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.

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.

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.