off Democratic hopes for an upset

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

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

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

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

New Jersey: Democrats put 2021 behind them

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

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

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

And don’t forget about New Hampshire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alonzo Malone Jr. says he felt “less than human” during the 27 years the state of Kentucky barred him from voting.  

Malone lost his voting rights, along with his freedom and a slew of other civil liberties, in 1989 when he was convicted of a felony in his late 30s and sent to prison for three years. He fell into addiction and homelessness upon release and was sent back to prison in 1998 to serve two more years. After his second release from prison, he filed a petition to regain his voting rights, and as it languished he became active in advocating for the voting rights of others. He’d been sober and free for 16 years when, in 2016, then-Governor Matt Bevin finally restored his right to vote.

“I felt human again,” Malone said when we met in early September at the Lexington Roots & Heritage Festival, a large annual celebration of the city’s Black community, where he circulated through the crowd with a clipboard to register people to vote. “I can remember on Election Day in 2008, Barack Obama being elected. I just felt so discouraged. I could pay the taxes for the salaries of those who were making laws, but I could not cast a vote.”

Until 2019, Kentucky disenfranchised all residents convicted of any felony for life. People who hoped to regain their rights had to seek an expungement—an expensive procedure that only applies to a narrow subset of felony offenses—or they had to directly petition the governor for an individual pardon. These pardons were rarely issued: Bevin restored voting rights for only about 1,500 people during his term in office, among the more than 300,000 in the state who were disenfranchised at the time. 

The outlook changed dramatically for Kentuckians with felonies in 2019, when Democrat Andy Beshear entered office with what he called a “moral responsibility” to help others like Malone. Two days after his inauguration, Beshear issued a sweeping executive order to automatically restore voting rights for people convicted in Kentucky of nonviolent crimes once they finish all parts of their sentence, including parole or probation. The order instantly restored voting rights to about 180,000 Kentuckians and sliced the state’s disenfranchised population in half. 

But in practice, this massive expansion of voter eligibility has not translated into a wave of newly-enfranchised Kentuckians actually heading to the polls. In the 2022 midterm election, three years on from the executive order, only about 7 percent of people whose voting rights were restored by Beshear’s order actually cast ballots, according to the Kentucky Civic Engagement Table, a voting rights organization. That’s compared to 42 percent of the overall electorate. 

Part of the blame, Kentucky’s advocates say, lies with a Beshear administration that did little to notify people affected by the order. This inaction has inspired Kentuckians like Malone to step in and inform people who are eligible to vote but may not realize it. Their project has kicked into higher gear recently, ahead of a critical November election that, as I reported last month, could lead to a reversal of Beshear’s order and a return to blanket disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of a felony. 

A coalition of activists and nonprofit organizations have been using public records and word of mouth to identify people whose rights were restored, traversing the state to tell those people they have the right to vote and to encourage them to exercise it. In addition to door-to-door canvassing, this coalition scours social media, meets people in barber shops and churches, in parks and county jails, and at public events like this Lexington festival.

“I go to the laundromat. I go to the grocery stores,” said Malone, who estimates that he has personally registered more than 500 voters this election cycle alone. He is active with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a statewide nonprofit that favors expansion of voting rights. He added, “If I’m at the gas station, I always keep voter registrations in my car at any time, and I don’t have a problem pulling them out. I go to car washes. Anywhere I can.”

He and other activists doing this work say they constantly encounter people whose rights were restored by Beshear’s 2019 order but still don’t know it. “It’s a disgrace,” Malone said, that four years later this is still the case. 

The Lexington festival is just getting going as the sun sets on a beautiful evening. R&B music blares and fragrant barbecue smoke billows from food trucks while Malone stares out to the growing parade passing by. “There are many Kentuckians who have felonies who are walking around and do not know that their rights are restored. It is my aspiration to talk to everybody here tonight,” Malone said, before heading out into the crowd, clipboard in hand.

On March 4, 2020, a few months after signing the order to restore voting rights, Beshear held a press conference in Frankfort to tout a new online search tool people with felony convictions could use to determine their voting eligibility. This, the governor said, showed he was delivering on one of his top priorities: “Restoring the right to vote to Kentuckians that have done wrong in the past but are doing right now.”

Beshear said during the press conference that his Christian faith teaches him forgiveness, and implored journalists in attendance to help him spread news of the search tool’s launch. “We should welcome those Kentuckians back into our neighborhoods and allow them to fully participate, to recognize that they are full human beings deserving respect,” Beshear said. But his order still excluded about 152,000 Kentuckians who weren’t afforded the same forgiveness after completing felony sentences, largely because they were convicted of violent crimes, according to The Sentencing Project, a national research and advocacy organization. 

A reporter at the press conference asked Beshear whether the state would itself take on the task of informing the tens of thousands of people whose rights were restored by his order. “Our job in government is, I believe, to make the opportunity there,” he responded.

The coalition of formerly incarcerated people and other activists now working to finish the job has tallied more than 89,000 people with felony convictions who had previously been blocked from voting and who have registered since 2019—nearly 60 percent of those affected by Beshear’s order. They say the state could have helped reach many more people by, say, renting billboard space or placing ads broadcasting the news of Beshear’s restoration order. At the very least, they say Beshear’s administration could have attempted to reach everyone whose rights were restored at the time of the order.

These coalition members also say it is no surprise that turnout has been so low among Kentuckians who were once barred from voting. “It’s almost like a secret,” said Teresa Forbes-Lopez, who works with Malone and says she was drawn to this activism through her interest in education reform. “The government is not pushing it out. It’s like they want to hold it back. When you let a person out, you should say, ‘Here are all the things you need to do,’ and that’s not happening.”

Beshear declined my request for an interview to talk about rights restoration and the limited impact of his order nearly four years ago. A spokesperson for his Justice and Public Safety Cabinet sent an email highlighting the online search tool that debuted in 2020, and also noting that Kentucky gives people leaving prison a printed “notice of restoration” that contains information on voter eligibility and registration.

Organizers working to ensure people covered by Beshear’s order know of their rights say they’re energized by the activism around rights restoration, but lament that it is so needed. 

“So many people tell you, daily, that they don’t know they can register to vote. So many of them are eligible and don’t know,” said Lexington’s Jessica Clark, who got involved in voter outreach through her church. “They are so amazed to know they have their citizenship back, that they can vote.”

“They’re surprised, very surprised,” said Roseileen Fitts of Louisville, who is formerly incarcerated and remains disenfranchised. “Some people don’t even believe you when you tell them.”

Fitts, 32, is a mom, owns a cleaning business, and for years has been a frequent volunteer in Louisville, including mentoring the children of incarcerated parents through the YMCA. Now in recovery from addiction, she’d like to think she’s the sort of person Beshear had in mind when he spoke in 2020 about people “doing right” after previous felony convictions. She is not, of course, as she’ll be reminded next month, when she misses out on yet another election.

We met on the campus of the University of Louisville at an event to direct resources and support to people grappling with substance use disorders. That day alone, Fitts told me, she and her colleagues had met two people unaware their voting rights had been restored by Beshear’s order in 2019. Informing someone that, yes, they can legally vote is bittersweet, she said.

“Our government did nothing to inform people. They didn’t tell anyone. We are doing that. We have a phone list and we go out and find people,” Fitts said. “And we have so much more to do.”

People working to pick up the government’s slack say the Beshear administration could do much more than simple outreach to those it lifted from disenfranchisement.

Bryan Ford, a formerly incarcerated activist who is disenfranchised and runs a nonprofit to assist people in recovery from substance use disorders, said that, for one, probation and parole offices could mention voting more often. This, Ford argues, would have a public-safety benefit, and the data agree with him: research shows that people with past convictions who have their rights restored and engage in voting are less likely to be rearrested. 

But as it is, Ford said, “Urinalysis and going to jail—that’s what probation talks to me about. That’s it.” 

“You’ll send me a court-appointed lawyer for my plea bargain, but after I do whatever time, who’s going to tell me that one of the things I can do, besides go see my probation officer, is to go get my rights back?”

Advocates would be thrilled by even minor reforms. They say the online tool Beshear touted in that press conference, for example, often fails to accurately report whether someone is eligible to vote. Beshear has pledged to be vigilant about keeping the site in order, but many of those using it say it frequently returns false information—telling people who are indeed eligible to vote that they cannot, and vice-versa—and that sometimes it doesn’t function at all.

“We were in a jail yesterday and the link didn’t even work,” said Savvy Shabazz, a formerly incarcerated voting rights activist based in Louisville. “We just have to do the work on our own.”

Shabazz helps lead voter outreach and education efforts in Kentucky jails, where people held before trial often have the right to vote but are still routinely disenfranchised. Shabazz said some people in jails report difficulty getting voter registration forms, while others request mail ballots but never receive them. He said most jails in the state take no proactive steps to identify eligible voters in lockup and provide them ballot access around elections. Shabazz said that many sheriffs, who run local jails, haven’t allowed him and his colleagues inside to do voter outreach ahead of this year’s election. 

“Voting is not a privilege; it’s a right,” he adds. “People’s rights are being violated when those jails are not allowing them to vote.”

The struggle to make jail voting easier, like the struggle to spread word of Beshear’s order, reminds Shabazz and other activists that they simply cannot trust the government to do the work of ensuring all eligible voters know of their rights and have ballot access.

Tip Moody, who is formerly incarcerated, says he learned he was allowed to vote again not from the governor’s office or any official government notice, but rather by happening upon a letter submitted by the League of Women Voters that was published in a newspaper. Moody, who now works for a small nonprofit that advocates for and seeks to amplify the voices of formerly incarcerated people, has often encountered people unaware that they are eligible to vote. 

He’s also come across plenty of people disinclined to participate at all, even when aware they are able. “You would be amazed at how many are eligible but don’t want to register,” he said. That’s common in the U.S., where interaction with the criminal justice system is often predictive of turnout. A series of studies released in the past 15 years found participation ranging from five to 18 percent among people recently released from prison who have the right to vote. In February, Bolts reported on new research showing that simply being pulled over by a traffic cop was enough to make people in Florida less likely to vote. 

Explained Marcus Jackson, who works with Moody and was imprisoned for 17 years, “The only time a lot of people, especially disenfranchised people, see politicians is during election cycles. We want people to understand why the vote is important, why they should show up at the polls, but we just haven’t had that type of investment in a lot of our communities.”

I met Moody and Jackson at a park in a suburb of Lexington in September. They and about 15 other men, all with past felony convictions, had come to Lake Mingo Park in Nicholasville to pick up trash and show face in their community—a way, they said, to remind passersby and themselves that they are worthy, valuable people, whether or not the government lets them vote. 

“I still can’t vote, and it’s hurtful,” said Jackson, who lives in Frankfort. “Not everyone is going to be as persistent to consistently show up like this, but I’m highly motivated to be that example, so that they will allow people like me to vote.”

Many other people working in this space echoed Jackson and Moody in saying that feelings of democratic detachment or abandonment are most evident in poorer and often predominantly-Black sections of the state. Disenfranchisement, after all, falls hardest on Black Kentuckians, who are more than twice as likely to be blocked from voting, according to a recent report. As of 2016, one in four Black people of voting age in Kentucky could not vote; at nearly one in eight today, the rate is still alarmingly high compared to the rest of the country. 

The longstanding and broad exclusion levied so strongly against Black people in Kentucky leaves many people feeling sidelined from a young age, activists said. Voting rights activists working to register people restored by Beshear sometimes visit local schools to pre-register teenagers on the cusp of voting age. They told me that the kids in poorer, more heavily-incarcerated areas tend to feel alienated from democracy in much the same way Jackson and Moody so often observe among adults with past felonies. 

“Lexington Catholic—that’s where the rich kids are, and when I set my table up, they come up to register to vote like I’m giving something away,” Clark said. “At the public schools, I have to work the crowd. I have to be in their face to say, ‘Can I register you to vote?’ And they say, ‘maybe next time, or ‘I’ll think about it.’ I have to beg them: ‘Please let me register you to vote. Your vote is your voice.’”

Regina Harris, who works with Clark on voter outreach in schools, says she tries to talk about disenfranchisement and rights restoration when meeting students, but that those in wealthier areas typically avoid the topic. “What I do notice with the Catholic schools and the private schools,” Harris said, “is that the kids there want nothing to do with me when I talk to them about restoration of rights for felons. Their parents will literally move them aside.”

It might not seem like it, Jackson said when I met him at Lake Mingo Park, but the effort to get Black teenagers in underinvested, overpoliced areas to exercise their power as voters aligns closely with the work he’s doing to get his peers to see value in spending a morning hunting for litter in the suburbs. At 51, Jackson said, he’s learned that government officials aren’t likely to take up the project of empowering and mobilizing people excluded either formally or informally from democracy. 

“My whole life, as a little Black boy, I always had to prove myself. No one accepted me on face value. It was always a stereotype or something that came along with me—the Black kid coming into the store to steal. That happened very early on in life.”

“It’s always been that ‘you’re not good enough.’ And once you get that felony conviction,” Jackson said, miming the swing of a baseball bat, “it’s ‘off with your head.’” 

The post Kentucky Activists Step In to Deliver on the Promise of Voting Rights Restoration appeared first on Bolts.

Then late last month, Tennessee’s elections director effectively shut down the process for restoring voting rights to Moore and hundreds of thousands of others in the state stripped of voting rights due to past felony convictions. 

In a July 21 memo, Tennessee Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins, a former Republican lawmaker, told local election offices that, on top of showing they’ve checked off all the boxes listed in state law, formerly incarcerated people must now also complete a separate process: persuade the governor to issue a pardon, or a local judge to issue an order restoring their rights. These officials can reject a request at their sole discretion, regardless of the criteria a petitioner has met.

It costs $159.50 to ask a judge for such an order in Davidson County, home to Nashville, where Moore resides, adding another financial hurdle to what was already a nearly impassable process.

Moore says he remains determined to work his way through the new process. “I feel like it’d make me a whole citizen again, getting my voting rights,” he told Bolts. Still, he says it felt particularly painful to pass by people at the polls during last week’s mayoral election in Nashville, knowing the state had just made it harder for him to ever again participate. “I’m hurt looking at the people voting, and I wish I could make a local difference in my community,” he said.

“They’re making it near impossible,” he added. “I think it’s by design. Once they open a door, they put out another block.”

Moore is working with Free Hearts, an organization led by formerly incarcerated women that helps Tennesseans regain the right to vote. Dawn Harrington, its executive director, told Bolts that dozens of people have already contacted Free Hearts asking for help since the new rules have put their rights entirely up to the whims of state officials. “What the state of Tennessee is doing is trying to suppress the vote, and be very strategic in suppressing the vote,” says Harrington, who herself had her rights restored in 2020. 

Tennessee’s previous system for restoring voting rights after prison, established in 2006, required people to file a certificate with their local elections office demonstrating that they fulfilled a long list of requirements, which included finishing all parts of a sentence, including probation and parole, paying off any fines, fees, and child support, and getting a corrections officer to sign off. Nearly 500,000 people in Tennessee are disenfranchised—around 9 percent of the state’s adult population. 

With Tennessee’s criminal legal system beset by massive racial inequalities in policing and prosecution, felony disenfranchisement is even higher for Black adults in the state: 21 percent can’t vote because of prior convictions, the highest rate in the nation. 

Advocates for rights restoration stress that these staggering numbers illustrate how tremendously difficult the previous system already was to navigate. According to the Sentencing Project, only 2,034 were able to get their rights restored between January 2020 and September 2022.

“Even under the old procedure, less than one percent of people who had felonies were able to get their voting rights restored because of just a morass of bureaucracy,” says Kathy Sinback, executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee. “What Mark Goins has done is horrifying, but [getting your rights restored] was almost impossible already.” Sinback told Bolts the hurdles the election coordinator added to the process last month are “putting in clearer relief the magnitude of the problem.”

“It puts the final nail in the coffin of democracy,” she said.

With this change, Tennessee joins Mississippi and Virginia as the only states where anyone who loses the right to vote over a felony conviction is presumed to lose it for life; in those states, the only path for relief is an act of clemency that is entirely at the discretion of state officials. (Nine other states permanently disenfranchise some but not all people with felony convictions.) Virginia only joined this group this year due to a new executive policy announced by Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican. 

Mississippi’s statute was struck down on Friday by a federal court. The state has not yet indicated whether it will appeal the decision.

The changes move Tennessee’s policy on rights restoration backwards in time. Before 2006, the state required people to secure a pardon or a court order to regain their voting rights, based on the process laid out in a 1981 statute. Then the state adopted the law in 2006, sponsored by two Democratic lawmakers, that meant to make the process less discretionary and listed specific requirements people must meet to be reinstated on voter rolls—the certificate process, detailed above. For the last 17 years, people who wanted to restore their rights needed to navigate cumbersome paperwork and bureaucracy to prove they met the criteria, but they didn’t need an individual court order or action from the governor.

Even with the 2006 reforms, the state maintained harsh standards for who is even eligible to have their rights restored, for instance disqualifying many lower-income people who could not afford to pay off their court debt or who fell behind on child support payments while incarcerated.

And not all Tennesseans were eligible to have their rights restored depending on the specific conviction they received. The process for determining eligibility was so confusing that people needed a three-page flow chart to decipher it.

In practice, many people who were eligible did not bother jumping through the hoops. Bolts talked to numerous Tennesseans who explained that it took them a very long time to access basic information and find people willing to help them understand the state’s process. They say they encountered elections officials who were also unable to answer basic questions, and had to chase down correctional officers to get them to sign the certificate many were unfamiliar with. After Harrington’s release from prison in 2011, for instance, it took her legal assistance and years of efforts—she was convicted in New York so had to get paperwork filed in that state—to fulfill the steps and regain her voting rights in 2020.

“The agencies that oversee the officials that are supposed to issue the certificate never created any training, any guidance,” Blair Bowie, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which sued the state over these rules, told Bolts. “The whole system is scattershot.”

Errors also put people who tried to regain their rights at risk of potential criminal prosecution. The state drew national furor last year when Pamela Moses, a Black activist in Memphis, was sentenced to six years in prison for registering to vote when she was not eligible to. A judge vacated her conviction after The Guardian reported that she had received false advice from state officials, and months later, voters ousted the local prosecutor who had targeted her. 

Last month’s memo from Goins, Tennessee’s elections director, made the rules more complex by piling the 1981 and 2006 statutes on top of each other. It states that people must obtain a pardon or judicial approval as outlined under the 1981 law and follow the certification process laid out by the 2006 law, saying the latter didn’t replace the requirements in the former.

Goins, who did not respond to a request for an interview, has attributed the policy change to a decision issued by the Tennessee Supreme Court in June in a case brought by Ernest Falls, a man with an out-of-state conviction who argued that he should not have to abide by all the requirements laid out in the 2006 law since he had already regained his voting rights in Virginia before moving to Tennessee. 

In ruling against Falls in late June, the court decided that the requirements of the 1981 and 2006 statutes should be combined when it comes to people with out-of-state convictions. Goins’ memo the next month stated that elections officials are now extending the logic of that ruling to people who have been convicted in Tennessee. The memo included a new version of the certificate of restoration, and instructions to also apply for a pardon or court order restoring rights of citizenship. “The application of the holding to other governing statutes requires the same interpretation to those convicted of a felony in both federal and Tennessee state courts,” Goins said. 

Bowie, whose organization helped bring the lawsuit on Falls’ behalf, told Bolts that these instructions are a “total misreading of the law.” She says it’s ludicrous to claim that lawmakers intended for the 2006 reforms to make the process even more burdensome. 

Steve Cohen, the lead sponsor of the 2006 law in the state Senate, told The Tennessee Lookout that this was “absolutely not” what his reform was meant to do. Cohen, who now serves in the U.S. Congress, did not answer a request for comment on the drafting of the 2006 law.

Demetrus Coonrod, a city councilor in Chattanooga who was incarcerated in the 2000s, got her voting rights restored a decade ago through the post-2006 system that only required completing a certificate. But she went on to also petition a court to restore her full rights of citizenship because she also wanted to run for office. She succeeded, one of only 11 people to complete that process in Chattanooga over a three year period. But she knows firsthand how arbitrary those decisions are.

“I was concerned because it felt like a gamble,” Coonrod told Bolts. “A judge can determine his idea of what a person is supposed to do to be productive.” 

People will now be subjected to that same procedure just to regain their voting rights, and Coonrod warns that making people plead for a governor or judge’s forgiveness will make the voting rights process even more haphazard. 

Harrington, whose group helps guide people through the rights restoration process, also warns that the legal fee people must pay to petition the court for such an order will add a tremendous obstacle for the state’s poorer residents to even apply.

“How are you going to charge somebody to restore their right to vote?” Harrington said. 

Dismayed by the new reality, Tennessee advocates want state lawmakers to step in and pass a system for automatically restoring people’s voting rights. Until then, they are also calling on Republican Governor Bill Lee to issue a blanket executive order to grant people pardons. 

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, who is also a Republican, issued such an order in 2020 when she restored the voting rights of Iowans once they complete most felony convictions.

“When someone serves their sentence and pays the price our justice system has set for their crimes, they should have their right to vote restored automatically,” Reynolds said at the time.

Since regaining her own voting rights, Conrood says she has devoted herself to helping others in Chattanooga go through the rights restoration process, step by step, “just keeping them empowered enough to complete it.” She shows people her own certificate of restoration to help fight off discouragement. “The hardest part for them was actually believing that it could happen for them too,” she said.

This year, Coonrood helped Nate Shropshire, a Chattanooga resident who had first looked into how to regain his voting rights a few years ago. He finally completed his paperwork and registered to vote this spring—right in time to beat Goins’ memo and avoid its new hurdles, such as the need to pay the court system and get lucky with a magnanimous judge.

Shropshire says he is now eager to exercise his voting rights but also to continue rebuilding his life.

“I just want to be a normal citizen like everybody else and not let my past determine my future,” he said. 

The post Tennessee Puts Voting Rights at the Whims of State Officials appeared first on Bolts.

At issue is an executive order Democratic Governor Andy Beshear issued in 2019, on his third day in office, that has restored the voting rights of at least about 180,000 people, or five percent of Kentucky’s adult population. The state constitution prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from voting for the rest of their life, but Beshear circumvented that by offering blanket restoration to most people who complete a sentence.

The fate of that order rests on the next governor’s goodwill, and each of the state’s last three governors have used their executive power to flip their predecessor’s policy on this issue. Beshear, a Democrat, is now running for re-election in this typically-red state against Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron. Voting rights advocates are nervous that Cameron, who is running as a law-and-order type and painting Beshear as soft on crime, may reverse the current order.

“We’re direly concerned that he would retract voting rights,” said Shelton McElroy, a volunteer organizer with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a group that helps people register to vote. McElroy himself was released from prison in 2002 but was unable to vote until after Beshear’s order in 2019.

The last time a Republican replaced a Democrat in Kentucky’s governor office, McElroy recalls, it prompted just such a stepback in rights restoration. Governor Steve Beshear, Andy’s father, had issued a blanket restoration order similar to the one currently in place in his final days as governor in 2015. Matt Bevin, the Republican who replaced him, immediately rescinded the order upon taking office, bringing rights restoration to a near-halt: the turnaround was so quick that very few people had time to benefit from Steve Beshear’s move and secure their rights back in that interval. 

Tens of thousands of Kentuckians were caught in that 2015 whiplash. Debra Graner, who had lost her right to vote in 2012, was among them. Like McElroy, she too had to wait until Andy Beshear’s 2019 order to see her voting rights finally restored, and she is anxious to see that the issue remains so unsettled. “It’s a scary proposition if Daniel Cameron wins and reverses the order,” she told Bolts. “Being able to get out there and vote is one of the biggest civil rights you can have,” Graner said.

Bolts talked to more than a dozen people involved in Kentucky politics, both liberals and conservatives, and all said they’ve not seen Cameron commit to a stance on how he would handle rights restoration, though many noted he has chosen to make “tough on crime” rhetoric a major part of his gubernatorial platform. 

“The fact that he’s not willing to speak about it kind of speaks for itself,” said Democratic state Representative Keturah Herron, a longtime champion for expanding the franchise. One advocate who said he personally pressed Cameron on this issue came away with the impression that he is playing coy.

But the same voting rights advocates who fear a major retrenchment if Beshear loses have also been disappointed by the scope of the governor’s order, and they’ve spent the last few years asking him to go further. Some even sued Beshear to compel him to do so, though they lost in court this month.

Beshear’s order automatically restores people’s voting rights when they finish all parts of their sentence—but it only applies to people who were convicted of nonviolent felonies. 

People convicted of offenses that the state categorizes as violent remain barred from voting for life, even after they have completed all parts of their sentence. The same is true of people who were convicted of felony in a different state, or in federal court.

For the people who are not covered by Beshear’s order, the only path is to apply for and receive an individual act of clemency, which is a rare and difficult process. 

This has kept Kentucky well out of step with most of the rest of the United States. Besides Kentucky, only 11 states disenfranchise any group of people for life, and most of those states have much narrower carve-outs than Kentucky. Even some Republicans have been more lenient than Beshear: in 2020, for instance, Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds issued an executive order restoring rights when people complete any sentence, excepting only those convicted of homicide.

Kenneth Williamson, who won back his voting rights in 2019 due to Beshear’s order, wishes the governor dropped his carve-outs. “It means the world to me to participate in the process that I was held out of for so long, but I absolutely wish he’d give everyone their right back if they’ve completed their sentences,” he told Bolts.

About 5 percent of Kentucky’s voting-age population—over 150,000 people—remains disenfranchised and won’t be able to vote in November. That’s more than double the national disenfranchisement rate. 

It includes 12 percent of Black Kentuckians, who are disproportionately targeted by the state’s criminal legal system, according to data compiled by the Sentencing Project, a national research organization.

Before Beshear’s order, disenfranchisement rates were even higher. Twenty-six percent of Black adults were deprived of the right to vote in the 2016 election, according to The Sentencing Project.

Beshear’s office has provided no criteria for how it responds to individual petitions for rights restoration from people who are not covered by his order; his office recently said in court that it assesses whether an individual is ”worthy” of the franchise.

The Fair Elections Center, a national voting rights organization, filed a lawsuit in 2019 that argued that this vague approach violated the First Amendment by subjecting some people’s right to political expression to arbitrary control of the governor. Beshear fought that lawsuit, seeking to maintain his exclusive  authority to pick and choose among applications. The Sixth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals sided with him when it rejected that suit last week, ruling that the governor has the discretion to decide who is or isn’t worthy of having their rights restored.

In a statement to Bolts, Beshear’s campaign embraced the selectiveness of the 2019 order. “Governor Andy Beshear will continue to stand up for the right to vote in a second term and the restoration of voting rights for Kentuckians with non-violent offenses who have paid their debt to society,” it said. 

The campaign also warned that its Republican opponent would narrow voting rights further. “Just like Matt Bevin did before, Daniel Cameron would rescind automatic voting rights restoration for non-violent offenders,” that statement read. 

For Jon Sherman, litigation director of Fair Elections Center, the organization that filed the lawsuit against Beshear, the upcoming election is a matter of harm reduction. Beshear’s approach is unusually punitive, but it widened the path to rights restoration for many Kentuckians. “A reversal of the current order, would take the bad part of the Beshear policy on rights restoration and expand it,” Sherman said. “That is very much on the ballot in November.” 

Sherman added, “It’s deeply un-American to have one person or government official sitting in judgment over the worthiness of a person with a felony conviction and deciding whether or not they should be able to participate in our democracy, and for that to be the sole and exclusive means by which people get the right to vote would be a travesty.”

If Cameron or another future governor were to rescind Beshear’s blanket order, it would not snatch back voting rights from people whose eligibility was restored under it, Sherman and other election law experts told Bolts. 

Executive orders operate prospectively and cannot undo an individual’s rights restoration. In 2015, Steve Beshear’s order had required people to apply for a state certificate to restore their rights; Bevin shut the door on that process before people had gotten a chance to obtain those. Andy Beshear’s order requires no application, so it is not subject to the same retroactive torpedoing.  

Marcus Jackson, founder and executive director of Advocacy Based on Lived Experience, a Kentucky-based organization that aims to empower currently and formerly incarcerated people, says he has spoken several times to Cameron and asked him directly whether he’d amend Beshear’s approach. He says he was unable to pin Cameron down.

“He insinuated it’s not even on his radar,” Jackson, who himself is disenfranchised even under Beshear’s order, told Bolts. “He is saying he doesn’t even care about it, but I know with the right pressure he would do the exact same thing Bevin did.”

During the 2015 election, Bevin, like Cameron as of now, took no firm position on felony disenfranchisement. A spokesperson for Bevin even hinted after his election that the Republican generally agreed with his opponent’s order. But Bevin then rescinded it less than a month later.

Cameron’s platform makes clear he wants to make Kentucky’s approach to criminal justice much stricter in general. His stated agenda includes calls to expand the death penalty, rein in citizen oversight of law enforcement, increase police wiretapping; and make it harder for incarcerated people to be granted parole. 

“Because Cameron himself has not come out with a public statement [on rights restoration], we look at his record on other progressive issues and we don’t think it looks favorable,” McElroy said.

Cameron, who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has painted Kentucky as unsafe and plagued by out-of-control crime. When asked recently whether he, as Kentucky’s attorney general and top law enforcement agent, plays any role in shaping the landscape he describes, he told local media, “Andy Beshear bears all the responsibility.”

But the forecast of Cameron’s stance on rights restoration is somewhat complicated by the fact that he was a vocal supporter of criminal justice reform as recently as a few years ago. 

Before he ran for attorney general, he was the spokesperson of a coalition called Kentucky Smart on Crime, that comprised organizations such as the ACLU of Kentucky, the Catholic Conference of Kentucky, and the state’s criminal defense bar. In 2018, Cameron wrote a column in the Courier-Journal advocating for a bill that would have implemented a slew of changes, from bail reform to defelonization of drug possession. 

Earlier this year, Cameron’s primary opponents slammed him for his prior affiliation with the ACLU and Smart on Crime. In response, Cameron released a letter signed by 37 sheriffs, prosecutors, and police chiefs touting his “law-and-order” solutions. 

Democrats once ran state politics in Kentucky, but the GOP has surged to near-total power over the last decade, and today holds supermajorities in both the state House and Senate. Trump carried the state by 26 percentage points in 2020. Still, Beshear ranks among the nation’s most popular governors, and recent polling has shown him with a lead against Cameron.

For voting rights advocates in Kentucky, the very fact that people’s access to the ballot is again coming down to a single election shows the need for more lasting change. They continue seeking a constitutional amendment that would automatically restore voting rights going forward. 

“It doesn’t make sense to me that people depend on the governor to make that executive order,” said Herron, the Democratic lawmaker, who has championed this effort and plans to do so again in the 2024 session.

These proposals have stalled in the legislature for years, despite some bipartisan support. A measure asking voters to codify some automatic rights restoration even passed the GOP-run Senate in 2020 before fizzling in the House. Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State, Michael Adams, is outspoken in favor of a change. “I strongly support amending the constitution to take it out of the hands of one person and make it permanently part of our constitution,” Adams told Bolts after he secured a primary win in May. 

“You shouldn’t have a governor change, and the electorate change,” he added. “The governor shouldn’t decide who gets to vote. It’s just not a good look.”

Until then, the rights restoration process can still be upended by one governor’s pen stroke. 

Said McElroy, “It’s races like these that demonstrate to us that we aren’t in a safe space just because one governor passed an executive order.”

The post Kentucky’s Governor Race Could Unwind Voting Rights Restoration appeared first on Bolts.

George Hawkins had a long to-do list when he left the Greensville Correctional Center on May 3, a free man for the first time in his adult life: stay out of trouble, find work, enroll in school, and relearn the streets of Richmond, which he hasn’t known since he was locked up at age 17. 

And, crucially to him: register to vote.

Since his release last month, Hawkins, who spent 13 years in prison, has secured stable housing with his father, made money by painting houses and repairing cars, and started taking college courses in business administration. But he will not be able to vote in Virginia’s elections on Tuesday, barring a last-minute reprieve, due to a new policy Governor Glenn Youngkin announced in March. 

Under Youngkin’s predecessor, Virginians automatically regained the right to vote upon leaving prison, an approach that would have made Hawkins eligible to vote. But Youngkin has revived the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people with felony convictions. Now Hawkins and the approximately 12,000 people released from Virginia prisons each year—a population in which Black people are massively overrepresented—must apply to the governor, who determines on an individual basis who deserves to regain their right to participate in the democratic process. 

Hawkins has never voted, but says he dreamed of doing so while he was incarcerated. He applied for voting rights soon after leaving lockup, hoping he could participate in the June 20 primary elections. As that date approaches, he still isn’t sure where his application stands, or even how or where to ask for an update. Unless the governor deems him worthy of casting a ballot in the coming days, Hawkins will miss out on the first election since he was freed.

“It’s like I completed my sentence, but it’s not really complete,” Hawkins told Bolts this week. “I feel like I have to pay way beyond the 13 years I already did.”

Virginia is one of few states that give governors the power to decide whether people who have lost their voting rights can regain them. Previous Virginia governors prioritized voting rights restoration by standardizing and automating the process, leading to the re-enfranchisement of some 300,000 Virginians since 2013. 

Republican Governor Bob McDonnell kicked this off a decade ago by restoring voting rights to about 8,000 people who’d completed sentences for nonviolent offenses. His successor, Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe, dramatically expanded the process by announcing in 2016 that Virginia would automatically restore people’s voting rights—no application needed—when they completed their full sentence; about 170,000 Virginians regained their rights under McAuliffe. By the time the last governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, left office, the rules were simple: the state would restore the voting rights of anyone convicted of a felony upon their release from prison, whether or not they’d finished probation, parole, or any other post-release sentencing condition. 

Youngkin, a Republican who came into office in early 2022, told lawmakers in March that he was reversing that approach. He said at the time he would assess applicants “on an individual basis according to the law and take into consideration the unique elements of each situation, practicing grace for those who need it and ensuring public safety for our community and families”—but he’s not said much else publicly since then, and his office did not respond to an request for comment for this story. 

Now, Youngkin alone chooses which people with felony convictions get to vote, making Virginia’s policy on disenfranchisement uniquely harsh: it is the only state where someone who is convicted of any felony is presumed to be barred from voting for life. 

Lawyers and voting rights advocates say Youngkin’s change has led to mass confusion about voting rights for formerly incarcerated Virgininans. People returning from prison say the policy makes them feel demoralized and even alienated from the rest of society.

Because he cannot vote, Hawkins said, he is dogged by his criminal record and unable to see himself as fully reintegrated in his community. “It’s second-class citizenship,” he said, “where you’re still an ‘ex-convict, an ‘ex-felon.’ It’s almost like it’s forever following you. That’s another form of incarceration.”

Voting rights advocates say Youngkin’s reversal caused major headaches for returning citizens. For one, they worry many people leaving prison simply won’t know how to apply to regain their voting rights to begin with. 

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who as the state’s former secretary of the commonwealth under McAuliffe helped build the now-shuttered program to automatically restore voting rights, said he’s also heard concerns from people who won back their voting rights before Youngkin was elected. Youngkin cannot, by law, strip voting rights from anyone who has already had them restored, but Stoney and voting rights advocates in the state told Bolts that Youngkin’s policy has spooked some people who already regained their right to vote under previous governors.

“There are voters—restored voters—who are afraid that maybe they may go to the polls, that maybe they may find out that [their] restoration is expired,” Stoney said. “They fear that could lead to a violation, a criminal offense.”

Officials in Florida and Tennessee have weaponized nebulous eligibility rules to arrest some people who mistakenly believed they could vote. There’s no evidence of any such enforcement in Virginia under Youngkin, but, Stoney said, “It certainly has sent a chill down the spines of many people.”
Virginia governors are limited to one term, so Youngkin, who is reportedly considering a 2024 run for president, will exit office no later than January of 2026. Stoney, the Democratic two-term mayor of Virginia’s capital, has all but confirmed he’ll run for governor in the state’s November 2025 election. He made clear to Bolts that he would, if elected, resume standardizing and automating the process for restoring voting rights.

But Stoney says it’s inherently problematic for Virginia to place so much power in anyone’s hands, including his own. That’s why he and advocates across the state have broadly supported efforts to put a ballot measure to voters that would amend the state constitution by creating permanent, objective criteria for regaining voting rights, and stripping the power from the governor’s office.

“My fear is until we get that constitutional amendment, you’re going to see this yo-yo effect, going back and forth between Republican and Democratic governors,” Stoney said. 

Under Virginia law, constitutional amendments must be approved by the legislature in two consecutive sessions, split by an election, before appearing on the ballot. An effort to amend the constitution to change the rights restoration process failed this session, and the next statehouse election after the coming one won’t be held for two years—meaning supporters can’t try again for a ballot measure until 2025, and wouldn’t be able to put one before voters until 2026 at the earliest.

In the meantime, Youngkin’s opponents are trying to find leverage. The governor faces a federal lawsuit from the Washington-based Fair Elections Center, which alleges Youngkin has acted unconstitutionally. Oral arguments in that case are set to begin next week, too late to help voters in Tuesday’s primaries. In the legislature, Democratic Senator Creigh Deeds has floated the idea of trading rights restorations for tax cuts that Youngkin seeks. Democrats control the state Senate, leaving them a critical check on a GOP that holds the governorship and the state House, though control of the legislature is at stake in the November elections.

“It’s just a matter of getting past these primaries next week before we can have serious conversations about it,” Deeds told Bolts. “The governor wants a billion dollars in tax cuts. We don’t want to give him a billion dollars. Is the cost we’re willing to pay for a billion dollars restoration of rights? I don’t know. I don’t know how everyone would feel.”

Senator Mamie Locke, Deeds’ Democratic colleague and a longtime voting rights advocate, said she thinks a constitutional amendment, far off as it may be in even the speediest scenario, remains the better route.

“I’m not interested in giving him any budget cuts,” she told Bolts. “A billion dollars in cuts is absolutely ludicrous, and I don’t think that we should be negotiating with him on what is an absolute right and not a privilege, exchanging voting rights for budget cuts.”

Locke and others have tried to “appeal to the governor’s heart” on this, she said, with no apparent success to this point. “You have to have a heart in order for someone to appeal to it,” Locke added.

Blair Dacey, who was formerly incarcerated, says she has tried personally appealing to Youngkin to regain her voting rights. Upon release from prison in 2022, she secured a job as a legislative aide to Virginia state Senator Joe Morrissey, allowing her far greater access to power than most of the state’s disenfranchised population. At the governor’s mansion in February, she got to meet Youngkin face-to-face.

Dacey, who has never voted and applied for her voting rights after her release from prison, thought she had a good chance at winning him over. A white woman, she was sentenced as a teenager to prison for kicking and killing a man—accidentally, she says—while defending her friend. Northam pardoned her midway through a 20-year sentence, and her release, like her original case, garnered substantial local media attention. 

When Dacey met Youngkin, she says, “he was really nice, really engaging—him and his wife, both.” She told him about herself and her work in government.

“He said, ‘That’s such a beautiful story,’” Dacey recalled. If this governor wants to evaluate disenfranchised applicants on a case-by-case basis, she thought, someone like her would seem a likely candidate.

But Dacey’s application is still pending. Unless Youngkin restores her rights in the next few days, she won’t get to vote for her boss, who faces a primary challenge on Tuesday.

“It makes me feel like it does not matter what I get out and do, or how many people I try to fight for. “If anybody would be more supportive of what’s going to help the community, it’s me. I’m putting forth the effort to show I’m trying to be the best and most positive example I can be.” 

“But I can’t even show it, because I’m canceled out already,” Dacey said.

While Hawkins, Dacey, and others wait on their applications, which seem to be pending indefinitely, the governor’s reversal on voting rights has scared off others returning from prison from even trying to regain their rights.

Deshun Watkins, 34, who befriended George Hawkins at Greensville and who was also recently released, has heard Hawkins detail the murkiness of his own re-enfranchisement process, and the feeling of dejection with which he’s grappling. “It makes me not even want to waste my time,” Watkins said.

He voted once in his life, for former President Barack Obama, and he remembers feeling proud to have played a part in Obama winning Virginia. Watkins would like to vote again, especially now that he’s got kids for whom he wants to be a role model. “If I get back to voting, at least I’ll feel like a normal citizen,” he told Bolts. “I’d get to do something my friends who aren’t felons get to do.”

But he’s concluded that Youngkin would probably not grant his application, and so, he says, he won’t subject himself to judgment. “Why would I want to get smacked in the face?” he said. “Who wants to take punishment like that?”
Watkins added, “I got friends that are waiting to apply for anything until Youngkin gets out of office. They don’t even want to deal with him. Like with parole, I got a homeboy who’s got 10 years left, and he doesn’t want to even think about that. He goes up for parole every year, and he’s not even excited.” (In addition to curtailing voting rights, Youngkin has also taken steps to limit what were already narrow paths to release for people eligible for parole in Virginia.)

Like Watkins, Alonzo Bland Jr., who was released from prison about a year ago, says he doesn’t want to apply for restoration of voting rights. He’d rather not involve himself at all with the Youngkin administration, he told Bolts at a church in Richmond, and so he plans to wait until he gets off probation before he explores applying. “I want to make sure I have no discrepancies,” he said. “I don’t want anyone saying, ‘Yeah, but…’ and I’d rather have my things in order before I put my ten toes down.”

Bland, 31, pays attention to politics, and was a habitual voter before he was locked up for two and a half years. Inside prison, he says, he and peers paid attention to candidate debates and watched election-night returns on TV. Bland has a degree in criminal justice and keeps tabs on policy decisions in that space, especially as they pertain to living conditions for the incarcerated. It sickens him to feel judged by Youngkin for his criminal history, given his strong sense of self-worth and the many steps he’s taken to improve his station during and since his time  in prison. 

“I’m just as much of a citizen as he is,” Bland says. “My values, my opinions about government, are just as valuable as his. Because an individual makes a mistake doesn’t mean a God-given right should be taken away from you, and he shouldn’t be the judge and jury on whether I get it back.”

The post The Virginians Who Can’t Vote Because of Glenn Youngkin appeared first on Bolts.

Going forward, Virginians will no longer regain their rights when released from prison—the most recent policy announced by Virginia officials in 2021—nor at any later point, unless Youngkin deems them to be worthy on an individual basis. 

His decision, which a future governor could alter, sidelines many residents who expected they would get to vote in Virginia elections. 

“I’ve never voted in my life. I was looking forward to voting this year,” Sincere Allah, who was released from prison the week Youngkin was inaugurated in 2022 and who has since waited to learn if his rights will be restored, told Bolts, in reference to the state’s upcoming legislative and prosecutorial elections. “I can pay taxes, I can be held to the same standard as everyone else when it comes to laws and rules and regulations, but I have no say-so or representation.”

Youngkin’s announcement also puts Virginia in a category all its own: It is the only state where someone who is convicted today over any felony is presumed to be barred from voting for life, with no remedy other than receiving a discretionary act of clemency from the governor. 

Virginia’s constitution permanently disenfranchises people with a felony conviction. Only Iowa and Kentucky have such a harsh rule on the books—other states with a lifetime ban, like Mississippi, do not apply it to all felonies—but their sitting governors have each issued executive orders that automatically restore at least some people’s voting rights upon completion of their sentences. 

For much of the last decade, Virginia governors adopted a similar approach, enabling hundreds of thousands of people to regain the franchise. Anyone whose rights have already been restored will retain the ability to vote. But for others, Youngkin has now rolled back those reforms.

“We are back to 1902-era policy,” Democratic state Senator Scott Surovell tweeted last week after Youngkin’s administration notified him of the change, in reference to the 1902 convention that designed Virginia’s disenfranchisement system with the explicit goal of disenfranchising Black residents: “discrimination within the letter of the law,” as one delegate termed it. That legacy lived on; as recently as 2016, 22 percent of Black Virginians were barred from voting.

“This language in our constitution is from extraordinarily dark origins,” Surovell told Bolts in a follow-up. “I thought we’d settled this debate over the past twelve years of reform, but apparently… anything’s on the table.”

In 2013, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell took a first step in the final months of his administration by announcing he would restore the voting rights of people convicted of nonviolent offenses after they complete their sentences. His Democratic successor, Terry McAuliffe, dramatically expanded the process in 2016 when he issued a blanket order that restored the voting rights of any Virginian once they completed their sentence; after Republicans sued, the state supreme court said the governor did not have the authority to issue a blanket order, but McAuliffe circumvented that limit by issuing individual orders to all those who’d have been affected by his original policy.

Democrat Ralph Northam maintained that approach once in office, and in 2021 he extended it by scrapping McAuliffe’s requirement that people first complete their full sentences, including any terms of probation or parole. Instead, Northam began restoring people’s voting rights upon release from incarceration.

Under McDonnell, 8,000 people regained their voting rights. The number then exploded to more than 170,000 under McAuliffe and 126,000 under Northam.  

Democrats tried and failed for years to refer a ballot measure to voters that would amend the state constitution to make rights restoration automatic. Absent that change, the future of the reforms implemented from McDonnell through Northam hinged entirely on the result of the 2021 governor’s race, which was won by Youngkin. During the election, Youngkin criticized McAuliffe, his Democratic opponent who was attempting a comeback, for his 2016 policy but he also remained vague as to what he’d do as governor. 

Even after he won, Youngkin adopted no public policy stance on rights restoration until this month. He restored the rights of roughly 5,000 people in 2022 but that alarmed observers because it was a far lower yearly number than his predecessors. About 12,000 people are released from prison annually in Virginia. 

Senator Lionell Spruill, a Democrat, sent Youngkin a letter earlier this month asking him to clarify what his administration was doing. The secretary of the commonwealth, a Republican appointed by the governor, replied last week that the governor’s office has a new approach: It is now evaluating whether to restore people’s voting rights on a case-by-case basis. This eliminates from state policy the notion that everyone can expect to have their rights restored at some point. 

Instead, Youngkin will be reviewing applications to decide who should have the right to vote. His office has shared no criteria as to how he’s deeming some people more deserving than others. 

Youngkin’s spokesperson, Macaulay Porter, said in a statement, “Restoration of rights are assessed on an individual basis according to the law and take into consideration the unique elements of each situation, practicing grace for those who need it and ensuring public safety for our community and families.” 

Porter did not respond when Bolts followed up by asking how, specifically, the governor would differentiate among applicants. “Every applicant is different,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Kay Coles James wrote to Surovell last week.

Democratic state Senator Mamie Locke, a longtime champion for rights restoration, says she personally pressed Coles James for more information. She told Bolts she has concluded that the vagueness is intentional.

“They did not want there to be any kind of hard and fast rules in terms of any kind of written criteria,” Locke said. “I have absolutely no idea what they consider to be the optimum candidate to have his or her rights restored.”

Virginia’s new status quo is similar to the rights restoration system that Florida had until 2018, when a landmark ballot initiative made it automatic for many residents. Until then, the only way for Floridians to have their rights restored was to apply and be grilled in live hearings by a panel of state officials who asked intrusive questions such as whether they had children from multiple partners. “There’s no standard, we can do whatever we want,” then-Governor Rick Scott, who sat in these hearings, said in 2016.

Sheba Williams, who directs the Virginia nonprofit Nolef Turns (“nolef” is “felon” spelled backwards), has helped thousands of formerly incarcerated people navigate the process of regaining their voting rights. She says she is in contact with about 100 people who applied to have their voting rights reinstated last year but who have heard nothing. Many, like Allah, expected they would be able to vote in the November midterms given Northam’s policy but Youngkin’s administration did not restore their rights or reply to their application. 

At the start of 2023, Williams noticed that the Youngkin administration had quietly updated the form it was asking people to fill when applying to have their rights restored. The new form asks people to state whether they were convicted of a nonviolent or violent offense and whether they still owe restitution or court fines and fees; those questions were not on the form that Youngkin’s administration inherited. Voting rights advocates in other states have denounced using court debt to determine voting eligibility as a modern-day poll tax.  

It is not clear whether and how the Youngkin administration is even using either piece of information to decide whether someone should be disqualified from voting. 

“Each governor can change the process however they see fit, and that’s the problem,” said Williams, who used to be disenfranchised herself due to a felony conviction. “It’s not a data-driven process, but a person with real emotions saying ‘I believe in this’ or ‘I don’t,’ saying ‘I think this person has been rehabilitated’ or ‘I don’t.’”

Williams helped the application of a woman, Grace, who told Bolts she now feels demoralized. She asked that her full name be withheld from this story because she fears retribution by the state. “I’m in limbo,” Grace said. “I know there are some people that don’t vote or register at all, but change only happens when you have the right to vote or speak on certain things. Right now, because I can’t vote, it doesn’t even mean that I’m going to be heard.”

“It makes me feel like I’m not a citizen,” she added. “I did the time for the crime, but I still have lost my rights. I don’t know if I’ll ever get them back or not.”

Shawn Weneta, a formerly incarcerated Virginian who is now a policy strategist at the ACLU of Virginia, said Youngkin’s approach has already created mass confusion. Speaking to Bolts last week, Weneta said he has recently gotten calls from people who have regained the franchise in the past wondering if their rights might now be revoked. They won’t, Weneta assured those people: Youngkin cannot reverse the restorations granted by previous governors. 

Still, those worried calls underscored for him the need for clarity on this issue. “Now it’s totally opaque,” Weneta said.

Weneta and other Virginians are also afraid that Youngkin’s policy could open the door to prosecutions in the future. In states that have confusing rights restoration procedures, some residents have been targeted with criminal charges if they get it wrong. 

“Florida has arrested people who have attempted to register and don’t qualify—and that’s a real concern here,” Williams said, alluding to the recent arrests by Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration of Floridians who erroneously thought they had cleared the state’s muddled criteria; in some cases, a public agency had told them they were eligible. The dynamic played out in Tennessee last year.

Virginia’s new approach is also drawing concern from Americans for Prosperity, a conservative organization that supported McDonnell a decade ago and has since backed several failed statehouse attempts at a statewide ballot measure to standardize and automate rights restoration.

“The community that is impacted by this, they want to have the confidence and clarity that if they do everything right they’re going to get their rights restored,” said Ben Knotts, legislative director of the group’s Virginia branch. “This creates a process where people don’t feel confident.”

Virginia is voting for its lawmakers this year, plus most of its prosecutors and sheriffs. The primary is in June, with a mid-May deadline for voter registration. Advocates and lawmakers will be watching closely to see whether Youngkin announces a new batch of people whose voting rights he’s restoring, and whether any particular pattern emerges among those who are and aren’t included in such an action.

In the meantime, Locke points to the long shadow of racism in Virginia history.

“What this administration wants to do is to retain vestiges of the 1902 constitutional amendment in Virginia,” she said. “They want to retain vestiges of Jim Crow, as a means of prohibiting individuals from voting.”

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