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.

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

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

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

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

Kentucky | Secretary of state

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

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

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

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

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

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

Maine | Question 8

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

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

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

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

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

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

Mississippi | Secretary of state

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

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

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

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

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

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

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

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

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

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

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

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

Virginia | Legislative control

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

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

Washington | King County director of elections

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

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

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

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.

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

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

In Mississippi, the GOP is defending its existing trifecta. 

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

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

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

Kentucky 

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

What’s on the ballot: The governorship

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

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

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

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

Louisiana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mississippi

Current status: Republican trifecta

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

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

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

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

New Jersey

Current status: Democratic trifecta

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: New Hampshire 

Current status: Republican trifecta

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Five States Where Trifectas Are At Play in November appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kentucky 

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

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

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

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

All Kentucky counties are hosting regular elections next year.

Mississippi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What other elections to watch in the South 

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

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

Alex Burness contributed reporting.

Explore Bolts primers of the other prosecutor elections in 2023

The post In the South, Challenges to Democratic Prosecutors Headline November’s Elections 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.

Still, all six commissioners secured the Republican nominations on Tuesday in their bids to serve another four years in these offices.

Should they prevail again in November’s general election—and these are all red-leaning counties—they’ll retain control of local election administration during the 2024 presidential cycle. 

Duncan Hopkins, a local organizer with the group Lancaster Stands Up who confronted Lancaster County GOP commissioners Ray D’Agostino and Josh Parsons at a public meeting last fall about their ties to election deniers, is alarmed by this landscape.

“We are looking at elected officials—at the highest levels, I’m thinking of former President Trump, all the way down to county election board officials—and we are seeing that they will work very hard to find a way to take votes away from people, even from people who voted for them, just to prove that it’s something that they can do legally,” Hopkins told Bolts on Wednesday. “It’s distressing.”

In most of Pennsylvania, county commissioners double as local boards of elections, with duties ranging from supervising voter registration to tabulating ballots. Their role in certifying election results has emerged as a critical lynchpin in Trump allies’ efforts to take over election administration. “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans last year. But these county officials have broad effects on voting rights beyond the count since they shape people’s access to different ways of voting.

D’Agostino and Parsons last year voted to remove Lancaster County’s only drop box for mail-in ballots, for instance, and Hopkins is concerned by local commissioners’ crusade against mail voting, which is central to Trump’s own lies about fraud. “There are a fair number of people who in the Republican Party have tried to make voting more difficult by taking away ballot drop boxes, making it more difficult to vote by mail,” he said.

D’Agostino and Parsons faced no opponent in Lancaster’s Republican primary on Tuesday. In Berks County, incumbents Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera prevailed against three challengers, while Fayette County incumbents Scott Dunn and Dave Lohr won against two. 

Similar results played out throughout the state. Local GOP officials have attempted to block election certification in a handful of other counties since 2020. And in an extensive investigation of public statements made by county commissioner candidates, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified additional Republicans who have amplified false conspiracies about voter fraud. 

In total, 20 incumbent commissioners were on the ballot this week after supporting the Big Lie in either word—repeating denialist rhetoric in public statements—or else in deed, by refusing to certify a recent election. Eighteen of them won their Republican primaries, most of them in contested races. 

In Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, Councilmember Samuel DeMarco was unopposed for the GOP nomination on Tuesday, three years after voting to not certify the local presidential results and even signing up as a fake Trump elector. 

DeMarco, in fact, is a very rare elected official anywhere in the country who agreed to add his name to alternate elector lists willing to declare their state’s electoral votes for Trump despite the Republican’s loss in their state. DeMarco was interviewed by the FBI last year as part of an investigation into these schemes; he defended himself, saying that the list was only meant to be used in case the courts overturned the results. “When we did not win in court, the matter ended,” he told TribLive last year.

The Trump campaign’s lawsuits themselves were on flimsy grounds, and numerous judges in 2020 expressed alarm that they were being asked to disenfranchise millions of voters. DeMarco, who is also the chair of the local Republican Party in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county, did not return a request for comment. 

Joe Gale, a commissioner in Montgomery County, is one of the two exceptions. Gale voted against certifying election results in 2020, though as the sole Republican on his county board he was not able to block them. “There is no way to verify the authenticity of one half of the votes cast this year,” he said at the time, mirroring lies spread by Trump allies about the results. He doubled down, later opposing certifying the 2022 elections as well. Gale was ousted on Tuesday, finishing third in the Republican primary when only the first two vote-getters move forward to the general election.

But even that vote was not a complete repudiation of election denialism; the Republican who got the most votes in Montgomery, Thomas DiBello, has himself repeatedly amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, as uncovered by Spotlight PA and Votebeat.

Another election-denying commissioner who lost on Tuesday is Stuart Ulsh of Fulton County, a small and rural jurisdiction. Fulton was Pennsylvania’s only known county whose commissioners agreed to let a private group, connected with Trump lawyer Sydney Powell, conduct a so-called audit of voting equipment. State officials then decertified the county’s voting equipment, saying they could no longer be sure it was secure since a third-party had toyed with the machines. 

Ulsh, who later testified in the legislature in defense of this scheme, was eliminated on Tuesday. But his colleague Randy Bunch, who approved that audit alongside Ulsh, came in first in the Republican primary and will move to the general election alongside another Republican. 

Other counties that feature incumbent commissioners who amplified false fraud conspiracies include Beaver, Butler, Juniata, Lackawanna, Schuylkill, Washington, and Wyoming. 

In the night’s biggest loss for an election denier, state judge Patricia McCullough fell short in her bid to join the state supreme court, losing in the GOP primary by seven percentage points.

McCullough gave Trump one of his brightest legal wins in late 2020 when she blocked the certification of state results, only to be quickly disavowed by the supreme court. “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” she later said, boasting of her boost to “Stop the Steal” efforts.

Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican who defeated McCullough on Tuesday, has herself amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, telling a Republican audience that a bipartisan law that expanded mail-in voting in the state had undermined the integrity of elections. Carluccio did not answer a Bolts request for comment, and she also dodged a question on what she meant by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Throughout the state, Tuesday’s elections were marked by relatively low turnout, as is typical for off-year elections. Roughly 820,000 Republicans voted in the judicial primary on Tuesday, which is just 60 percent of the electorate that participated in the GOP primaries 12 months ago. 

Carluccio will face Democratic nominee Daniel McCaffrey in November. The winner will sit on Pennsylvania’s supreme court and hear potential election cases during the 2024 cycle. Democrats will retain a majority on the court no matter the outcome, though a loss would narrow their edge to 4-3. This general election is expected to be highly competitive. 

But in the counties where GOP commissioners tried to block certification in recent years, most of the incumbents who won their primaries yesterday are likely to have a clear edge in November. Trump carried Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster counties by large margins in 2020. 

Still, there is recent history to suggest that Pennsylvania Democrats can be competitive in red-leaning territory when facing a far-right candidate; Berks swung blue last year in the governor’s race, which featured election denier Doug Mastriano as the Republican nominee. In each of these counties, the two Democratic and two Republican nominees will run on one ballot, and the top three vote-getters will become commissioners.

DeMarco, the fake Trump elector running for re-election in Allegheny County, is also highly likely to return for another term. Under Allegheny’s complex rules, Democrats and Republicans each nominate only one candidate to complete for two at-large council seats in the general election, so they’re each sure to win unless an independent also enters the race. Local election observers told Bolts that they are not aware of an independent running at this time, though the deadline for one to file is Aug. 1.

“Since it is these local officials who are responsible for administering our elections and certifying the results, it’s critical for Pennsylvanians to not only be aware of this dangerous trend spreading through their cities and counties, but to know who the officials are who could potentially be a threat to democracy,” says Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, an organization that released its own report on local officials in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who have amplified the Big Lie.

The results in Pennsylvania’s Republican primaries on Tuesday stood in marked contrast with those in Kentucky, the only other state with statewide elections this week.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams easily won the Republican primary, defeating two election deniers who’d spread false election conspiracies with 64 percent of the vote. Over his tenure, Adams partnered with Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to support election changes that made it easier for Kentuckians to vote early and to vote by mail.

“I’m really proud that Kentucky Republicans ratified the things that we’ve done to make voting easier at a time that other red states have gone backwards,” Adams told Bolts on Wednesday after his victory. “I’ve got hundreds of thousands of Republicans that use those mechanisms to their satisfaction, and I just didn’t think that they were going to punish me for that.”

Adams will face Buddy Wheatley, a former Democratic lawmaker who promises to champion reforms to increase turnout, in the general election.

In the run-up to the Republican primary, Adams denounced the spread of conspiracies about the 2020 elections and he himself framed this race as a referendum on election denialism. 

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” he told Bolts. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories. You can’t cave.” He defended his decision to keep Kentucky in ERIC, a national consortium to clean voting rolls that a wave of GOP-led states have quit since the start of the year. 

Adams acknowledges that it may be easier to push back against the Big Lie in a state where Republicans already dominate, compared to a place like Pennsylvania where ”the stakes are higher.” But he cast election denialism as a national crisis, pointing to threats in places that aren’t as competitive in presidential elections such as Tennessee or New Mexico, where some GOP officials tried to block local certifications last year. 

“This is not a six state problem, it is a 50-state problem now,” he said.

The post Pennsylvania GOP Doubles Down on Election Deniers, Including a Fake Trump Elector appeared first on Bolts.

The result in Michigan will have the most immediate effects since, unlike California and Vermont, Michigan has a statutory ban on abortion on the books. Proposal 3, which affirms a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” passed on Tuesday, overturning the state’s abortion ban and protecting access going forward. ABC News called the race in favor of the measure which, as of publication, led 53 percent to 47 percent.

Meanwhile,  California voters overwhelmingly to  add a “fundamental right to choose to have an abortion” and a “fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives” to the state’s constitution. Vermont voters also approved language adding a  “right to personal reproductive autonomy” to that state’s constitution by a wide margin on Tuesday.  

Whether state constitutions protect abortion rights—and how state courts interpret those protections—has been a critical question in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade. The conservative court’s ruling only concerned whether abortion rights were protected under the federal constitution, but each state’s constitution can set higher standards for the protection of individual rights and liberties. Additionally, though individual rights to contraception are currently recognized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, many observers have speculated that the Court may overrule that decision, too. Accordingly, it is significant that all three constitutional amendments that passed tonight also recognize—explicitly or implicitly—individual rights to contraception.

An analysis published by Bolts in July found that a dozen state supreme courts have ruled that their states’ constitution recognizes abortion rights. But until Tuesday, no state constitution explicitly declared such a right; judges in those states relied on provisions that talked about a right to privacy or about due process. California, Michigan, and Vermont are the first three states to add provisions into their constitution that explicitly codify the right to an abortion. 

They likely will not be the last, with Democratic governors around the country calling for similar amendments and with abortion-rights advocates motivated by tonight’s results.

In states with abortion bans, advocates have also turned to courts to challenge their legality under state constitutions, hoping that more judges might recognize abortion protections.

Tuesday’s elections decided the courts’ balance of power in populous states that may face showdowns over abortion rights. The GOP gained a new majority on the state supreme court in North Carolina, and narrowly retained its majority in Ohio; Democrats are favored to retain their majority on the Michigan supreme court. In another major race where abortion was on the line, Republicans also failed to take full control of the state government in Pennsylvania, another battleground on the issue; Governor-elect Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, favors abortion rights and would be poised to veto bills that carry restrictions.

Tuesday’s results build on the landslide in favor of abortion rights in a referendum in Kansas in August. Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers in Kansas proposed a constitutional amendment that would have effectively overruled a landmark decision by the Kansas supreme court in 2019 protecting abortion rights, but Kansas voters rejected that amendment.

Kentuckyians were similarly voting on Tuesday on a constitutional amendment that would have declared that their state constitution does not protect abortion rights, and just like Kansas they rejected the measure. The result is welcome news to abortion-rights advocates and opponents of the proposed amendment, which significantly outraised and outspent supporters. However, the failure of the amendment itself will not legalize abortion in Kentucky. Ongoing litigation at the Kentucky Supreme Court, which concerns whether the state constitution implicitly includes abortion rights, will ultimately determine the legality of abortion in the commonwealth. 

Also in Kentucky, a conservative lawmaker who championed abortion restrictions in the legislature lost an election to join the state supreme court.  

Montana decided yet another measure pertaining to abortion on Tuesday. Unlike the other referendums, this concerned a state statute that required medical care be given to any infant “born alive” after induced labor, cesarean sections, or attempted abortions. The bill was drafted to mirror model legislation advanced by national anti-abortion groups, and was condemned by abortion-rights advocates and abortion providers as addressing a non-existent problem—especially given the rarity of late-term abortions generally. The measure appeared to be failing on Tuesday night, but regardless would likely have little impact on the legality and availability of abortion in Montana.

Of Tuesday’s referendums, Michigan’s Prop 3 drew the most attention heading into Tuesday. 

Passage of the measures in California and Vermont was never seriously in doubt given both states’ socially liberal bent. Both states enable abortion access, and the California Supreme Court has recognized an implicit state constitutional right to reproductive rights since the early 1980s. However, the addition of explicit constitutional protections further entrenches abortion rights in both states, and insulates them from the prospect of future supreme courts changing course.

Michigan, though, is more politically divided and Prop 3 faced a heavy opposition campaign. Attacks from opponents of the measure falsely argued that passage of the amendment would allow children to have access to “gender change therapy without parental consent,” a charge that appeared in television advertisements and was widely condemned as false.

The measure was also set to offset the status quo. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision “triggered” old statutes outlawing abortion in many states around the country. In some places, this meant returning to laws that were a century old—and in some cases, even older. Arizona returned to its 1864 ban, adopted when it was still a territory, and Wisconsin returned to its 1849 ban. In Michigan, the ruling threatened to reactivate the 1931 abortion ban, raising the prospect of widespread criminalization, even as some liberal prosecutors promised to resist it.

But the ban was blocked by state courts, with the state court of appeals halting the law’s enforcement and the state court of claims holding that it ran afoul of the state constitution. The issue was still pending before the state court of appeals, however, and the passage of Proposal 3 all but guarantees that the 1931 ban will be held unconstitutional.

With the amendment’s passage in hand, abortion will remain lawful in Michigan—and protected as a “fundamental right,” meaning that state courts will critically evaluate infringements on the right.

The post Measures to Protect Abortion Rights Triumph on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.

This guide walks you through how concretely the 2022 midterms will shape abortion access. 

We identify nine questions that touch on reproductive rights that state and local elections will decide, and the critical battles that will help answer them. The guide successively covers the meaning of state constitutions, the viability of new laws, and matters of law enforcement.

This guide is just one small slice. The elections mentioned, which cover 21 states, are by no means exhaustive: There are many other races playing out along similar lines for offices that will wield power over these issues for years to come. Still, we hope to give you a taste of the enormous range of powers held by state and local officials, and some of the ways that candidates on all sides are getting creative in how they’d use these in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

What are the candidates running for prosecutor saying in your county, if there’s an election? What about those running for sheriff and attorney general, governor and judge? The very need to ask these questions underscores the magnitude of the loss of federal protections, though local and state conflicts over the issue are by no means new; and that means many candidates already have long histories and some ideas when it comes to how they will approach abortion access.

1. Will voters affirm or reject state constitutional protections for abortion access?

Never have there been more referendums on abortion than this year. In six states, voters will weigh in directly on the issue, and more indirectly in a seventh, and the results could establish new bulwarks against the right’s efforts—or else open the door to new restrictions.

These stakes are clear in: Kansas’s August referendum… 

In a landmark ruling that’s now styming Kansas conservatives, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state constitution’s equal protection clause protects access to abortion. But voters will soon decide whether to adopt a constitutional amendment, championed by Republicans, that would overturn that ruling and lift its protections; the election is scheduled for the lower-turnout August primary. 

… and a likely Michigan referendum in November.

Pro-choice organizers in Michigan this week submitted more than 700,000 signatures on behalf of a constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion rights, far more than the amount needed to get the measure on November’s ballot. If enough signatures are verified, voters will decide the fate of the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban. A progressive win here would be one of Election Night’s defining stories since it would protect access to abortion in a populous swing state, one where governance has long been out of reach for Democrats due to GOP gerrymanders. (That may change this year too.)

Also keep an eye on:

California and Vermont already enable access to abortions, but this fall they could become the first states to explicitly codify the right to abortion and contraception in their state constitutions. 

Inversely, Kentucky conservatives are championing an amendment that would say that the state constitution provides no protections for abortion. Kentucky courts have not affirmed such a right, so this referendum would not overturn existing protections. Still, pro-choice groups have asked judges to do so; that door would all but close if the amendment passed. In Montana, voters may decide that a fetus born alive counts as a legal person. Finally, and more indirectly, Alaska holds a referendum, as it does every ten years, on whether to hold a constitutional convention that may change the state constitution; this matters because the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution’s privacy clause protects abortion access, and some conservatives who favor an abortion ban in Alaska hope for a ‘yes’ win to overturn that precedent.

2. Will new state judges affirm abortion rights, or strike down abortion protections?

State supreme courts are critical battlegrounds for reproductive rights. Nearly a dozen have established that their state constitutions recognize abortion rights. But that landscape is in flux as progressive and conservative litigators aim for new rulings. Upcoming judicial elections will tip the scales in many states; most states elect supreme court justices this year.

These stakes are clear in: Michigan’s supreme court elections…

Governor Gretchen Whitmer and pro-choice organizations want Michigan courts to strike down the state’s pre-Roe ban and find a right to access abortions in the state constitution; the state’s supreme court has yet to rule, and its makeup is a question mark. Democrats enjoy a 4-3 majority on the court, but one justice from each party (Richard Bernstein, a Democrat, and Brian Zahra, a Republican) is up for re-election. Republicans must carry both seats to flip the court.

… and a supreme court election in Montana.

Montana’s supreme court, unlike Michigan’s, has already affirmed that the state constitution protects abortion. But conservatives are asking the high court to overturn that ruling—at the same time as they’re working to push the bench further right. In a heated judicial election this fall, they are backing Jim Brown, a former counsel for the state’s Republican Party, over Justice Ingrid Gayle Gustafson, an incumbent who was appointed by a Democratic governor. 

Also keep an eye on:

The partisan majority of supreme courts is on the line in three other states—Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio—with a combined seven elections between them. These races may be decisive in future cases that touch on abortion rights. Of the three, North Carolina stands out: Abortion remains legal there but the situation could rapidly shift if the GOP makes further gains (see below), making it critical for Democrats to maintain their supreme court majority.

In Kentucky, pro-choice advocates hope to get courts to affirm a right to abortion in the state constitution but a fervently anti-abortion lawmaker is running for a seat on the supreme court. Similarly, conservatives hope to oust a moderate supreme court justice in Arkansas. Finally, eleven justices face retention elections (meaning a yes-or-no vote on whether they should stay in office) in Florida and Kansas, where state jurisprudence is especially fragile right now.

See also: Your State-By-State Guide to the 2022 Supreme Court Elections

3. Will states elect governors who will veto new abortion restrictions?

In some places where abortion remains legal, all that’s standing between virulently anti-abortion legislatures and new restrictions is the veto pen of a pro-choice governor. But for how long?

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania’s governor race.

Abortion rights have survived in this state despite Roe’s fall because the GOP legislature has to deal with the veto power of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat who supports abortion rights. But this status-quo is precarious: Wolf is term-limited and Republicans have nominated far-right lawmaker Doug Mastriano, who has long fought access to abortion, to replace him. The contrast is stark between Mastriano and the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who has opposed new abortion restrictions for decades.

Also keep an eye on:

The Democratic governors of Kansas and Michigan, Laura Kelly and Whitmer, have each used their veto pen to block anti-abortion bills passed by GOP lawmakers. But that shield could soon disappear: Each is up for re-election this fall. That said, each state’s situation is complex: Michigan already has a ban on the books, but Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants state courts to strike it down; in Kansas, the right to an abortion is protected by a court ruling that voters may overturn this summer.

Inversely, Democrats could break the GOP’s control of Arizona and Iowa by flipping these state’s governorships. Arizona’s legal landscape on abortion is in flux, while Iowa’s high court overturned abortion protections in June, opening the door to new restrictions. In New York, where Republican Lee Zeldin would be the first governor opposed to abortion rights in at least 50 years, access would remain broadly protected but Zeldin has signaled he’ll look for ways to chip away.

4. Will states elect legislatures that want to restrict or protect abortion?

Governors are only one part of the puzzle when it comes to new laws; legislative control is just as fundamental. Simply put, will each chamber be favorable or hostile to abortion rights—and if they disagree with their governor, will lawmakers have the votes to override a veto?

These stakes are clear in: North Carolina’s legislative elections.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, is sure to be in office through 2024. At the moment Republicans, who control the legislature but lack veto-proof majorities, cannot get restrictions past him. Will that change this fall? If November is very rough for Democrats, the GOP could make enough gains to sideline Cooper.

Also keep an eye on: 

Republicans have failed to override Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of anti-abortion bills, but even if Kelly wins a second term, they may have an easier time next year if they grow their legislative majorities. Republicans also have outside shots at seizing control of Nevada, New Mexico, and Minnesota state governments if they manage to flip both the governorship and legislature. In the first two states, abortion is currently legal but not protected by state courts; in the third, a court ruling protects abortion but the GOP may still push for some new restrictions.

Inversely, legislative gains by Democrats could protect abortion in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the party has a stronger shot than it has in decades thanks to fairer maps. Finally, keep an eye on Democratic primaries in Maryland and Rhode Island, where progressive groups like Pro-Choice Maryland are targeting Democrats who oppose abortion. This can matter even where Democrats have supermajorities (as in Maryland) if they need to override a Republican governor’s veto.

5. Will cities and counties empower law enforcement to enforce bans or investigate pregnancy outcomes?

Besides changing state constitutions and laws, proponents of reproductive rights face a vast host of challenges having to do with how to mitigate the harms of existing bans, and that includes the threat of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. First up are the sheriffs and police chiefs in charge of arresting and investigating people. A few police chiefs and sheriffs in blue-leaning areas like New Orleans have said they would not enforce abortion bans. How might this play out in the midterms? Police chiefs are typically appointed by city governments (which often have more leeway to direct police practices than they utilize), while sheriffs are directly elected.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s sheriff elections.

The sheriff of Dane County (Madison) put the question of abortion enforcement at the center of Wisconsin’s sheriff elections when he said he would not enforce the state’s 1849 ban on abortion. “Our sheriff’s office has a very strict budget with regards to our time and where we decide to put things,” Kalvin Barrett, a Democrat, told Bolts. He is now running for re-election against Republican Anthony Hamilton, who did not respond to Bolts‘s questions about his position on the issue. Bolts reached out to other candidates running for sheriff in the state. In Milwaukee, the state’s most populous county, all three candidates echoed Barrett’s stance and said they would not use the department’s resources to investigate abortion cases. (All are Democrats.)

In Eau Claire County, where three candidates are running, only Democrat Kevin Otto told Bolts that he would follow Barrett’s footsteps. “I would not enforce the laws on abortion because of the lack of resources and interference into a person’s health matters,” he said. Otto’s Democratic opponent David Riewestahl said it was too early to definitively answer the question, while Republican candidate Don Henning replied he would “investigate complaints as they arise.” 

Also keep an eye on:

Many cities in states with severe abortion restrictions (or that risk having them soon) will elect their municipal governments this year, and the role that their local police departments play in enforcing abortion bans should be central issues. Those cities include Little Rock, Arkansas, Tallahassee, Florida, and Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky.

6. Will counties elect prosecutors who have pledged not to charge abortion cases?

Prosecutors have historically enjoyed vast discretion over what cases to charge, which has made them a highly visible line of defense against the criminal consequences of bans. Already, dozens of prosecutors have said they won’t press charges in cases that involve abortions. As a result, reproductive rights are a major fault line in a host of upcoming elections that pit candidates who say they would enforce restrictions—and candidates who say they’ll decline cases. 

These issues were already present before Dobbs, as zealous prosecutors investigated pregnancy outcomes, as Bolts reported in June. Just last month, a conservative California district attorney lost his re-election bid after prosecuting two women who had experienced stillbirths.

The stakes are clear in: Maricopa County’s prosecutor race (Phoenix)…

Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Rachel Mitchell is now the chief prosecutor of Maricopa County in Arizona, home to 4.5 million people. If courts greenlight the state’s new restrictions on abortion, Mitchell has said she would enforce them. But Maricopa is holding a special election this year, which adds further uncertainty since presumptive Democratic Julie Gunnigle has ruled out pressing criminal charges, as Bolts reported in May in partnership with The Appeal. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” Gunnigle said. “Not now, not ever.”

… and in the prosecutor’s race in Florida’s Pasco-Pinellas (St. Petersburg) counties… 

Florida’s Pasco and Pinellas counties, which share a state attorney, have not had a contested election for prosecutor in 30 years despite being home to a combined 1.5 million residents. And what a time to have one: Their judicial district hosts a special election, much like Maricopa, and the two contenders are at odds on whether to enforce the state’s existing ban on abortions after 15-weeks. (Florida laws may soon get harsher still.) Democrat Allison Miller, a local public defender, says she will not prosecute people providing or obtaining an abortion, unlike Republican incumbent Bruce Bartlett, appointed to the job by Governor Ron DeSantis.

… and in the Texas DA elections.

A group of Texas DAs issued a joint statement this spring vowing to not prosecute abortion. And though just a portion of Texas counties vote for a DA this year, November’s elections will shape whether that group grows or shrinks. Democratic DAs who signed that statement are running for re-election in Bexar and Dallas counties. And in two populous counties that have trended bluer, Democrats are hoping to flip the DA offices. “I will not allow the persecution of our neighbors by cynical politicians bent on establishing a theocracy in Texas,” Kelly Higgins, the Democratic nominee in Hays County, wrote on Facebook after the Dobbs decision. In Tarrant County, where a staunchly punitive incumbent is retiring and former President Trump has gotten involved on behalf of the GOP nominee, Democratic nominee Tiffany Burks told Bolts she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever.”

Importantly, the discretion of Texas DAs may be strongly tested by conservatives going forward, as lawmakers and the attorney general are working out ways to kneecap these local officials.

Also keep a eye on:

Iowa’s most populous county (Polk, home to Des Moines) is sure to have a new prosecutor come next year, and Democratic nominee Kimberly Graham told Bolts in June she would not prosecute cases linked to abortion; the state supreme court in Iowa struck down abortion protections in June, plunging reproductive rights in the state in greater vulnerability. In Shelby County (Memphis), one of the few staunchly blue counties in Tennessee, Republican DA Amy Weirich has pointedly rejected the idea of issuing a blanket policy on not enforcing abortion ban; Steve Mulroy, her Democratic opponent in the August election, has said prosecutions “should be extremely low priorities” and he has assailed Weirich for lobbying for a harsher law.

See also: Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors in 2022?

7. Will states elect attorneys general who want to interfere with local prosecutors?

Prosecutors are imperfect bulwarks since any policy they set is at the mercy of the next election, but also because conservatives have mechanisms at their disposal to supersede DAs—and they are plotting to set up more. Chief among them: Attorneys general. In some states, they have the authority to bring criminal charges on their own, and if not to bury providers under civil lawsuits. 

But this authority can cut both ways. Pro-choice candidates are signaling how they too would try to use the powers of this office for the opposite end, namely to stop the prosecution of abortions. When the conservative DA of California’s Kings County prosecuted two women over stillbirths, for instance, Attorney General Roy Bonta blew up the cases through media appearances and convinced a judge to reopen a case.

The stakes are clear in: Michigan’s attorney general election…

While a series of Michigan prosecutors have ruled out prosecuting abortion, they face a major obstacle: The Michigan attorney general’s latitude to step in is greater than in many other states. Democratic incumbent Dana Nessel has ruled out doing so, but she’s up for re-election and her likely general election opponent, Matt DePerno, has indicated he is in favor of enforcing bans.

… and the Arizona attorney general election.

Kris Mayes, Democrats’ likely nominee for Arizona attorney general, wants to go a step further: She is not just ruling out prosecuting people herself, but she also proposes stopping others from doing so. She says she would use her office’s supervisory authority over all local prosecutors, an authority that is broader in Arizona than elsewhere, to direct all of Arizona’s county attorneys to not enforce bans on abortion. But the Republican candidates in this race largely oppose abortion rights; were they to win, they may flex their power and try to supercede Democratic prosecutors who are refusing to bring criminal charges. Either way, legal questions about the extent of the attorney general’s authority will remain, likely leading to more clashes.

Also keep an eye on: 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, is among the country’s most militant officials in restricting abortion and has vowed to help local prosecutors enforce the state’s harsh laws; he may also bring ruinous civil lawsuits against providers. His opponent Rochelle Garza could not be more different. She has worked on defending access to abortion as an attorney and says she would set up a reproductive rights unit in the office if she wins, which is always a tough proposition for a Texas Democrat—though Paxton’s own criminal indictments may give her an additional opening. In Georgia and Ohio, two states that are looking to implement severe restrictions, Democratic nominees Jen Jordan and Jeffrey Crossman are also speaking on the issue; Jordan says she would issue legal opinions to undercut local prosecutors who are bringing criminal charges, for instance, and Crossman refuses to defend the law in court. Their Republican opponents, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (who responded skeptically to a 10 year-old rape victim who sought an abortion), are currently defending abortion restrictions in court.

8. Will states elect governors who promise clemency?

In states that have already banned or severely restricted abortion, a pro-choice governor, on their own, won’t shield people from arrest and prosecution. But some governors may at least have the authority—by themselves or through appointees to a board, depending on state rules—to issue clemencies for people who are convicted of violating criminal codes.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s governor race.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers has said he would grant clemency to anyone convicted under the state’s 1847 ban on abortions. But Evers is up for re-election this fall, and his GOP opponents have made it clear they support enforcing the ban. 

Also keep an eye on: 

Wisconsin governors have broader discretion than most to grant clemency; many other states dilute that power considerably. 

Still, at least one other state is electing a governor who will have somewhat direct authority to issue pardons: Ohio. Republican Governor Mike DeWine faces Nan Whaley, Dayton’s Democratic mayor, who is an abortion rights supporter and says she would veto new restrictions. She did not respond to a request for comment on clemency powers. The issue has also come up in Arizona, where the governor shares power with a clemency board. Democrat Marco Lopez has said he would support pardoning people convicted over abortions; Katie Hobbs, the other Democrat in the race, supports abortion rights but did not reply to a request for comment on clemency. 

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, who has broad authority over pardons and is only up for re-election in 2023, has not said how he would use his own clemency powers.

9. Will new judges bless gerrymanders that would lock in anti-abortion majorities?

Before overturning Roe v. Wade, this conservative U.S. Supreme Court also refused to rein in partisan gerrymandering. And there’s a direct connection to abortion rights: The GOP in many states has drawn maps that lock in legislative control, making it extraordinarily difficult for pro-choice majorities to emerge even if most residents vote for them. A few state courts have guarded against this dynamic—but their judgements are now on the line.

The stakes are clear in: North Carolina and Ohio’s supreme court elections.

These two states’ supreme courts have each struck down GOP gerrymanders, though Ohio lawmakers have for now circumvented those rulings. But new court majorities may emerge in November—five justices will be elected across the two states—and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering, as Bolts reported in March. Friendlier courts could enable the GOP to draw maps that last the full decade and enshrine anti-abortion majorities. (Note that, while North Carolina is sure to have new congressional maps by 2024, it will be tricky for Republicans to justify drawing new legislative maps before the end of the decade due to legal idiosyncrasies, but they may try if they think they’ve secured a high court would rubber stamp their maneuver.)

And there will be no rest for the weary. Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin indicated that he may push for severe restrictions if the legislature were favorable to it, which has already marked the state’s elections for the state Assembly and Senate in the fall of 2023 as critical for abortion.

The post Your Guide to Local Elections Where Abortion Is on the Line This Year appeared first on Bolts.

A small court in Franklin County, Kentucky, will hold a trial to decide whether the state’s new election districts are unconstitutional. The lawsuit, backed by the state Democratic Party, argues that the new maps unduly entrench Republican power by carving up urban areas. 

Franklin may be a county of just over 50,000 residents, but it is also a rare Democratic-leaning jurisdiction in this conservative state and home to the state capital, Frankfort. That has long made Franklin County an inviting place for groups looking to file lawsuits against the state, giving its circuit court outsized importance when it comes to voting rights, education, labor rights, and a lot else in state politics. That has also made it a target for Kentucky Republicans.

Last year, they stripped Franklin County’s circuit court of some of its jurisdiction over statewide matters, overriding a veto by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to get there. In 2022, they’re going after a seat on the court, where a conservative gain could further narrow one of the remaining paths for civil rights litigation in Kentucky. 

One of the two judges sitting on the court, longtime incumbent Phillip Shepherd, faces a well-funded challenger this year. The race is nonpartisan, but Shepherd has long drawn Republican fire. His opponent Joe Bilby is a lawyer who describes himself as a “constitutional conservative” and who once worked as a legislative aide for U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell. 

McConnell has already gotten involved. His political action committee, Bluegrass Committee, donated to Bilby’s campaign shortly after he entered the race last fall. 

Republicans nationwide have lashed out against judges who they think are ruling against them on voting rights cases. They have passed laws across the country that weaken their powers, as they did in Kentucky last year, while also seeking to oust them at the ballot box. National conservative groups have poured money into dominating local judicial races. In the last midterm cycle, the biggest donor to the Republican State Leadership Committee by far was the dark-money Judicial Crisis Network, a group that champions a conservative judiciary. 

Douglas Keith, who tracks spending in judicial elections for the Brennan Center for Justice, says conservative groups have intervened in local races for many reasons, ranging from building a bench to targeting a particular judge. But it may also be that some localities acquire far greater importance than one would expect, “like the Franklin County court which plays a special role in Kentucky.”

Attorneys have long zeroed in on Franklin County to stop civil rights violations. When the state Board of Elections moved 175,000 registered voters to an “inactive” list before the governor’s race in 2019, the court granted an injunction to block it, citing the “chilling effect on voters in the Commonwealth.” At the time, Kentuckians could file lawsuits against state officials in that county, no matter where they lived, since that is where state officials work. That’s no longer as easy today because of the Republican law adopted in 2021. Now lawsuits filed against new state laws, regulations, or executive orders must be filed in a plaintiff’s home county. 

But Franklin County’s court continues to hear lawsuits against state officials and state actions. Beshear successfully challenged new Republican laws against his COVID-19 regulations there. 

As long as a group finds a plaintiff based in Franklin County, it can still file there and have its case heard by one of its two judges—Shepherd or Thomas Wingate, who is handling the gerrymandering case. Few court systems in Kentucky fall outside of very conservative areas—Franklin is one of three counties that McConnell lost in his 2020 re-election race—and lawsuits alleging civil rights violations may receive a less friendly hearing in many other places.

Franklin County’s court can also consider cases alleging that state officials are neglecting their duties; last summer, a coalition of civil rights groups sued Beshear in Franklin County for failing to give some Kentuckians with felony convictions the information needed to restore their voting rights.

Ben Carter helped file that lawsuit as a counsel at the Kentucky Equal Justice Center. He says one main reason for filing a lawsuit in Franklin County is because judges there are already used to reining in other branches of government.

“When you have a question about the governor or the legislature, you want a judge who has been in the business of telling the executive and legislative branch what they can do,” he told Bolts. “It’s not as daunting to them. They’re in the habit of making those calls and will not give undue deference to the legislature or the governor.” 

He added, “When you file in Franklin Circuit Court, you know that you are going to get one of two judges with a combined 30 years of experience making thoughtful decisions about the scope of government powers, and those are muscles that other courts have not gotten to exercise.”

As one of only two circuit court judges serving in Kentucky’s state capital for 16 years, Shepherd has heard many lawsuits against the state. In the felony disenfranchisement case, he greatly disappointed voting rights groups last fall after siding with Beshear, who had asked for the lawsuit to be tossed. But Shepherd has reined in the legislative or executive branches in other instances. In 2014, he rejected the settlement that the state had reached with a coal company that was accused of massive violations of the Clean Water Act. He ruled that the terms were too lenient on the company, and that the state’s regulations had created “incentives for inaccurate reporting” of water pollution. 

Republicans won control of the state government for the first time in nearly a century in 2016, and their aggressive agenda has since repeatedly triggered lawsuits over constitutional rights or the limits of legislative power, including in recent years public health during the pandemic. In that time, Shepherd has struck down several high-profile bills as unconstitutional. 

Shepherd overturned a law slashing state pensions in 2018, leading Republican Governor Matt Bevin to call him an “incompetent hack.” When Shepherd’s decision was later upheld by the Kentucky Supreme Court, Bevin called that decision “an unprecedented power grab by activist judges.” Justice Daniel Venters wrote an op-ed criticizing Bevin for trying to “bully” judges. 

Then in 2021, Shepherd struck down several Republican laws, passed over Beshear’s veto, that limited the governor’s emergency powers in the context of COVID-19. The decision was later overturned by Kentucky’s supreme court. Also in 2021, Shepherd struck down a law that offered tax credits to fund private school tuition, ruling that this system could “exacerbate inequality in educational funding.”

These decisions put Shepherd squarely in the GOP’s crosshairs. 

Republicans have cited Shepherd’s decisions and even social media habits to make the case that he is too biased to hear politically charged cases. But a 2016 analysis published by the Courier-Journal in Louisville found that the judge actually often ruled for Republicans in high-profile cases. On the campaign trail, Bilby has also attacked Shepherd for failing “to follow the law.” Shepherd defends his impartiality, recently telling the State Journal that he sees his role as “speaking truth to power when power is in the wrong.”

Neither Bilby nor Shepherd replied to requests for comment from Bolts.

Bilby’s legal endeavors have signaled a different outlook than Shepherd’s. In 2020, he represented Tabernacle Baptist Church and helped convince a federal court to rule that churches across the state didn’t have to comply with Beshear’s executive order banning mass gatherings, because it infringed their religious freedom. Around the same time, he represented a Christian school that asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to reopen, despite Beshear’s order. 

Several years ago, Bilby also defended a Christian organization that was receiving state funding to operate group homes for children against a lawsuit that alleged the group was pressuring the children to become Christians. 

Bilby had already raised well over $90,000 by early January, a large sum for an election in a county where just about 25,000 votes were cast in the last presidential election. That’s more than any Supreme Court candidate raised in Kentucky through the state’s May 2020 primary. And it’s more than three times Shepherd’s haul so far. Shepherd ran unopposed in 2014.

Bilby’s effort to oust Shepherd comes amid broader talk by the Kentucky Republican Party to change the state’s judicial system. In a 2017 speech to the Federalist Society, Bevin suggested outright ending judicial elections. Two years later, the Senate’s Republican Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer also proposed changing how judges are chosen. Asked if he was motivated by retaliation after Shepherd’s ruling to throw out the cuts to state pensions, Thayer said that judges “need to be reined in.” 

Corey Shapiro, legal director of the ACLU of Kentucky, says lawmakers are “playing games with what should be an independent judiciary.”

He told Bolts that, with federal courts moving to the right, state courts have grown more central to fights over civil rights and the integrity of elections. “As we’re seeing federal courts become more resistant to supporting voting rights, especially with respect to partisan gerrymandering, advocates for voting rights are going to seek relief in state court,” he said.

Voting rights cases are likely to continue popping up in the lead-up to Kentucky’s 2023 governor’s race and the 2024 presidential race on matters like voter eligibility, purges, and mail-in ballots. What 2022 may decide is who will be the first judge to hear them, and whether the Republican legislature takes additional steps to insulate its decisions from courts.

Joshua Douglas, a law professor who works on election law at the University of Kentucky, says “We’re in for a brave new world of partisanship infecting Kentucky judicial races.” 

The post Meet the Local Judge Mitch McConnell’s PAC Wants to Unseat appeared first on Bolts.