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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers in Oregon, a state that already leads the nation in electoral engagement, adopted legislation this summer that would make voting even more inclusive. If it is signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor, House Bill 2107 would instruct state Medicaid offices to automatically register people to vote when they open or renew a health plan. 

The bill could add tens of thousands of people to voter rolls by allowing the Oregon Health Authority to forward basic information it collects from people applying for Medicaid coverage—age, residence, and citizenship status—to election officials. These officials would then use it to register anyone who is eligible to vote and but not already signed up to do so.

This process, which would still give people the chance to decline being registered, is nearly identical to Oregon’s existing system of automatically registering people. But that system only applies at the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services department, leaving out Oregonians who don’t visit the DMV. 

“Voter registration shouldn’t be dependent on going to the DMV, because not everybody does,” said Isabela Villarreal, policy director for Next Up Action Fund, a group that helped bring automatic voter registration to Oregon in 2015, explaining that lower-income and younger Oregonians are less likely to use DMV services. “We just want to make sure we’re capturing every single person and allowing them to participate.”

According to the secretary of state’s office, 85 percent of all Oregonians who are not registered are enrolled in Medicaid, a program that serves people living near or below the federal poverty line. That’s roughly 170,000 people in this state of 4.2 million who could be added to the voter rolls if the state began automatically registering Medicaid recipients. 

“This is a critical opportunity to register people that have been historically and currently excluded from our electoral systems,” Villarreal said.

The reform, however, comes with a catch: It would not actually change anything unless Oregon wins the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up similar proposals in other states and told Bolts it’s still reviewing the issue. Medicaid is a program administered by states but regulated by the federal government, which largely bars a state’s Medicaid office from disclosing information to other agencies without the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ authorization.

Colorado, for one, adopted a reform similar to Oregon’s in 2019, only to see the federal agency that administers Medicaid stall its application over privacy concerns. Colorado’s secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, shared her frustration with Bolts last week, saying she struggles to even get answers from federal officials. “It would be great for Colorado to implement it,” she said. “We should be working to streamline people’s interactions with the government.”

Advocates for expanding voter registration hope that the growing number of states seeking to automatically register Medicaid recipients will motivate the Biden administration to revisit its stance and greenlight new  reforms in Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere.

Oregon eight years ago became the first state to adopt automatic voter registration, or AVR, and today similar systems exist in almost half of U.S. states. The design differs greatly by state, but the core idea is simple: Instead of expecting people to take proactive steps to register, a government agency uses the information they already collect to register people, while still giving them an opportunity to opt out. 

AVR has been proven to boost registration and turnout, and make the electorate more diverse. In Oregon, roughly 94 percent of eligible residents are now registered to vote. 

But in Oregon, as in many states, AVR is limited to people who visit the DMV, an agency with which many people, especially low-income residents, just don’t interact. Oregon voting rights advocates say this helps explain why nearly 200,000 eligible voters in the state—roughly 6 percent of the voting-eligible population—remain unregistered. They’re hoping that reaching Medicaid recipients gets the state closer to universal registration.

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a national voter advocacy organization, says including Medicaid recipients would make AVR systems far more inclusive. 

“These are the people who generally fall through the cracks in our voter registration system: people who might be more transient, people who are less affluent, people who are unable to take time off work to go vote, older individuals who don’t have their documentation in order,” she told Bolts. “These are the type of people that, in general, face more barriers to the ballot. If we can reach those people with something like this, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t.”

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who has until late July to take action on HB 2107, did not respond to questions for this story. Local observers told Bolts they expect she will sign the legislation.

Several other states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, have already had the same idea and passed legislation to extend AVR systems to government health programs. “The DMV seemed like the big first place to get the most people registered,” Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, told Bolts. “We believe Medicaid is that second place.”

But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency housed within HHS that oversees the Medicaid program, has left most of those states in limbo for years. Oregon may be next, as state officials there say HB 2107 cannot be implemented without CMS authorization. 

CMS rules bar state Medicaid agencies from using or disclosing client data for purposes that are not directly connected to the Medicaid program, but a state can request a waiver to implement a specific proposal, or ask CMS to determine that the way in which it plans to use the data is indeed legitimately connected to health care administration. Medicaid law experts say the prohibition exists to protect people from having their information used against them—police can’t turn to Medicaid for a person’s last known address, for instance, nor can prosecutors in states that punish abortion patients.

Colorado’s attempt to implement AVR through Medicaid has gone nowhere since 2019, first under the Trump administration through early 2021, and then under the Biden administration. When Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet wrote a letter to CMS last year imploring the agency to green-light Colorado’s reform, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure wrote back that the agency “had previously concluded that [the state’s proposal] appears to be inconsistent with the Medicaid privacy protections in current laws and regulations.” 

But Brooks-LaSure, who was nominated to the position by President Biden, also referred to an executive order Biden issued soon after his inauguration directing all agency heads to “evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation.” Brooks-LaSure added that CMS is “exploring opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration.”

CMS told Bolts in a statement on Monday that “this issue is under review.”

CMS did not say whether it had reached any new conclusion since Brooks-LaSure’s letter to Bennet more than a year ago. When Bolts first reached out to CMS seeking clarity, the agency said in a statement that AVR systems “may” breach Medicaid’s confidentiality rules but a CMS spokesperson reached out days later to say the agency’s initial response had been rushed and “provided in error,” and reflected the view of the Trump administration. The agency then issued another statement that kept the door open to new state initiatives.

“In keeping with the President Biden’s Executive Order directing federal agencies to promote access to voting, we recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” CMS said. 

CMS did not reply to follow-ups requesting more information about its review process.

The picture gets fuzzier considering Medicaid services are already automatically registering people in Massachusetts. States Newsroom reported last week that the state had seen a large jump in registration as a result. 

Michelle Tassinari, an attorney in the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, told Bolts she is confident that the state is compliant with federal rules because Massachusetts asks people, during their initial interactions with the health agency, if they’d prefer that their information not be used for the purpose of voter registration. Washington state also registers people through its health agency using a similar approach, a process known as “front-end” AVR. 

Automatic voter registration looks different in Oregon, as well as in Colorado. Instead of being asked if they want to opt out of registering during their transaction with an agency, prospective voters receive a mailer later on; they must respond to it if they do not wish to be registered. Data show that this approach, known as a “back-end” system, registers many more people to vote than when people are asked up-front, and more states have been switching to this model.

CMS did not answer Bolts’ questions when asked if these design distinctions were relevant to how the federal government is assessing state-level AVR programs. 

This confusion reflects what officials in the states that are in limbo have experienced. 

Griswold told Bolts that she’d be happy to hear the federal agency’s specific concerns and reach a workable solution, including by adjusting the exact design of Colorado’s system, but that CMS hasn’t even created the opportunity or shared precise feedback.

“We do not see a big difference between AVR at the DMV versus at Medicaid offices,” Griswold said. “If CMS thinks there’s a big difference, we can always address that in the law, we can go back and tighten the law if they want. But they need to give us guidance.”

Griswold doesn’t dispute the importance of protecting privacy but she believes this isn’t that complicated or fraught. “I think you can design the system where states never interact with the underlying data,” she said. “We do not need to know anything about people’s medical information, nor do we want to know that information.”

Other election experts also point out that the design of existing AVR systems already integrates privacy protections. The goal, they say, is to make use of data the government already collects without weaponizing it.

“If it’s administered correctly, I don’t see it being any different than [automatic voter registration] through the DMV,” Lacey Donaldson, the elected clerk in Pershing County, Nevada, and the head of that state’s county clerk association, told Bolts. Nevada’s plans for automatic registration of Medicaid recipients is also in limbo due to CMS.

One difference between the DMV and health services is that Medicaid recipients interact with the state more frequently. In Oregon, Medicaid recipients must renew their plans and update their information—including their mailing address—annually, whereas many people go years without visiting the DMV. This means that administering an AVR system through Medicaid would be likelier to keep voter rolls up-to-date.

“This is a win-win-win-win for lots of different people,” says Amber McReynolds, a national expert in election procedures who was appointed to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors by Biden. “The people who want to make sure more people are registered to vote, for people who care about making sure voters addresses are accurate, for people who want more efficient government. It’s one of these concepts I always think that everybody should like.”

In Oregon, the concept was championed by Shemia Fagan while she was secretary of state. Fagan, a Democrat, resigned in May after Willamette Week revealed she’d been accepting lucrative consultant payments from cannabis entrepreneurs who have been top donors to her political career. Still, the legislation passed based on strong support from Democratic lawmakers who run both chambers; Republicans opposed the legislation. 

Other states may soon join the CMS waiting chamber. A new bill introduced last month in New Jersey proposes expanding that state’s AVR system to include Medicaid services.

“We’re hopeful that CMS will reconsider its reading of the law, which we think is currently incorrect,” Griswold said. “State pressure is mounting.”

The post Oregon Wants to Register Medicaid Recipients to Vote. Will Biden Officials Allow It? appeared first on Bolts.

One reform, which drew the ire of congressional Republicans, will enable noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. The second largely flew under the radar of national politicians, and will overhaul the city’s approach to voter registration. 

Underlying the Automatic Voter Registration Expansion Amendment Act, that seemingly technical bill, is a challenge to a core aspect of U.S. elections. Why put a burden of registration on prospective voters when public authorities can determine who is eligible on their own? 

Going forward, D.C. will use the information it collects when residents interact with public agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles to create a running list of people who are “preapproved” to vote. For people on this list, there will be no need to register in advance of an election; all they will have to do is vote.

This new law would pair with a reform that the council has adopted but is not yet law, which would set up universal mail-in voting: That bill would apply to people on the “preapproved” list. As a result, D.C. would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible to vote—even if they have not registered. 

“Unlike other parts of the country where we’re seeing people try to restrict the ability of people to get to the polls and to vote, in D.C., we want everyone to be able to vote,” Councilmember Charles Allen told Bolts last year when he filed the bill. This act, he said, will “make sure we are really reaching every single person we possibly can to make sure they can participate and have their voice heard.”

The bill was approved unanimously by the D.C. council in December and signed by the mayor. It became law after the customary congressional review that all D.C. bills undergo expired this week. Republicans in Congress did not target this legislation, though they sought to block other recent city reforms, including a bill that enables noncitizens to vote in local elections. 

That noncitizen voting bill, known as the Local Residents Voting Rights Act, also became law this week. The U.S. House voted to block it in January in a resolution proposed by the GOP and supported by some Democrats, but the Senate did not follow up by the March 14 deadline that was set by the chamber’s parliamentarian. 

As a result, noncitizens who have been residents of D.C. for 30 days will be able to vote in local elections—including for mayor, city council, education board, and ballot initiatives. The law would not apply to federal elections.

“While we’re expanding voting rights here within our boundaries, Congress is attacking our autonomy altogether,” Brianne Nadeau, a D.C. councilmember who sponsored this bill, told Bolts this week. “It’s kind of a wild moment in history.” 

D.C. follows at least 15 other municipalities, including Maryland suburbs of D.C. such as Takoma Park, that already allow non-citizen voting. Most recently, voters in Oakland, California, approved a ballot measure in November to enable noncitizens to vote in school board races; in January, Vermont’s supreme court upheld several towns’ decision to enfranchise noncitizen residents. 

Similar proposals are on the table in other cities such as Boston. But the GOP is working in several states to preempt such local reforms.

A conservative group filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against D.C.’s new noncitizen voting law, claiming that it “dilutes the vote of every U.S. citizen voter in the District.” Nadeau says she also worries that Congress may still move to block the the funding needed to implement the measure; Congress has budgetary tools available to thwart D.C. measures beyond the congressional review period.

Proponents of the change say that restricting the franchise from noncitizens excludes a large swath of the population from decision-making. The Legal Aid Society of The District of Columbia testified before the council that more than 40,000 D.C. residents are not U.S. citizens, but many of them work, pay taxes in the District, or send children to public schools. They should have a say in their elected government, Nadeau said. 

“We have a special opportunity to show that getting involved locally can make a difference,” she said. By getting involved in municipal government, she added, “you can make change in a very short amount of time.”

The Automatic Voter Registration Expansion Amendment Act, D.C.’s other new law, only applies to U.S. citizens. It aims to draw into the process people who are already eligible to vote by building on D.C.’s prior reforms to voter registration.

The city already follows a model known as automatic voter registration, or AVR, along with more than 20 states. The idea is to use the fact that people from all walks of life are already interacting regularly with a DMV and other public agencies for reasons that have nothing to do with voting, like getting a driver’s license. While they’re there, the thinking goes, the government should take the opportunity to register them to vote. Studies have found that this approach boosts registration and turnout rates.

Some automatic registration programs, including the one D.C. currently uses, give residents the chance to opt out of registering while they’re still conducting the transaction with an agency. Many people take the chance to opt out up-front, often because they’re in a hurry and believe that declining will get them out the door faster, or because they may have questions about their eligibility. 

The new law switches D.C. into another model, known as “back-end.” Residents who are automatically registered are offered the chance to opt out later on: They will receive a mailer at home, and they can return it if they wish to opt out. If they do nothing at all, they will remain registered to vote. 

Colorado made this switch in 2019 and saw its registration rates soar as a result. Testifying last fall in support of D.C.’s change, Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold said that under the state’s prior “front-end” system, roughly 60 percent of eligible residents were opting out. After the switch, Colorado found that more than 99 percent remained registered after receiving the post-transaction mailer.

Allen, the sponsor of the D.C. law, told Bolts he drew inspiration from Colorado. 

But his proposal also goes beyond this “back-end” approach. It charts a new path that no longer treats registration as a step that residents must take before voting. 

Requiring voter registration, says Alex Keysarr, a Harvard historian who studies the development of voting laws in the U.S., “creates a barrier between the voter and the act of voting.” Historically, he told Bolts, this barrier has suppressed the electoral influence of poor people, immigrants, and people of color. 

Under the new law, the city will identify people who, based on information they’ve already provided the government, are eligible to vote. They will then receive a ballot in the mail. For those individuals, the only decision would be to vote, or not. 

Still, people added to the “preapproved” list in D.C. would be sent a mailer that gives them an opportunity to remove their name.

The new law also does not get rid of voter registration. The city would inform people that returning the mail-in ballot or heading to the polls would activate their registration. In effect, voting itself would be the act of registration.

But D.C.’s reform may still leave some residents behind since it hinges on them heading into specific public agencies. People who do not interact with the DMV or a Medicaid office would not be added to this “preapproved” list. 

“I would caution that there are still people who will not be offered registration opportunities, particularly people who do not interact regularly with government agencies like the driver’s license offices,” said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who studies turnout.

D.C. has for years offered same-day voter registration, so those people would have the opportunity to head to a polling location during the early voting period or on Election Day. They would not receive a mail-in ballot, though. 

McDonald does not expect the new law to make a major change to turnout in D.C. given the city’s unique circumstances. “The fact that the city is highly uncompetitive and the District has limited self-rule probably matter more,” he said.

D.C. is already facing new attacks on its self-rule. Last week, some House Republicans launched a new push to overturn a set of policing reforms, known as the city’s Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act, adopted by the D.C. government to expand citizen oversight of police and limit police use of dangerous weapons against protesters, among other provisions. 

Nadeau said, “Recent congressional action makes it clear that any of the work we do in the District of Columbia is very precarious as long as we don’t have statehood.” 

The post Pair of Reforms to Expand the Electorate Become Law in D.C. appeared first on Bolts.

Adam Griego, who has battled trauma and addiction for most of his life, felt he was treated as subhuman when he was in prison. Over three months in solitary confinement, he recalls, he was forced to drink water out of his hands because he wasn’t given a cup. He labored eight-hour days in a recycling yard, rifling through trash, for $10 a week. When he was released in 2020, he had only $125 to his name and couldn’t find a job despite 20 years of experience as a car technician.

“Once you commit a crime and you’re convicted, you sort of are defined by your choices and the fact that you’ve been convicted,” he told Bolts. “It makes your return back into society extremely difficult.”

To this day, Griego is not allowed to vote. He resides in New Mexico, a state that withholds voting rights from people while they are in prison, on probation, and on parole over a felony conviction, and Griego isn’t set to finish probation until the fall. Now sober, on staff at a Subaru dealership, and an adjunct professor at a technical college, he’s proud of what he has accomplished.

“So for any politician to look at me then and say I haven’t completed my sentence, I don’t deserve the right to vote, is absurd,” Griego said. “Some people want to keep the formerly incarcerated population exactly where they’re at. That’s why the voting rights issue isn’t a political one; it’s more of a human rights issue.”

Griego now volunteers with OLÉ, a civil rights group in New Mexico that for years has called on the state to expand voting rights, alongside other local organizations. Lawmakers answered their call this week. 

The state legislature on Monday adopted House Bill 4, an omnibus voting rights bill known as the New Mexico Voting Rights Act, sending it to the governor’s desk. Among many provisions, HB 4 enables people to vote while on probation and parole. This would immediately restore the voting rights of roughly 11,000 New Mexicans like Griego; and going forward, many others would regain the franchise upon release, though the bill would not help people while they are incarcerated.

“I can’t stop crying,” Griego texted after the state Senate passed the bill last week. The House first passed the measure in February and it concurred with the Senate amendments on Monday.

HB 4 now heads to Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, who supports it and is expected to sign it. 

When she does, New Mexico will become the 26th state, plus D.C., where at least anyone who is not in prison can vote. Minnesota took this same step earlier this month. 

Proponents of the move made the case that it will give people more of a stake in the places they live. “When people have a sense of belonging in the community, they’re less likely to inflict harm on themselves and others,” Justin Allen, a New Mexico advocate who is himself formerly incarcerated, told Bolts. “This legislation is about welcoming people back and allowing them to participate in a functioning society.”

HB 4 was championed by Democratic lawmakers, and every voting Republican lawmaker in both chambers opposed it. All but two Democrats who took part in the vote supported the bill (House Democrats Ambrose Castellano and Joseph Sanchez opposed its initial passage, though they each supported it when it returned to the chamber on Monday).

It contains a flurry of other measures that are meant to strengthen voting rights in the state, including the establishment of Election Day as a state holiday and the expansion of ballot access on Native land. Native people living on reservations in New Mexico did not gain the right to vote until 1948, and HB 4 addresses continued hurdles by requiring language translation at the polls, reducing the distance people on reservations must travel to cast a ballot, and allowing input from tribes on where voting precinct boundaries are set. 

“This is a huge step in the right direction,” said Ahtza Chavez, executive director of NM Native Vote, an organization that advocates for the rights of Native people. “Tribes, Pueblos, and Nation will now have a Native American Voting Rights Act section in the [New Mexico] election code to build upon.” 

The bill would also further automate the state’s registration system. Under the new program, the state would automatically register eligible New Mexicans when they interact with the Motor Vehicle Division, for instance while renewing a license; these new voters would later receive a mailer at home enabling them to opt out if they choose. Currently, people are asked to decide immediately, while they are still at the MVD. 

Colorado made this same switch in 2019—delaying the stage at which people are asked if they want to opt out—and that resulted in a dramatic jump in the number of registrations.

The lawmakers who have championed HB 4 are eager to emulate Colorado and other places that adopted this system, known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. “If other states’ experiences are instructive,” said Democratic state Representative Gail Chasey, one of the bill’s chief sponsors, “we’ll have only five percent [of new registrants] who choose not to stay engaged.”

State Democrats had pushed similar voting reforms for years but repeatedly hit a wall. Last year, another package containing many of the same provisions derailed at the finish line because it was filibustered into oblivion by Republicans, though voting rights advocates also told Bolts that they blamed the intransigence of a Democratic senator who slowed down the bill and opposed automatic voter registration. 

But Democratic lawmakers shed some of their farthest-reaching proposals along the way. Last year’s iteration would have lowered the voting age to 16 in local elections, a step that HB 4 does not take. 

HB 4 will also continue disenfranchising the roughly 5,000 New Mexicans who are imprisoned over a felony conviction. When Chasey first introduced a bill targeting felony disenfranchisement in 2019, she went for a bolder reform: abolishing it altogether. 

Her proposal, filed shortly after Democrats won full control of the state government, would have let every citizen vote, including while they are incarcerated. At the time, only Maine and Vermont allowed people with felony convictions to vote from prison (Washington, D.C., joined them in 2020), and those two states are largely white. In New Mexico, communities of color are consistently criminalized at elevated rates and thus are disproportionately deprived of the right to vote. 

During the state’s most recent elections, according to the Sentencing Project, Latinx people in New Mexico were nearly twice as likely to be barred from voting as white people. For Black New Mexicans, the rate was four times higher. 

Chasey quickly found many of her fellow lawmakers weren’t on board with enabling all citizens to vote. “They were like, ‘You mean you’re going to let them vote, too?’” she recalls them saying. “As if it’s a privilege, which it’s not. It’s a civil right.”

Allen, who supports expanding the ballot further to include incarcerated people, says he expects that HB 4 will move the conversation forward. “It’s a big step towards universal suffrage,” he said. “These things take time.”

The post New Mexico Is Making It Easier to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

Washington, D.C., may soon do away with voter registration as most Americans know it. Under a new bill, set to have its first council hearing on Friday, D.C. would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered.

Drawing inspiration from Colorado, which many voting-rights experts characterize as the national standard for accessibility, the city would take information it collects when residents interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles and other agencies to maintain a constantly-updating list of people who are “preapproved” to vote. For people on that list, all there would be left to do is to vote come election time. 

“Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” Charles Allen, the D.C. councilmember who is sponsoring the legislation, told Bolts. “It’s a way to be a gatekeeper as to who you think should be able to vote.” 

Under Allen’s bill, voting itself would be the act of registration—at least for those the city identifies as prequalified. This would “make sure we are really reaching every single person we possibly can to make sure they can participate and have their voice heard,” Allen said.

D.C. already enacts a policy known as automatic voter registration. First adopted in Oregon in 2015, it has since spread to more than twenty states, plus D.C., as a tool to expand voter rolls. (It largely exists in Democratic-run states, with some exceptions.) The idea is that instead of the traditional approach of waiting for people to opt in being registered, agencies like the DMV make it the default to register them to vote and then give them the opportunity to opt out of the rolls. Studies have found that this policy has boosted registration and turnout rates.

But in most places with automatic voter registration, the policy is falling short of its promise. Many people who enter the DMV unregistered are still not registered when they leave. Neal Ubriani, policy and research director at the Institute for Responsive Government, an organization that promotes efficiency in government, and an advisor to Allen on the D.C. bill, says this boils down to how these systems are designed.

When they go to to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license or get an ID card, D.C. residents are currently told that their information will be used to register them to vote, they are shown a list of criteria they must meet, and they are given the option to refuse registration by checking a box: “I decline/opt out. Do not register me to vote or update my voter registration.”

Ubriani said systems like D.C.’s on average have about a 50 percent opt-out rate. Some just want to leave the DMV and think that by opting out they’ll avoid more time and questions; some may not be sure whether they are eligible; others might trust themselves to update their voter registration on their own; or they may believe (falsely, in many cases) that their registration is up-to-date and not tied to a previous address.

D.C.’s design is known as “front-end” since people are asked whether they want to opt-out while still at the DMV. Most states with automatic voter registration do the same. 

“I’ve seen states that call themselves AVR systems that have an 80 percent declination rate at the DMV,” Ubriani said.

Allen wants his bill to fix that problem. “We already have a version of automatic voter registration, and this really takes it further,” he told Bolts.

Allen says he looked toward the handful of states like Oregon, Alaska and Colorado that have gone a different route, implementing a design known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. There, people who provide documents that indicate that they are U.S. citizens are automatically registered to vote and they are not asked any further questions while at the public agency; they later receive a mailer at home, and they can return it if they wish to opt-out. If they do nothing at all, they will remain registered to vote. 

Colorado switched from a “front-end” system to a “back-end” one in 2019, and a recent study conducted by two political science professors at Stanford University found that the switch successfully activated voters. It drastically cut down the rate of people who opted out: Less than one percent of the people who were sent a mailer returned it indicating they declined registration. This sent registration in Colorado soaring, roughly doubling the registration rate for DMV customers who were previously unregistered. About 250,000 Coloradoans were automatically registered to vote during the first year of implementation, and about half voted.

Amanda Gonzalez was a voting rights advocate as then-executive director of Common Cause Colorado in 2019 when she helped draft and lobby for these changes. “I think the question we probably should be asking ourselves is, what is the system that is going to best facilitate the most participation?” she told Bolts.

Allen has an answer, telling Bolts, “We want to make it as automatic as possible.”

His bill would not exactly move D.C. to a “back-end” system like Colorado’s because it wouldn’t outright register people. But it’s guided by a similar principle that it’s really up to public authorities to review someone’s eligibility based on the information they’ve already shared. Under his proposal, as long as someone has provided certain documents, the city would verify and record them as eligible: This would pre-qualify them as voters, even when they’re not formally on voter rolls. 

D.C. would then send people on this preapproved list a mail-in ballot for every election during the following two years. They would never need to proactively register, though they would be given an opportunity to remove their name from this list through a mailer. D.C. would also inform them that they can return a ballot or head to the polls to activate their registration. All they would need to do at that point is choose whether or not to vote.

Ubriani thinks that this would break the mold of how we usually approach elections. “It’s not mythologizing this first antecedent step (registering to vote) as some important, necessary civic duty,” he said.

Alex Keysarr, a Harvard historian who studies the development of voting laws in the U.S., has documented that the emergence of registration laws made voting a two-step process that had exclusionary effects.

Voter registration requirements gained widespread popularity in the U.S. starting in the 1870s. The result was to deny some people the ability to vote, or at least to make exercising their right more difficult. “We know historically that those people have tended to be poor people and people of color and immigrants—people who haven’t had the resources,” he told Bolts.

He added, “It creates a barrier between the voter and the act of voting.” 

The bill pending in D.C. would chip away at that barrier. Still, the policy would only cover people who interact with select agencies, mainly at the DMV and when filling a Medicaid application. What of people who don’t go to those agencies? There are efforts nationwide to include automatic voter registration with a broad array of public services—–some of which would need approval from the Biden administration—and some want to eliminate voter registration altogether.

Allen says he’s open to expanding his D.C. proposal to use data collected in other settings— perhaps at libraries or public recreation centers—to build a more comprehensive “preapproved” list of voters. 

That can get tricky, though. The DMV is an ideal setting not only because it’s a place visited by people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, ages and races. It’s also a place where citizenship questions are already being asked, and all sorts of information relevant to voting, such as age and home address, are already collected. With relatively low effort, a government interested in boosting participation can simply use information the DMV was going to gather anyway.

Expanding this program to, say, libraries or recreation centers would mean asking people about their immigration status in more settings, citizenship being an obvious prerequisite to voting, and that’s a step many balk at.

“I love the idea of libraries, but those aren’t places that currently do citizenship checks, nor should they be,” said Gonzalez, the Colorado advocate who is now the Democratic nominee running for county clerk in Jefferson County, outside of Denver. “We don’t want to create new places where people are being asked to verify their citizenship.”

Some voting right organizations like the Brennan Center worry about these immigration issues even at the DMV, which has led them to criticize “back-end” systems; they say that registering people without asking them immediately if they want to opt out could mistakenly add noncitizens to the polls.

Ubriani says that these risks are already present in D.C.’s current “front-end” system, which is designed to pose registration-related questions to DMV clients even when they are not U.S. citizens. That means people who affirmatively show a document making clear their lack of citizenship still get asked about voter registration. “That’s sort of like a trap for the unwary,” Ubriani said. “If I miss that question, if I’m less English-proficient or confused, even slightly inattentive during the transaction, suddenly I’ve incorrectly indicated citizenship.”

For Ubriani and Allen, this hazard adds to the flaws that they want D.C. to urgently fix.

Allen chairs the committee that his bill will start in, which makes for strong odds that the bill will advance past its first hearing on Friday. The bill would then have to be approved by the full city council and the mayor, and Congress would need to not intervene to repeal it.

The councilmember is simultaneously sponsoring a bill to enact universal mail voting; in 2022, all registered voters in D.C. are already set to receive a mail-in ballot due to pandemic-era rules, but this bill would make that permanent. Allen has also backed other measures to expand participation, including the landmark law that enabled people to vote from prison starting in 2020. 

“Unlike other parts of the country where we’re seeing people try to restrict the ability of people to get to the polls and to vote,” Allen said, “in D.C., we want everyone to be able to vote.”

—

Editor’s note: Neal Ubriani was a member of the board of directors of the nonprofit organization that runs Bolts from July 2021 to January 2022.

The post New Washington D.C. Bill Would End Voter Registration As You Know It appeared first on Bolts.

Her attitude stands in stark contrast with the debunked conspiracies spread by Donald Trump’s allies demonizing ballot drop boxes and mail voting as the source of widespread fraud. Those conspiracies will feature in the general election to be Vermont’s chief elections officer. The state may lean hard to the left in federal elections, but Republican nominee H. Brooke Paige has echoed the former president’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; he is part of a large network of Republican election deniers running for secretary of state.

Bolts recently spoke with Copeland Hanzas about her concerns over  this rhetoric and about how she envisions the role of a secretary of state when it comes to championing ballot access.

Vermont is in the midst of major debates regarding how to strengthen democratic participation. Copeland Hanzas, who has served in the state House since 2004, helped shepherd the state’s new universal vote-by-mail system into law this year; she also supports towns in Vermont that want to expand their electorate by allowing noncitizen residents and 16- and 17-year olds to vote in local elections. (Two Vermont municipalities, including the capital city of Montpellier, just implemented noncitizen voting in local elections this year.) 

Bolts also talked to Copeland Hanzas about how she would expand voter registration, including for people who are in prison. Vermont is one of just three places in the United States, alongside Maine and Washington, D.C., where no incarcerated person loses the right to vote, though turnout rates from prison are low. “Why would they not be allowed to vote? They’re citizens of our country,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts.

You are running against a Republican opponent who has amplified Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. What concerns do you have about an election denier in this office?

It is highly worrisome to hear people echoing false claims and misinformation about the safety and security of our elections. It is a fundamental threat to our democracy, in that the purpose of these claims is to discourage people from participating in elections. And I think that is very undemocratic.

We’ve seen rising threats and harassment of local election officials. Are you concerned about that taking place in Vermont?

It’s certainly a concern. I haven’t been briefed in any formal way about the extent to which there may be actual threats, but I do hear anecdotally, talking with local elections officials, that the tension and stress around elections has definitely increased because of this misinformation. 

In Vermont, that is a really serious allegation: What you’re essentially saying is that your neighbor, who is duly elected to be the local elections official, is somehow part of a broad scheme to defraud the electorate. It’s just offensive and preposterous, and it is disheartening for people who care so deeply about democracy and local government that they have made their career out of acting as a town clerk. 

Vermont Digger called the three-way Democratic primary in August a race between “a technocrat, an activist, and a lawmaker.” You, the lawmaker, won. How do you envision the role of secretary of state, and do you hope to approach it more with the mindset of a voting rights “activist” or an elections “technocrat”? 

The role of the office is to be the defender of democracy. When I look at defending democracy, I think Vermonters need education on how to navigate within the system: How do you in fact influence your elected officials? If we don’t help people learn how to operate within a democracy and have faith in their ability to influence their leaders, and in the ability of governments to uphold the safety and security of elections, then we’re not going to live in a democracy long. 

Civics is boring if all you’re learning about is, ‘Here are the three branches of government, here’s the federal system.’ But people do get interested when you talk about it from the standpoint of, ‘Here’s an issue that you are passionate about—maybe you feel like you’ve been wronged—and here’s how you can advocate for a change in the system to right that wrong.’ In Vermont, you have the ability to protest your local government, participate in town meetings and lower the budget; you can vote to raise the budget, you can vote to strike the line items that suggest we should spend a million dollars on a new fire engine. I’m not going to pretend that every Vermonter knows how to participate in town meetings; the reality is a very small percentage of Vermonters actually go to their town meetings. But it is an example of democracy and action that we can point to; and when people understand that that’s possible at the local level, then it’s easier to help people engage in the idea of advocating at the statewide level.

Vermont is among just a few places that allow people to vote from prison. Nobody in Vermont is stripped of the right to vote when convicted of a crime. What do you think of that approach?

I absolutely support it. The right to vote is fundamental to your rights of citizenship, and so Vermonters need to have that protected and respected. And so I certainly support folks who are incarcerated being able to participate in our democracy. Why would they not be allowed to vote? They’re citizens of our country. 

Turnout is reportedly low among incarcerated people. What if anything would you do to address that?

Absolutely. I would refer back to two of my campaign priorities and would look for ways to make them available to incarcerated individuals.The first priority is education and outreach on civics. We need to extend that outreach to incarcerated individuals as well, so that folks understand how to vote. And my second priority is that the secretary of state’s office needs to be creating and publishing a voter guide in advance of the general election: contact information for the candidates, their website—and we could add to that a 100-word statement. That information needs to be made available to Vermonters so they can find the candidate whose values match their own, and that absolutely needs to be extended to incarcerated individuals. If you’re in prison, and you are reliant on whatever media sources you have access to, it’s no wonder people don’t vote. The secretary of state’s office needs to take a more proactive approach in making that information available.

Vermont has adopted automatic voter registration, which is triggered when people interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Would you support extending automatic voter registration to Vermont’s Department of Corrections as a way to increase participation among incarcerated people?

It’s certainly something that I would want to look into. We [lawmakers] directed the secretary of state’s office to collaborate with various state agencies outside of the Department of Motor Vehicles to explore the extent to which automatic voter registration might be simple and easy to extend to their systems. And I could see doing that with the Department of Corrections.

What other public agencies would you want to extend automatic voter registration to? There are various efforts to make the state’s Medicaid office a participating agency as well. 

We started that conversation several years ago with our Medicaid office. At the time, the Medicaid office asked us not to mandate that they go forward with it immediately; instead, they asked if they could work collaboratively with the secretary of state’s office and figure out the best way to implement that. I haven’t gotten an update. During the pandemic, there were so many challenges that we as lawmakers were having to unravel that extending AVR fell off of my radar. But it’s something that I will ask in the upcoming transition if I’m elected. I would like to know what are the barriers, and see if we can eliminate them and get this done for Vermonters. 

People who don’t ever intend to have a driver’s license should still be registered to vote so that they can be participating in democracy.

Two Vermont towns are set to allow noncitizen residents to vote in local elections this year. Why did you support these towns’ change when they came up in the legislature?

Yes, I absolutely supported that. I was chair of the Government Operations Committee when those charter changes from two municipalities came to our committee. I was surprised at first, but as we explored with constitutional scholars and historians, we realized that there is in fact precedent in Vermont history for noncitizen residents to be able to participate in an election, and that there is no prohibition against a community wanting to allow noncitizens to vote in their own municipal elections. We heard from these communities about why they thought it was important to be able to welcome people into the democratic franchise at the local level, sometimes as a transition or step to full citizenship, and other times as a recognition that somebody who is a resident is a longtime participant in the community.

There’s also the debate over the voting age, with one Vermont town trying this year to lower it to 16 in local elections. Do you support such efforts?

We considered that proposal from Brattleboro at the same time that we were considering the proposals on noncitizen voting. Brattleboro had an overwhelmingly supportive local vote to extend the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds, and we felt it was important to honor that wish. Unfortunately, the governor of Vermont, despite the House and Senate approval of the charter change, vetoed the bill, and we were unable to override the governor’s veto. 

I certainly would support other communities pursuing this. I think it’s up to the local community, whether they feel that works for them. I think the advantages lie in helping people understand democracy: What a great way to have relevant school lessons then when young people are going to actually be able to go out and vote.

Vermont recently adopted universal vote-by-mail, a move you supported, which means that anyone who is registered gets a ballot. The right has fought mail voting. Why do you support expanding it?  

That convenience factor for someone who is a single parent, or someone working two jobs, or someone who lives in one community but works in another. There are so many, many barriers to people being able to participate on Election Day. But the other thing is that, when you pick up a ballot on Election Day and you have three to five minutes with your ballot, it’s really hard to be able to figure out who you want to vote for. I think it really empowers people to be able to do a little bit more discerning of the candidates when they have the ability to do that at their kitchen table before the election.

The post Vermont Secretary of State Candidate Looks to Expand Ballot Access, but First She Faces an Election Denier appeared first on Bolts.

The rapid sequence of events left voting rights advocates deeply frustrated. As originally introduced, the package contained a bevy of reforms they have pushed for years. It would have restored the voting rights of thousands of New Mexicans who cannot vote due to a felony conviction. It would have also enabled people to sign up to get mail-in ballots for all elections without having to request one, made Election Day a holiday, strengthened voter access on Native communities, and established a new system for the state to automatically register residents.

Those reforms are now delayed until 2023 at the earliest, unless Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham calls a special session.

“It’s really unfortunate and very upsetting to us, and to a lot of other people who were looking forward to an expansion of voting rights,” Austin Weahkee, political director of NM Native Vote, a group that champions better access to the ballot on Native land, told Bolts soon after the session ended.

“I’m disheartened, disappointed, and angry,” said Miles Tokunow, the deputy director of OLÉ, a civil rights group in New Mexico. “Instead of the political games played by the senators who got into the way of this historic legislation, I wish for once they’d think of the thousands of New Mexicans whose livelihoods are at stake and who will continue to be disenfranchised. Shame on them.”

Republican senators used repeated dilatory tactics to stall for time during the last days of the session. The package ultimately died on Thursday morning thanks to a filibustering speech by Republican Senator Bill Sharer. 

Tokunow also faults decisions made earlier by Democratic senators. During the session, local voting rights groups like Progress Now were already blaming Democratic Senator Daniel Ivey-Soto for weakening the package. When Senate Bill 8, the original package of reforms, sat in committee, Ivey-Soto introduced a substitution that took out key components, including automatic voter registration and the Election Day holiday.

Multiple advocates also told Bolts that the package would not have been vulnerable to Republican delays had it not sat in a Senate committee overseen by Ivey-Soto for weeks. “He held up the bill for a couple of weeks, and in a 30 day-session that’s a very long time,” said Leila Salim, who volunteers with OLÉ. “That was the big thing that stalled that bill.” Weahkee agreed, saying, “We would never have been in this position if it were not for the Chair of Rules,” referring to Ivey-Soto’s role.

Ivey-Soto rejected that characterization, telling Bolts the bill had plenty of time to go through the legislature once a version passed Senate committees. He blamed advocates for lengthening the committee process by asking for public comment, and House Democrats for attempting procedural maneuvers that generated even more resistance from Republicans in the final days.

Ivey-Soto also explained he has a disagreement with automatic voter registration. As long as a state has same-day voter registration, he says, it’s intrusive for the state to proactively register people. “Nobody is prejudiced by not being registered to vote and we should respect the agency of voters in making that decision,” he said. 

Under the original version of SB 8, eligible New Mexicans would have been automatically registered while interacting with various public agencies, and then received a notice that they could opt out of voter rolls by returning a prepaid mailer. Proponents of this process say same-day registration alone cannot replace this, since registering people in advance of Election Day enables them to use vote-by-mail options and can reduce lines at the polls.

New Mexico offered Democrats an opportunity to accomplish in a state capitol what they have failed to do in Congress—to pass legislation expanding access to the polls.

Many of the measures in SB 8 were similar to provisions in the federal For the People Act, which has generated a firestorm of progressive anger against the U.S. senators responsible for blocking it. Yet there’s comparatively little attention being paid to parallel fights to advance voting rights legislation in Democratic-run state capitals around the country. 

The original SB 8 package also went further in a few key ways, including lowering the voting age to 16 for local elections, a move that proponents say would boost civic engagement at a formative time.

Local activists who were in Santa Fe over the past month hope Democrats make these issues a priority. Some also wish Democrats changed procedural rules to prevent delays.

“The filibuster should be abolished,” Justin Allen, an activist who testified for the bill two weeks ago, told Bolts on Thursday evening. It “remains a tool for maintaining systemic racism.” (The debate mirrors that at the federal level. The state’s two U.S. Senators have similarly said in the past that they support ending the federal filibuster.) 

Allen’s testimony focused on expanding rights restoration. The voting rights package would have enabled New Mexicans who are on probation and parole to vote. Had it passed, New Mexico would have enabled anyone who is not incarcerated to vote, joining 20 states that already do this. More than 11,000 people were barred from voting here because they fell in those categories in the 2020 election, according to a study by the Sentencing Project.

Allen was disenfranchised for more than two decades, first while he served a lengthy sentence and then while he was under supervision. He voted for the first time of his life in 2018, and soon began volunteering with different social justice organizations. He says this work changed his life at a time when he could not get any employer to hire him. Allen is now a fellow with America Votes NM. “I wouldn’t be in this community today had I not been speaking up for myself and advocating for myself and advocating for others,” he said.

“I view voting rights as an extension of my voice, and exercising my voice is how I broke the cycle of recidivism for myself,” he told Bolts. “Most people who find themselves in prison lost their voice long before they enter the carceral state. That’s why we accept plea bargains and why we have allowed others to make decisions for us and about us.” 

Even after he was discharged from supervision and became eligible to vote in 2018, Allen says he had to repeatedly return to the county clerk’s office because they kept erroneously denying his registration. The complex rules that govern felony disenfranchisement in many states also lock out many eligible people from voter rolls.

New Mexico’s failure to expand rights restoration this session coincided with the defeat of another promising criminal justice reform in the state.

A bill that would have repealed sentences of life without the possibility of parole for minors also died this week, a reform that 24 states have already made, including GOP-run Ohio last year. New Mexico seemed poised to join them when the state Senate passed Senate Bill 43, but the bill’s champions pulled it after the Democratic governor, a Republican lawmaker, and the association that lobbies on behalf of prosecutors struck a deal that gutted it, according to Source NM. 

“I know a lot of the individuals that that legislation would impact from spending time in prison with them, and I’ve witnessed their humanity,” said Allen, who vowed to continue demanding reform, including restoring the right to vote not just to formerly incarcerated people but also to people currently in prison.

Other advocates said they would continue to push for an ambitious voting rights package. “What’s next for us is really everything that was in the original draft of Senate Bill 8,” said Weahkee of NM Native Vote. “Everything that was in that original draft is important to us and disproportionately impacts Native communities. So we’re going to continue to fight for that.”

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