Growing up in Vermont, my first encounter with direct democracy was the town meeting. Once a year in March, my parents and our neighbors gathered in the pews of our bucolic town hall to elect local officials and hammer out decisions about taxes, roads, budgets, and schools. The process was open to any resident of voting age who cared to attend—as long as they were a registered voter and U.S. citizen. Afterward, the whole town congregated downstairs for a potluck. 

Though they exist primarily in New England, town meetings are a familiar symbol of small-scale democratic experiment to many Americans. Norman Rockwell used his Vermont neighbors as subjects for his 1943 painting Freedom of Speech, which depicts a rough-hewn worker standing to speak his truth as genteel men in suits listen carefully—so instantly recognizable it has, in recent years, become a meme. This sort of robust floor discussion only happens in Vermont’s towns, but every municipality in the state has a Town Meeting Day to vote on local matters.

Lately, parts of Vermont have looked to expand the promise of a vibrant local democracy and invite noncitizens to participate as well. Three cities now allow all residents with legal status to vote in local elections, making decisions on Town Meeting Day about everything from the composition of their local school board to the structure of their municipal government. (Noncitizens remain barred from weighing in on statewide or national elections). In 2018, residents of Montpelier, the state capital, voted by a 2-1 margin to establish noncitizen voting. In 2020, Winooski, a small city outside of Burlington where many resettled refugees reside, followed suit, and by the same wide margin. After state lawmakers approved those local charter changes in 2021, Republican Governor Phil Scott vetoed both measures but the legislature quickly overrode his denials. 

Burlington, the state’s largest city, approved a similar charter amendment in early 2023—also by a 2-1 margin. Lawmakers again overrode Scott’s veto of the change, voting in June to approve extending the right to vote in local elections to 2,000 additional Burlington residents. 

These rapid reforms have made Vermont home to nearly a fifth of all U.S. municipalities to offer noncitizen voting. Several towns in Maryland allow noncitizen residents to participate in local elections, most notably Takoma Park since the early 1990s; more recently, Washington, D.C., Oakland, San Francisco, and New York City passed similar ordinances, though local judges overturned the latter two last year.

Proponents of noncitizen voting say all residents deserve a say in who runs the schools their children attend and how the city spends their money. “The types of decisions that you make at a municipal level—you are impacted by them the same way regardless of if you’re a citizen or if you’re not a citizen,” said Zoraya Hightower, a city councilor in Burlington who supports the practice, calling it a “no-brainer.” Meanwhile, the new laws have sparked backlash ranging from frustrated locals to a national conservative group that has sued to block noncitizen voting. 

“All resident voting,” as it is often called here in Vermont, has also provoked debates about what constitutes meaningful political representation and the role of voting in civic life. Vermont’s progressive reputation has historically been untested on issues like race and immigration: it is one of the whitest states in the country, second only to Maine. “There’s an imagination of Vermont as being a particular kind of white liberal oasis,” said Pablo Bose, director of the University of Vermont’s Global and Regional Studies Program, who works with refugee communities in Winooski and Burlington. “People talk a good game about class and race, but I don’t actually think that they confront how different it might be in a place like this if you have a different background.”

Over the last few decades, Vermont has become a new home for many immigrant communities: resettled refugees who hail from places like Bhutan, Somalia, and Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexican farmworkers who toil on Vermont’s historic dairy farms, and most recently, asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Ukraine. Like any community, their views on noncitizen voting are not uniform: some believe voting should be tied to citizenship, while others have chosen to build political power in other ways. 

Those new Vermonters who have embraced noncitizen voting see it as a crucial step towards full participation in civic life and a chance to weigh in on the practical matters facing their city. 

Jeetan Khadka, a former refugee from Bhutan who has championed noncitizen voting in Burlington’s local elections for nearly a decade, invoked the Burlington school district as an example: “There are hundreds of kids of non English-speaking parents—who is going to be their voice? Who’s going to represent them?” 

Khadka and his family arrived in Vermont from a Nepalese refugee camp 15 years ago this September, becoming members of a regrettably selective group; worldwide, less than 1 percent of refugees ever experience resettlement. Compared to other U.S. states, Vermont has accepted a high number of refugees relative to its tiny population: Between 1989 and 2019, the state took in around 8,000 refugees from across the globe, according to Seven Days, a Vermont publication. Most of them were resettled in Burlington and Winooski, two of the three cities that have enacted noncitizen voting. 

In high school, I volunteered at the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program, a subset of the U.S. agency responsible for resettling refugees, helping with childcare for a Congolese family who had arrived in Vermont a year earlier. In some ways, they were lucky: as officially designated refugees, they had a clear pathway to citizenship, and the government helped get them set up with an apartment and temporary financial assistance. But a whole set of obstacles still lay ahead of them: learning English, finding jobs, adjusting to the bitter cold of Vermont winters, and, after years in a sprawling refugee camp in Mozambique, starting over in a place with few other people who so much as looked like them, let alone shared their culture. 

Students of color now represent the majority at the Winooski school district, thanks in large part to the city’s robust refugee population. The Burlington school district also boasts that its student body speaks dozens of different languages at home. But Khadka remembers being sequestered in an English language learning program with other refugee students when he arrived in Burlington in 2008. “You are literally depriving someone to have that cross cultural conversation,” he said. 

Frustration at how he and his refugee peers were isolated from the rest of the student body pushed him to get involved in civic life for the first time. “Seeing injustice happening or seeing unfair treatment or seeing or hearing things that doesn’t feel right to myself—I started speaking up,” he told me. 

After high school, Khadka stayed on for a year through Americorps, working on culturally responsive pedagogy for the school district’s preschool program. His second year at Americorps, he started working at the Community & Economic Development Office at city hall, right next to the mayor’s office. Today, Khadka works as a caseworker for the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, which serves refugee communities in the state regardless of national origin, and sits on the Vermont New American Advisory Council, which he helped found. 

Bose, the UVM professor, said it’s not uncommon for resettled refugees to become deeply involved in their communities. Over time, he told me, “we’ve seen increased participation on things like city boards…neighborhood planning assemblies, [and] in other kinds of ways around the neighborhoods—starting up new businesses, getting involved in local community organizations.” 

Khadka got involved in pushing for noncitizen voting in Burlington in 2014, after his application to serve on a city commission was rejected due to his immigration status. He calls participation in local elections “a stepping stone for something bigger” for noncitizen residents. Many refugees are eligible to gain U.S. citizenship after a yearslong waiting period, and Khadka said it’s important to start the process of political and civic engagement early. 

“You are encouraging people to be part of local, municipal government, encouraging them to go out and share your concern, raise your voice, vote for the candidate that supports your voice,” he told me. 

Burlington voters rejected noncitizen voting at their annual town meeting in 2015. Five years later, it came back before the city council, which chose to put the question to voters before reversing its decision and sending it back to a committee for further study. One of the people who voted against the measure both times was Ali Dieng, a independent city councilor and himself a former refugee from Mauritania. He did so because, as a freshly naturalized U.S. citizen, he felt that voting was a sort of prize that comes with full citizenship. At the time, he also said he feared that creating a registry of noncitizen residents would be unwise given ICE’s increased targeting of immigrant communities under the Trump administration.  

But in 2022, when noncitizen voting again went before the Burlington council, Dieng chose to back it. In the time since his last vote, Montpelier and Winooski had both passed noncitizen voting, and Trump had left office. Dieng says he had also talked to more refugee constituents who told him they supported the measure. 

“I think there is nothing more beautiful than becoming an American citizen, it’s still a great thing,” he said. “But this is just for the municipality of the City of Burlington—and people who live here who are paying taxes, have their kids in the schools.” 

With Dieng’s support, the council set up a vote by Burlingtonians during the city’s Town Meeting Day in March 2023. Of the roughly 10,500 residents who voted on Question 4, 68 percent approved the measure and expanded the electorate for future Town Meeting Days. 

Noncitizen voting, especially at the local level, was common throughout the U.S. during the 19th century; it has existed at various points in around 40 states. The Vermont supreme court upheld the constitutionality of local noncitizen voting in 1863. But by the 1890s, xenophobia about the arrival of migrants from non-Western countries caused states to definitively start banning noncitizens from participating in elections.

The reintroduction of noncitizen voting in the modern era has proved predictably controversial, inflaming tensions around immigration and voting rights, both major Republican bugbears. Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), a national group founded by Karl Rove and led by, among others, former Trump attorney general William Barr, has sued to block noncitizen voting in Winooski. In January, the Vermont supreme court upheld Montpelier’s charter amendment and allowed noncitizen voting in another lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee and state GOP attempting to block it. 

Shades of the hyper-polarized national discourse around voting rights and immigration have appeared locally as well. Election workers say they have encountered people at the polls who express anger about voting alongside noncitizen residents in every election cycle since it’s been implemented. Winooski city clerk Jenny Willingham, who has overseen the implementation of noncitizen voting there since 2022, told me that a few voters each election have arrived at the polls incensed by the concept, telling her they believe only U.S. citizens should be able to vote. “The numbers weren’t a lot. It was just the intensity of their opposition to it,” she said. Willingham added, however, that the anger seemed stronger last year when noncitizen voting was brand new. 

Today, Winooski has 61 registered noncitizen voters, Willingham told me. Some of the town’s initial noncitizen voters have since become citizens or moved away. Turnout is still quite low compared to the overall number of noncitizen residents eligible to vote (Winooski has over 1,100 foreign-born residents, though a good number are either under 18 or already possess citizenship). In response, Willingham says that Winooski is working on improving outreach about noncitizen voting to residents who might be eligible, and considering offering ballots in even more languages. 

“I’m just trying to do more,” Willingham said. “Bring the polls to them, rather than having them come to the polls.” 

Nearly everyone I spoke to for this piece emphasized that establishing noncitizen voting isn’t necessarily a victory in and of itself. “I think it’s valuable symbolically,” Bose, the UVM professor, told me. “I think that it can signal to people, you know, ‘You are valued here.’” But he says awareness of the new laws around noncitizen voting are generally low, and suspects that Vermont’s immigrant and refugee populations would be more likely to care about voting if they had the sense that their participation could meaningfully affect election outcomes. Unlike in New York City—where a judge struck down noncitizen voting on the basis that extending the franchise to some 800,000 noncitizen residents with permanent status or work authorization would plausibly dilute citizens’ votes—there is relatively little chance that votes from noncitizen Vermonters could sway the results of elections. 

Moreover, much more outreach and education about the new laws will need to be done before there’s even a chance of refugee parents becoming a constituency to be reckoned with in a Winooski or Burlington school board election. One Afghan asylum seeker living in Winooski, who asked to withhold his name because his asylum case is pending and his family is still in Pakistan, told me that he had had no idea that legal residents were eligible to vote in local elections in the three cities, but said that he was excited to pass the information along to other Afghan families living in Winooski and Montpelier who have their green cards already. “It’s a great thing,” he said, adding that he looked forward to participating if he eventually secures a green card.

Khadka says “invisible walls” block some noncitizen residents from voting even when they’re eligible. People of his parents’ and grandparents’ generation can also be plagued by memories of the harsh consequences they faced for trying to participate in politics. “There is some trauma in that, that people who are deprived of that and were being tortured by like the political superpower of their country—they are scared, some people are scared to participate,” he said. “You know, ‘remember what happened 20 years ago, when you asked for your right—you got kicked out of the country.’” 

While Vermont has expanded the franchise to noncitizen residents, other immigrant communities are still left out of local elections that directly impact them. The state is also home to as many as 1,500 migrant farmworkers, mostly undocumented men from Mexico and Central America who still cannot vote in local elections. Noncitizen voting “won’t really change anything for our community,” said Marita Canedo, the program coordinator for the group Migrant Justice. 

In the absence of ballot access, farmworkers working with Migrant Justice have found other ways to build economic and political power. For more than a decade, they have built campaigns connecting their backbreaking labor to the historic Vermont dairy industry and secured huge material wins, such as the extension of drivers’ licenses to undocumented Vermonters, solid labor agreements with Ben & Jerry’s, and stronger firewalls between local police and immigration enforcement. 

Canedo said that for now, migrant farmworkers in the state seem far from having any hope of inclusion in the political process through voting or running candidates from their community. “Right now our community is looking to survive, day by day,” she said. “Every campaign that we had has been a small step into the freedom of people.” There is more work to be done, she said, “for people to really feel that, ‘okay, now I can think about bigger things. Now that I know I can be in a safe place and you know, how to organize my farm or in my workplace—what other bigger things we can dream.’” 

The post Refugee Organizing Helps Spur Noncitizen Voting in Vermont Cities 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.

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.

“We won in every single district in this county,” George said in an interview Wednesday. She called the results a “command” from the community to continue with the reforms she’s initiated since taking office. “I really hope that it’s seen by law enforcement and others in the community as a sort of, let’s come together and do this, push forward on some of these issues together. And I look forward to doing that. That’s what I plan on doing.”

George, who was first appointed by GOP Governor Phil Scott but has run as a Democrat, will be unopposed in the general election, and is all but certain to secure an additional four-year term. 

George and Kenney fundamentally disagreed during the campaign about the proper scope of prosecution and policing in Chittenden County, with Kenney faulting many of George’s reforms.

During her tenure, George has implemented major changes. She has refused to seek cash bail and declined to charge people for possessing buprenorphine, which helped inspire legislation that in 2021 made Vermont the first state to legalize possession of the prescription medication used to treat opioid addiction. In 2019, George ordered her entire staff to visit a prison, saying she hoped the experience would lead them to seek fewer and shorter sentences.

George has also significantly expanded the use of pre-charge restorative justice programs, Bolts reported in July. The state’s attorney has been a champion of restorative justice since she first took office, arguing that it is a more compassionate and victim-centered form of harm response that can allow people to take accountability for their actions while avoiding contact with the criminal legal system altogether.  

She allied with so-called progressive prosecutors around the country who are looking to reform local court systems, some of whom celebrated her win on Tuesday. Many have faced pushback this year from critics of reforms, including law enforcement associations. In June, San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was ousted in a recall, while fellow reformer Diana Becton prevailed over police attacks in neighboring Contra Costa. George’s win comes just five days after a reform challenger ousted the police-backed DA of Tennessee’s Shelby County (Memphis).

Similar tensions arose in Chittenden County. Major police associations, including both local and state unions like the Vermont Troopers Associations and the Chittenden County Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Kenney in recent weeks after long feuding with George over her approach.

Police departments criticized George for declining to prosecute certain cases—and, by extension, hemming them in in their duties. A statement from the Burlington Police Officers’ Association criticized what they called her “pattern of non-prosecution,” calling her actions “disastrous.” George, meanwhile, argued that the police themselves were declining to make arrests in cases that she would have prosecuted—in order to prove their own point and drum up fears about rampant crime.

“In some cases, they were saying, ‘I’m not going to even respond to this because Sarah George won’t prosecute it’—and in a lot of those instances, it was things we absolutely would have prosecuted and would prosecute if the police sent it to us,” George told Bolts. Asked for an example of such a crime, George cited vehicle thefts—which Burlington officers’ association had singled out in their letter denouncing George’s reforms. This conflict also seemed reminiscent of the dynamics in San Francisco around Boudin: in the months before his recall, San Francisco police refused to assist the DA in a sting operation, leading some to speculate whether they were engaged in a retaliatory “work stoppage.”

In recent weeks, local media has published multiple accounts of individual officers invoking George as the reason they couldn’t or wouldn’t arrest someone. According to Seven Days, after a couple’s moped was stolen and the couple tracked down the thief, police let him go, placing the blame on George’s directives. In an encounter caught on body cam and reported on by VT Digger, a Winooksi police officer blamed the police’s inability to address crime and drug use in the neighborhood on George’s “super-progressive, soft-on-crime approach”—and urged the Winooski residents he was talking to vote for her opponent Kenney. 

One of George’s most controversial reforms was her policy of not prosecuting cases that arose from traffic stops for things like a suspended registration or a broken brake light, which she enacted to try to reduce the documented racial bias that factors into such encounters. The Vermont Troopers Association cited this reform as evidence of “an imbalance, [sic] that put her in direct conflict with her elected responsibilities as State’s Attorney.”

Kenney’s campaign echoed much of the criticism that local law enforcement leveled at George, arguing that restorative justice was not appropriate for repeat offenders, denouncing her traffic stop policy as “radical,” and highlighting upticks in theft as evidence of George’s leniency on crime. 

But the criticism failed tosway the county’s voters, and given Vermont’s progressive voter base, the highly visible support from police may have actually hurt Kenney’s chances. George prevailed on Tuesday by a margin of 62 to 38 percent.

George said the last-ditch involvement from law enforcement seemed to spur a dramatic escalation in the amount of hate mail she received during the home stretch of the campaign. At the same time, George said, she suspected that the community would react against the outpouring of police opposition.

“I think they were rightfully pretty angry that they were pawns in this political game that it felt like law enforcement was playing,” George told Bolts.

The post Reform Prosecutor Wins After Police Union Attacks in Vermont appeared first on Bolts.

In 2017, when Sarah Fair George became the state’s attorney of Chittenden County, the most populous county in Vermont and home to Burlington, she knew she wanted to center restorative justice. In the years since taking office, she has promoted the practice as a more compassionate and holistic approach that can keep people out of the criminal legal system, encourage meaningful healing for victims, and ensure deeper accountability for those who cause harm. 

George’s focus on restorative justice has been part of a broader effort to overhaul the criminal legal system in her county. She has declined to seek cash bail and prosecute possession of buprenorphine, a stance that helped inspire legislation that in 2021 made Vermont the first state to legalize possession of the prescription medication used to treat opioid addiction. Her office also adopted a policy of not pursuing charges where evidence was collected during traffic stops for a suspended registration or a broken brake light, a provocative attempt to reduce the racial bias that can lead to such stops in the first place. 

“I think Sarah George has demonstrated a broader commitment to a reshaping and rethinking about what a just system looks like and what the role of a prosecutor is in the justice system than honestly any state’s attorney I’ve ever seen in Vermont,” said Bobby Sand, a former state’s attorney and founder of an innovative restorative justice program at the Vermont Law School (Sand supports George in his individual capacity).

On August 9, George will face Ted Kenney, who recently left a top post in the Vermont Attorney General’s Office to run in the Democratic primary for Chittenden County State’s Attorney. Kenney stresses that he’s no lock-em-up type, and has the CV to prove it: a longtime public defender and criminal defense attorney who has volunteered with a local transitional shelter and an organization that assists unhoused people. 

But Kenney’s rhetoric in the race echoes that of more conservative candidates running against reform-minded incumbents around the country. His campaign has focused on retail theft and a recent increase in crime, arguing that reforms under George, including her traffic stop policy and what he sees as her reluctance to request strict conditions of pretrial release, are too extreme and undermine public safety.

Kenney also claims that George’s use of restorative justice has been too reflexive and sometimes applied inappropriately. Their conflict illustrates the intellectual and political challenges that restorative justice poses for reform-minded prosecutors. For those like George who see the practice as a philosophy, it’s a totally alternate framework for adjudicating harm, with many principles that stand in direct opposition to the way the current criminal legal system operates. Vermont’s groundbreaking but imperfect integration of restorative justice into that system also leaves prosecutors like George vulnerable to many of the same criticisms levied against other aspects of criminal justice reform: that it’s too lenient, will be exploited, or only works in low-level cases and can’t adequately address serious harm. 

George is going farther than any state’s attorney in Vermont to integrate these two radically opposed systems. “Whether the public is ready to fully embrace that or not, I don’t know,” said Sand. “I guess we’ll find out in August.”

Where the traditional criminal legal system sees law, crime and punishment, restorative justice centers the concepts of relationships, harm, and repair. RJ, as Sand calls it, is “a philosophically different way to respond to harm.” It inverts the thinking behind some of the country’s most infamous tough-on-crime policies, like so-called three strikes laws that condemned people to life in prison if they accrued a third charge after already having two felonies on their record. 

“I always say to my volunteers: do you believe in second chances—and do you believe in 22nd chances?” said Christalee McSweeney, director of the Williston Community Justice Center. “Because sometimes that’s what it takes.”  

The Abenaki and other tribes indigenous to Vermont would have practiced some form of restorative justice, according to Sand, but when it began to be reimplemented in the 1990s, by two department of corrections officials, it was within and around the criminal legal system: courts, jails, prisons, probation, parole. Today, restorative justice is practiced in Vermont in a number of different forms, from post-release accountability circles, a program that Sand estimates is the most robust in the country, to community mediation that elides the criminal legal system entirely, to diversion and pre-charge programs.

Becky Penberthy, the Adult Restorative and Volunteer Coordinator at the Burlington Community Justice Center (CJC), which handles the city’s pre-charge restorative justice cases, says the goal of the process is to help people work through what they did, why they did it, what impact it had on the person they hurt and the people around them, and what they might do to make amends. “When something terrible happens and you’re both in on it, it doesn’t matter what your role is, a relationship is created—and it’s a terrible relationship,” Penberthy said. “The relationship can be repaired, so that people can move on.”

Two important questions the Burlington CJC asks participants are: what were you thinking at the time and what have you thought about since? Penberthy considered a hypothetical situation with a participant who drank too much and got into a bar fight. In response to the first question, he might recall that he didn’t like how someone was looking at him; to the second, he might confess that he didn’t even clearly remember what happened, and that he felt ashamed for letting himself get so drunk. 

Next in the process, the restorative justice practitioner would ask the participant to consider who’d been hurt: the guy he punched, obviously, but also the bouncer, who’d had to break up the fight; the bartender, who’d had to clean up the resulting mess; and his girlfriend, who had to pick him up from jail. Though these questions are the same for everyone, everything that flows from them must be tailored to the individual. The instigator of the bar fight, for instance, could be a college freshman with a fake ID who’s intoxicated in part by their newfound freedom, or someone who struggled with substance abuse for decades and might need treatment before being able to participate in the RJ process at all. 

George first became a prosecutor in Chittenden County in 2011, where she was assigned to domestic violence cases. She had gone to law school to become a public defender, but this was one area where she felt forthright about seeking justice for victims. “In my head, I thought that meant some form of punishment, even jail,” she recalled. “What I learned really quickly was that most survivors of domestic violence didn’t really want any of that.”

Seeking other ways to remedy the harm that domestic violence caused, George discovered restorative justice—but quickly learned that Vermont prohibits its use in three cases: sexual assault, stalking, and intimate partner violence. Still, the experience helped her develop a different framework for thinking about harm and repair. When George was appointed as state’s attorney in 2017 after her boss left to become Attorney General, one of the first things she did was invite Chittenden County’s CJCs in to discuss the practice with her staff.

Most restorative justice cases that the state’s 17 CJCs receive are referred there directly by law enforcement. But how many and what type of cases police send over depends on how much the state’s attorney in question prioritizes restorative justice—meaning that CJCs in George’s jurisdiction are a lot busier than others. “It’s very clear that there’s Chittenden County and then there’s the rest of the state,” McSweeney said. 

From the outset, George expanded her use of restorative justice in court. “Whenever our advocates would have conversations with victims that felt like it’d be a good fit, they would talk to them about it,” she said, and either recommend a restorative justice process instead of prosecution or as a condition of a case resolution. Then the pandemic hit. Caseloads skyrocketed, and the courts closed. George can’t explicitly tell police departments what to do, but she suggested that they expand their notion of what cases might be eligible; occasionally, she sent back cases that she thought would be a better fit for pre-charge restorative justice. The Williston CJC’s caseload went up so much that they dramatically expanded their volunteer base to meet demand. 

George’s opponent, Kenney, partially blames this expansion of restorative justice for the recent rise in crime in Chittenden County; George responds by citing a Seven Days analysis of 10 years of data that shows overall crime has declined, adding that there are obvious external factors, like the pandemic itself, that explain the spike in theft-related crimes. While Kenney says he’s a fan of restorative justice and supports using it as a tool, he argues that it’s been applied too widely under George.  

To McSweeney, the Williston CJC director, the pandemic actually facilitated the restorative justice process. She told Bolts that her office saw higher levels of engagement from both participants and victims under a new, virtual system. “They don’t have to come to an in-person meeting, they don’t have to worry about transportation or childcare,” she said. “I think for impacted parties, it’s easier to talk about what happened in the comfort of your own home on a screen rather than coming face to face with somebody.”

Another reason for the higher level of engagement, McSweeney said, is that participants might be leery of coming into the Williston CJC itself, since it shares an office with the town’s police department.

Herein lies the paradox: restorative justice is a critical tool for reducing the power and reach of the traditional criminal legal system, but the form of RJ that begins at the moment of harm (or the legal violation, in a more conventional framework) is usually practiced within it. Even if a community justice center’s restorative justice process precludes someone from ever getting a criminal record or having to appear in court, that person often still got there because of an arrest.

George’s attempts to expand direct referrals between law enforcement and CJCs shrinks the scope and reach of her office, a goal of many serious reform prosecutors nationwide. But the Vermont system relies on police as frontline arbiters of restorative justice, and the pandemic’s changes to operations have only strengthened that reality. In April 2020, George issued a memo encouraging police to consider sending more eligible cases to CJCs instead of to her office for prosecution. Prosecutors in George’s office may have less discretion over people’s lives now—but local law enforcement now has more. “It also does mean that we don’t have any way to track the potential disparities in who’s being referred and who’s not,” George noted.

Chittenden County is Vermont’s most diverse county, but it’s still more than 85 percent white. Burlington is over 80 percent white, and the police force has a documented history of stark racial bias in traffic stops, arrests of and use of force against Black civilians. Though CJCs and local police departments have tried to cut down on referral bias by creating lists of infractions that are suitable for restorative justice, it’s not unreasonable to think that such bias could still play a role in referrals to those programs. For police to properly screen people for restorative justice, they also need to be able to assess whether someone might be willing to take accountability for their actions. But the traditional criminal legal system enshrines the presumption of innocence: “We’ve literally trained people who have committed a crime not to talk to police, not to admit anything, and then not to take any responsibility,” said George. “So some of that can be really difficult to gauge immediately.”

In an interview, Kenney seemed less worried than George about the potential of bias in police referrals. He denounced her policy of not pressing charges based on evidence discovered during routine traffic stops, which she enacted to try to cut down the well-documented bias that can play into those decisions, as “radical,” saying he’d opt for continued anti-bias training instead. But he criticized George for ceding too much power to police by encouraging them to refer a wide range of cases to CJCs, saying he wants the state’s attorney to have more control in whether to bring the power of the criminal legal system to bear on a defendant. 

“The more serious things—a repeat offender, or a felony level offense—I would want the police to refer that to the State’s Attorney’s office as the first step so that they can do a review,” he told Bolts. “That does not mean that the people who don’t make the cut for reparative boards are going to go to jail. One of the benefits of bringing a more serious case into the criminal justice system is there are more tools available.”

Practicing restorative justice within the confines of the criminal legal system, rather than pre-charge, means there are more established consequences for failing to follow through, which raises another philosophical conflict between these two opposing systems. “My philosophy and my understanding of restorative justice is that it’s voluntary, right?” McSweeney said. “And so the moment that it becomes a court condition, it’s no longer voluntary.”

Probably the biggest controversy over restorative justice, and certainly the biggest in the state’s attorney race, is the question of accountability: what happens when people stop participating in the process? It seems like everyone agrees that restorative justice doesn’t work unless the person is willing to participate. How could it? “People need to want to take accountability,” said George. “It’s a lot harder than just pleading guilty.”

The association of restorative justice with leniency rankles many of its acolytes. “Most people don’t know how much work goes into a particular case,” said McSweeney. “Most people don’t know what a restorative contract looks like. When I train law enforcement [about RJ,] when I give them a copy of what a contract looks like, they’re normally pretty shocked at the depth of what we ask people to do.” 

Penberthy described the restorative justice “conference,” where the participant and their community volunteers talk through the harm caused and settle on a course of action intended to repair it. If the victim chooses to be present, they too will answer a series of questions, including: what was the hardest thing for you? In Penberthy’s experience, the answers are unpredictable and often surprising. A damaged car might mean more to its owner than just its monetary value—it might be a lifeline. A schoolyard threat might strike a particularly painful chord because the child’s parent had lingering trauma from a similar experience when they were in school. “In the best of situations, it becomes really quiet and really intimate,” Penberthy said. “And people really settle into this very, very challenging conversation.”

Still, McSweeney said that participation is essentially still voluntary in the pre-charge system,  meaning there’s not a surefire mechanism for accountability when people simply drop out of the process. And this is what leaves the system most vulnerable to criticism from people like Kenney. His campaign website asserts that restorative justice “will never work if there is no consequence for refusing to engage in the process.” When people fail to complete the process, he said, “many cases are being accepted for prosecution by the state’s attorney, but some of them are not.” George said her office looks at each case where participants drop out: “In some cases we’ll take the case and in some cases we’ll say, like, it’s been nine months and they haven’t picked up anything else. So we’re not going to charge it at this point. But we decide with each case.”

When she volunteered on the reparative panel in the city of Winooski (akin to a local CJC) in 2018 and 2019, Kayla Loving thought long and hard about restorative justice’s ties to the traditional criminal legal system. “I think the assumption was: oh, this is restorative justice, you just work with the police department,” she said. “And that’s not the approach I wanted to take.”

Now, as the restorative justice coordinator for Spectrum Vermont, which provides youth and family services, Loving focuses on a more holistic vision of restorative justice that aims to strengthen community before the harm-repair framework begins. “The way that I think it should be implemented is, first by providing opportunities for people to learn from one another and be authentic with each other, so that they are comfortable with one another and really value each other as human,” she said. That way, “when harm does happen, which will happen, they already have a relationship in place.” She’s currently conducting listening circles with middle and high-schoolers; the group recently discussed how to support each other amidst the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

Though it wasn’t for her, Loving respects the work of the CJCs, noting that the Burlington office recently hired a community mediator to help resolve interpersonal disputes before the criminal legal system ever gets involved. “I do think it is having a positive impact on the community,” she told Bolts. “And I think it might have even more of an impact if we did focus on community-building in the first place and not just: okay, something happened. Now what do we do?”

The post A Vermont Prosecutor Expanded Restorative Justice. Now She’s Defending It At the Polls. 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.

The movement against mass incarceration has pushed local officials to get more creative, and rethink how they could be using the arrays of their discretionary powers to break punitive conventions. So far this has mostly manifested itself in prosecutors, sheriffs, and judges.

Enter Vermont’s high bailiffs. 

These little-known county officials have limited powers; mainly, they can arrest the sheriff and can step in when a sheriff is incapacitated. This year, though, two proponents of criminal justice reform—Bobby Sand in Windsor County and David Silberman in Addison County (Middlebury)—decided to run for these offices with a stated goal of harnessing its platform for progressive change and promoting civilian oversight over law enforcement. “Could an obscure county position that harkens back to the 18th century provide a path to police oversight and reform in modern times?” the Vermont Digger asked last week.

Sand and Silberman each won contested Democratic primaries last week. In the general election, Sand will face independents Shawn Orr and Matthew Harootunian, according to the state’s provisional candidate list. Silberman will face Republican nominee Ron Holmes, whom he already defeated in the Democratic primary, and independent Michael Elmore. “I look forward to seeing how [they] can push the limits of this position to expand criminal justice reform,” Sarah Fair George, Burlington’s reform-minded prosecutor, wrote on Twitter after the primary results. “I’m all in! Let’s do it! (Whatever it is we can actually do!)”  

I talked to Sand and Silberman on Thursday in a joint interview about what it is that they want to do, and why they think high bailiffs can be relevant to criminal justice reform.

“It’s up to me as an activist, as a person who’s looking to change the system, to use the tools at our disposal to make our society better,” said Silberman, who has long been an advocate for legalizing marijuana and decriminalizing drug possession. He promised to use an “adversarial” approach to hold the sheriff’s department to account, but also continue speaking up on drug policy. “This campaign is a concrete experiment in the popularity of criminal justice reform,” he said, adding it may strengthen his hand in conversations with lawmakers.

Sand, a former chief prosecutor in Windsor County, called his outlook “more collaborative,” but he says he wants to push against sheriffs’ expanded roles and against the “business” model of law enforcement. “I don’t think it’s law enforcement’s fault that we have dumped responses onto them that are not within their wheelhouse,” he said, “but I think it is our collective obligation to figure out how to divest them of that role by creating other appropriate citizen-based responses.”

Sand and Silberman stressed that they are eager to work together but have not coordinated their campaigns or their language. They both said contrasts between their styles and visions were an asset that would enable them to experiment with the office in various ways and, in the longer run, set up different avenues for progressive change.

“Just the act of voting for a civilian in this position that in recent history has been held by law enforcement sends a powerful message,” Silberman said.

The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

—

Daniel Nichanian: You have centered your bids on this idea that law enforcement needs more civilian oversight. That fits as well into the recent nationwide protests. What about Vermont’s context made you focus on a need for oversight and decide to seek office yourself?

David Silberman: Vermont is very white and very small, but we do see police misconduct going unchecked. Vermont’s sheriff’s departments are roughly as accountable as any other states’, meaning the sheriff is elected but it’s typically not a contested election. We need to have that accountability be more structural, rather than just something that every four years comes up for election—maybe he’ll get challenged, and maybe we’ll have the moral persuasion to make them feel bad when they do something bad—because that never works.

So take away positions from law enforcement: The high bailiff was originally intended as an independent check on the sheriff, but has become something different; it’s basically seen as a sheriff in-waiting. I thought here’s an opportunity to take that power back to the people and say, no, we want civilian oversight. Just the act of voting for a civilian in this position that in recent history has been held by law enforcement sends a powerful message and makes people feel uncomfortable. And making powerful people feel uncomfortable is a good thing, always.

Robert Sand: One of the things that’s challenging for me is not overplaying the significance of my run. Historically, if I’m being honest, this is a position that has done almost nothing. The roles are extraordinarily limited. Having said that, even though it’s hard to find the historical record for this, clearly someone thought it was important to have an independent actor who had the authority to arrest the sheriff, who up until the 1940s was the most powerful law enforcement official in the state because we didn’t have the state police. If we extrapolate from that historic rule of the importance of having an independent actor to today, it’s not a huge leap to then say: Since this is a constitutional role that was designed to be an independent actor, there is value in having a contemporary independent actor. That is what appeals to me about the office. 

The Vermont Digger reported on your criticism of law enforcement functioning as a business. What do you have in mind when you fault this focus on contracts and bringing in funds? 

Sand: Philosophically, there are certain functions that I believe ought to be core functions of government, paid for by taxpayers, not privatized. The manifestation of the private or the business aspects for sheriffs in Vermont largely is speed enforcement, that I’m aware of: Towns will contract with sheriffs to do speed enforcement. 

Silberman: Given what we know about how police pull over drivers and how they select Black and brown drivers for pulling over and enforcement at far greater rates than white drivers, and how we know that they pull over people who look poor, because they drive older cars or beat up cars, the sheriff literally is reverse Robin Hooding, taking from the poor and giving it to himself. 

Another area where sheriffs make quite a bit of money is on construction projects, flagging and site security. There are private companies that can do this, it’s not a law enforcement function. And that money goes to fund the operation of the sheriff’s department: He’s able to take those contracts and fund himself in a way that the county does not already fund him, and thus hire more deputies and grow his department.

So, your criticism is that sheriffs are generating functions for themselves. There’s a related debate around the country on the scope of law enforcement, so that they’re no longer the go-to for mental health crises and substance use issues. Seven Days reported on the sheriff of Lamoille County who has taken on a role of transporting and supervising mental health patients. Is there an opportunity here in Vermont to shrink the role of law enforcement along those lines? 

Silberman: I’m a big advocate in Addison County for replacing the police response with a social services response. With homelessness, with the kind of problems that lead to homelessness, the mental health problems, the drug dependency problems, and that translates into vagrancy, police end up having to respond because we don’t have any other agency to respond to it. We don’t sufficiently fund those other agencies. So I’ve advocated for using our tax dollars differently. 

When the sheriff is able to do what he pleases with the money he brings in, that creates both an opportunity and a risk. Within weeks of me announcing my campaign on a reform platform, our sheriff announced that he is planning in early 2021 to hire two social service workers to be inside his department to help respond to those calls. And on the one hand, it’s great that we can send people who are actually trained in dealing with mental health, health crises, and drug abuse, to deal with those problems, rather than police. But that’s not what would happen here: They would be going along with the police. So we’re not taking away that additional trauma, that potential for introducing violence to a volatile situation. And so that creates a political problem: You want to encourage the sheriff to think about new and better ways of responding to these crises that are not law enforcement crises. But you don’t really want the sheriff to be involved at all. 

Sand: I don’t think it’s fair to fault law enforcement for the fact that we’ve outsourced our mental health response to them or that we’ve abdicated our responsibility. But for so many reasons, law enforcement is the wrong entity to respond to people in mental health crises or to respond to addiction issues. I’ve been a longtime believer in the police social work program that partners a social worker with a law enforcement entity, to have that social worker be one of the first responders. But in a perfect world, and perhaps a long-term offshoot of the defund the police movement—I don’t think it’s law enforcement’s fault that we have dumped responses onto them that are not within their wheelhouse, but I think it is our collective obligation to figure out how to divest them of that role by creating other appropriate citizen-based responses.

—

Let’s return to the role of the high bailiff, since we’ve talked about many law enforcement arenas in need of upheaval here: How would this position help with those goals?

Silberman: I think it’s entirely possible to carve out a role for high bailiff under existing statutes that is adversarial, where they are to present a different view and challenge the sheriff—not to scandalize and not to overthrow and not to exceed our legal authority in any way, but to be there as a check in the public sphere. One thing that I would hope to do, should I win, is to utilize Vermont’s very open open records law to start digging into the sheriff’s contracts.

Sand: I suspect David’s style and my style are subtly different. I think I am a little bit more, “Start from a more collaborative place and see what changes can be implemented.” I will say, though, that to the extent I had an ultimate vision for the office, if you think historically this has oversight over the most powerful law enforcement entity in the state, I like the high bailiff’s role not just being constrained to review of the sheriff, but instead to be an independent voice for the justice system. How are police generally doing within the county? How’s the DA generally doing within the county? To what extent is this county utilizing appropriate less punitive responses to harm? In its broadest expression, it is civilian involvement in the justice system.

Silberman: The need for criminal justice reform hits every aspect of the system. It hits policing, the courts and prosecutors. We’re very fortunate in Addison County, to have a reform prosecutor. But if you take a look at one county to our south, Rutland County, there is a regressive DA. And in Bennington, there is the DA who sends the most people to jail per capita of every county. 

Sand: Both of whom are Democrats. 

Silberman: That’s right. And that’s a problem. 

It’s interesting that there is this divergence of views between you about just how adversarially to think of the function, to the extent that you are both engaged in an exercise of reimagining an office that has not done very much. 

Sand: What’s really exciting about this is it’s a blank slate. It wouldn’t shock me if there’s further effort down the road to get more progressive-minded folks in this office, but none of those discussions have happened so far.

Silberman: Bobby and I definitely have different personalities and different approaches. But at the end of the day, we are both deep believers in the need to fundamentally reform our criminal justice system. I can’t say enough about Bobby; he has been doing this for decades. But I think it’s good to have different styles. I’m a big believer in the Overton window; I am in Vermont politics known as a person who will lay out some far into the future policies. I’m out there talking about reallocating our police budgets towards social service agencies. I’m talking about decriminalizing drug possession, taking that outside of the realm of the criminal justice system and dealing with it like in Portugal through the public health system. And I’m very loud about those things, so I think my election will demonstrate to other elected officials that negative campaigning of that person as too “soft on crime” doesn’t fly, at least not in Vermont: People realize that this system has gone too far. 

So, David, your point is that your victory would enable you to cite the electability or legitimacy of those positions.

Silberman: This campaign is a concrete experiment in the popularity of criminal justice reform. I want to make these changes happen, and I’m tired of the slow pace of reform. So this is the way to demonstrate that these policies are popular, that the message of police needing to be accountable to the people is deeply popular.

You’ve described some of what you want to do for oversight with the high bailiff’s office within existing parameters. What do you want done by others to bolster the role of the high bailiff?

Silberman: The legislature is starting to look at the role of civilian oversight in law enforcement. We see also at the local level various groups getting together demanding police accountability. I think this is an area where there’s a real opportunity for the high bailiff role to be expanded, and it’s something that I’m talking about with legislators. If we’re going to create this at the county level, well, you have this independently elected county officer. You could put this person to work. We could enshrine in legislation the independent civilian nature of this role, by having the high bailiff be a core part of this county oversight function. 

Sand: What would be a good extra line to build into the enabling legislation to this position? Whether it’s asking the high bailiff to do an annual or biannual report about the state of law enforcement, the state of the criminal justice system, or the extent to which restorative justice (something that I’m very involved in at Vermont Law School) is part of the response within the county. It could be a fairly innocuous one-sentence addition to the enabling statute that creates the legitimacy and the authorization for a high bailiff to play a more engaged civilian oversight role. 

Do you think the position being an elected one is a positive in that it can tie oversight to the general public, or potentially harmful if it helps people with an attitude hostile to oversight?

Silberman: I think this role being independently elected is a positive to the extent that you can get candidates from outside of law enforcement. It’s not for me to say whether the tools we have at our disposal are the ones we should have. It’s up to me as an activist, as a person who’s looking to change the system, to use the tools at our disposal to make our society better. And that’s how I look at this: I can throw my hands up in the air and say it’s a flawed system, but I think we can be much more productive and get to a much better result if we engage within the system and work from inside to make the changes. It takes a lot of effort, and there’s a very real risk of reformers being co-opted by the system and getting in there and getting a taste of power and not pushing. Fortunately, the high bailiff has no power to get a taste of.

Aug. 25: This article has been updated to reflect the independent candidates who have qualified for the November ballot, according to the state’s secretary of state.

The post “Making Powerful People Feel Uncomfortable Is A Good Thing”: Enter Vermont’s High Bailiffs appeared first on Bolts.

A New York bill introduced by Democratic state Senator Kevin Parker in October would guarantee the right to vote of all voting-age citizens, including if they are in prison. “All New Yorkers should be able to exercise their foundational American right of voting,” it states. 

Lawmakers have filed similar legislation this year in at least seven other states, as well as in Washington D.C.. Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts also introduced a federal bill last week to enable incarcerated people to vote, as is already the case in Maine and Vermont.

These bills would end felony disenfranchisement schemes. New York law, for instance, currently strips people convicted of felonies of their voting rights while they are incarcerated or on parole, though Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order in 2018 to let people on parole vote. Parker’s bill would enable people in prison to vote absentee in their last county of residence.

Ending felony disenfranchisement would also mean that law enforcement professionals are no longer the arbiters of who gets to exercise democratic rights.

New York Assemblymember Steve Hawley, a Republican, took issue with this proposal. He called the notion “insulting” to “members of law enforcement and the criminal justice system who worked diligently to get these dangerous predators off the street.” 

Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, tweeted in answer to Hawley, “The right to the franchise must not be subject to the whims of the personal feelings of police officers—or any other group for that matter.”

It’s questionable why any group should enjoy such a special say in whether their fellow citizens can vote. Yet we routinely accept that it is. Choices made by prosecutors or police chiefs constantly shape who loses the franchise. In deciding whether or not to charge someone at the felony level, or in disproportionately patrolling some communities over others, they are among a cadre of public employees with discretionary authority over who will be disenfranchised. 

Hawley’s reaction reflects a system that has set them up as gatekeepers of voting rights, with the punitive expectation that effective law enforcement means cutting people off from the world. 

But in Maine and Vermont, law enforcement’s decisions do not affect people’s voting rights, and that promotes a different dynamic. When I talked to the prosecutor of Vermont’s largest county in August about the fact that the state enables people to vote from prison, she expressed a very different sentiment than Hawley.

“I am very proud of Vermont for doing that, and I think every state should allow [incarcerated people] to vote,” Sarah Fair George, the state’s attorney of Chittenden County (Burlington), told me. She added that she wanted it to be easier still for incarcerated people to obtain ballots. “They are still a community member, and they should still have a say in the way their community is run, whether they’re in jail or not,” she said. 

—

This week, after reading Hawley’s statement, I reached out to all the prosecutors in Maine and Vermont to ask for their reaction. I also contacted officials in each state’s Department of Corrections (DOC), the agencies that run state prisons.

Those who answered either defended prison voting as a boon to the criminal legal system, or shrugged it off as a non-issue. None expressed a sense of being disrespected.

“[F]elon voting in Vermont has been a rather uncontroversial topic and is not something that we as prosecutors and law enforcement regularly discuss,” said David Cahill, the state’s attorney of Windsor County, Vermont. An executive at Vermont’s DOC echoed that sentiment. Todd Collins, the district attorney of Maine’s Aroostook County since 2010, replied that he had not given this “any serious consideration before.” 

George was direct when asked about Hawley’s view that Parker’s bill is “insulting.” “That quote is appalling,” she told me via email. “It’s a good reflection of how inhumane our system has become, that we can use language that likens human beings to animals, and imply that once we ‘get them off the street,’ they no longer deserve to be treated with dignity.”

She added that voting from prison “does not negate their incarceration or any work done by law enforcement to put them there” but that it could “force elected officials who played a part [to] think twice about likening them to animals. If more district attorneys, mayors, governors or attorney generals, knew that every inmate could vote in their elections, they may start seeing them in a different light…maybe even treat them with some respect.”

That gets to the crux of the matter. Protecting voting rights is just one piece of how the criminal legal system can make room for every person’s  humanity and political agency. But it is a critical one. 

Depriving people of this right invites public officials to think they can ignore other rights, too. But in states whose public officials have to contend with all citizens having some political voice, they have more of an incentive to not use them as easy scapegoats. 

As Pressley told The Appeal last week: “Perhaps we would be further along in transforming the criminal legal system if people were held more accountable to those that are behind the walls.” 

—

“All voices count,” the organizers of the 2018 prison strike wrote on their list of demands that summer. The fight for voting rights has since grown. Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, and Nevada implemented new laws this year that considerably cut disenfranchisement, restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands. In addition, bills to abolish disenfranchisement moved one legislative step in Hawaii and New Mexico, and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont injected the issue into the presidential election.

Still, Maine and Vermont remain the only states that give all people the right to vote regardless of their criminal record. Incarcerated individuals can vote in Puerto Rico as well. One thing this means in practice is that, in most states, prosecutorial discretion impacts who can vote. 

Each time prosecutors decide whether to charge someone with a felony or a misdemeanor, or whether to offer someone a deal that avoids incarceration, or how long a prison sentence to seek, they are shifting the voting public. 

Such decisions systematically skew against people of color. One study of New York City shows that African Americans were likelier to be offered deals that included incarceration, even when controlling for factors like the seriousness of the alleged offense; another showed that Black New Yorkers on probation were likelier to have their probation revoked and be incarcerated. Studies elsewhere have shown that African Americans are likelier to be charged at the disenfranchising felony level.

This is reflected in the population prevented from voting in New York. While African Americans make up 15 percent of the state’s voting-age population, 47 percent of the state’s disenfranchised population was Black as of 2016, according to the Sentencing Project. Black New Yorkers were an outright majority of those who could not vote specifically because they were incarcerated.

Felony disenfranchisement laws empower some public officials to exercise this vast control over the boundaries of the electorate.

This power validates the outlook of people like Hawley, who describe incarcerated people as though they were vanquished adversaries and who fight criminal justice reforms with a more rehabilitative outlook.

Laws in Maine and Vermont, by contrast, do not give public officials discretion to police who should vote. That sets a different tone, that citizenship doesn’t just stop at a prison’s doors.

Multiple officials in both states told me that voting rights are an important link between incarcerated individuals and the world beyond the prison. 

“Our perspective is one of actively maintaining this important connection to society,” Derek Miodownik, the community and restorative justice executive at Vermont’s DOC. “We want them to become more constructive civic participants than some of their past behaviors have indicated, and we believe they can.” He added that the ability to vote helps incarcerated people not “opt out” of social institutions. Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state, similarly told me in April that voting is a “sliver of light”: “They’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens, and… in no small way it helps keep them connected to the real world.”  

Their perspective stands against practices that foster civil death and cut off incarcerated people from civil and political communities. It complements the nationwide work of activists, many of whom are disenfranchised or incarcerated, to give people inside prisons a say in elections.

Parker, the New York senator, has mentioned the benefits of such links in justifying his proposed reform. Voting from prison can “facilitate an easier transition back into society,” his bill states. 

George agreed that voting can facilitate people’s re-entry. “We have to do everything we can to connect each of those individuals to their respective communities while they are incarcerated, so they are better adjusted when released,” she said. “Voting is one of the most important ways that someone can connect to their community. It allows them to have a voice, have a part in electing officials who reign over things that matter to them, that impact them and their families.”

The post When People in Prison Can Vote, Officials “Treat Them With Some Respect” appeared first on Bolts.

Sarah Fair George, the state’s attorney of Chittenden County (home to Burlington) in Vermont, has instructed all staff and prosecutors who work in her office to visit the St. Albans prison, also known as the Northwest State Correctional Facility. “Most prosecutors have never stepped foot in the buildings that they sentence people to spend years in,” she wrote on Twitter. “That needs to change.”

I talked to George on Wednesday about her initiative, and how it could change practices in her office. She said prosecutors often treat prison time “nonchalantly,” as something abstract, and get in the habit of “just throwing out numbers.” “We say six months or two years, and don’t really have to think about what it means for the person,” she explained. 

“It’s important to stand in that space and see it for yourself, and feel it for yourself,” she added. “My hope is that people recognize that six months is a long time to spend in jail. Maybe thirty days can be enough time, maybe no jail. Just being more cognizant of the space you’re sending people to when you put an arbitrary number on an offer sheet.”

George said this perspective should fuel shorter sentences, but also restrain prosecutors from seeking incarceration in the first place. “They spent an hour and a half there and were relieved to get out,” she said of staff members who have already visited St. Albans as part of her initiative. “So let’s imagine how this might impact somebody who is there for six months or a year, and how this impacts them as a community member when they get back out. Is there a way that we can avoid that entirely, and not risk them coming out a more violent person or with some type of trauma having been in jail? Can we find another way?”

Her comments flip the typical way opponents of criminal justice reform react to cases of recidivism to argue that people were not treated harshly enough. Instead she suggested that some instances of recidivism should force prosecutors to confront the failures of incarceration. “That hasn’t worked, that person is back. Maybe we need to find another way to address this particular person,” she said.

I also asked George, who has implemented programs to divert people from prison, how lawmakers could further decrease reliance on incarceration. She endorsed a proposal to eliminate de facto life without parole sentences, which would be a national first. She also told me that she plans to work for incarcerated people to have better access to ballots. “Although we are proud of ourselves for saying that inmates can vote,” she said, “I don’t think we do enough to make sure that they do.”

George’s announcement comes a month after the group Families Against Mandatory Minimums called on lawmakers to visit a carceral facility to see how people are detained. 

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

You announced that you have instructed prosecutors in your office to visit a prison in the next month. What is the impetus for this, and what insights do you wish them to glean?

For me, it has gone back to my own experience having been in some of these prisons. It has shaped a lot of my reform policies and how I approach prosecution in general. When I was in grad school, I went to multiple prisons and was on the mental health wards at those prisons, which were in some cases pretty appalling. Then, when I was at the public defender’s office, I went to several prisons and met with clients and heard the stories of either how they were treated in jail or the conditions of jail, solitary confinement, stuff like that. I came into being a prosecutor with that background, and with that idea of what some of those prisons are like. 

I have always thought it is important for people to understand what probation does, and what some of our community partners do, and that’s always been stressed. But it’s never been stressed that they should also fully understand what prison means, and what a jail sentence means for these individuals. 

As prosecutors, we get very comfortable with just throwing out numbers as an amount of time. We say six months or two years, and don’t really have to think about what it means for the person, that six months for one person could be detrimental to their entire lives. 

What are you thinking of when you say it’s important to understand what prison means for individuals? What it is that you think people in your office should have to witness?

Literally just seeing the facility, and understanding literally where they’re sending people. But also being in one of those cells and sitting on the bed in a cell and seeing how small that space is, and seeing a solitary confinement room and seeing how claustrophobic you get in five minutes in that room. Hearing those sounds in the jail of those doors closing, and how cold and harsh all of those sounds are. Seeing inmates in that environment.  In Vermont, there is this idea that jail isn’t that bad, and in some sense we’re very lucky, but that’s a lot easier to say on the outside. You spend an hour and a half in the jail and you find yourself relieved to come out. You know you were always coming out, but you have that experience and you think, “Okay, maybe that TV and that good food is not as important as I thought it was when I just lost my freedom for an hour and a half, knowing full well I’ll be coming out and I’m still relieved.” 

As a prosecutor, the only time I’ve been to a jail is for a deposition of an inmate, or an inmate who wants to do a proffer. Those meetings are very structured, they’re in a space right inside the jail, so you’re not going very far. There’s really nobody else around. That doesn’t count for me, that’s a very easy way to say you’ve been in a jail without actually being in a facility. I think it’s important to really stand in that space and see it for yourself, and feel it for yourself.

How exactly do you think prosecutors should take these things into account in the course of their work? At what stages of their discretion should this weigh in?

It may not start necessarily with the charging decisions, but I think in some cases it could. If you know for example that this person’s parole could be revoked and they may go back to jail, or you know that they might be held in bond or some other violation, then maybe it does charge at the charging decision. But at the very least, I think that when you’re giving an offer on a case and you nonchalantly say six months as if that’s not a lot of time, my hope is that people recognize that six months is a long time to spend in jail. Maybe thirty days is enough time, maybe no jail. Just being more cognizant of the space you’re sending people to when you put an arbitrary number on an offer sheet.

But also understanding where people are coming from. Somebody may have a long record, and that record has led to incarcerative sentences several times in their history—maybe you can have a better understanding of why they are in the place that they’re in, having spent all that time in jail. Maybe doing it again isn’t going to do them hasn’t favors. That hasn’t worked, that person is back. Maybe we need to find another way to address this particular person.

In the past, you have talked of promoting law enforcement responses that keep individuals in their communities, rather than “taking them out of the community and putting them in an incredibly violent and dangerous space, for however long.” How does this new initiative connect to the other policies you are putting in place to cub incarceration? 

Prosecutors recognizing that this place that they’re sending people is a real place, and it is not a nice place, and it’s not a good space. They spent an hour and a half there and were relieved to get out. So let’s imagine how this might impact somebody who is there for six months or a year, and how this impacts them as a community member when they get back out. Is there a way that we can avoid that entirely, and not risk them coming out a more violent person, or with some type of trauma having been in jail? Can we find another way?

I think there are very few law enforcement officers who have really spent any time in jails. Of course, they’re taking them to and from, but our sheriffs actually do a lot of our transport. I think it would be a good idea for law enforcement who have spent any time in jail, to see that and ask how is this actually helping our community for somebody to be in this space for some amount of time? If we start having less sentences on these cases, not to generalize all law enforcement, but they may start thinking, “Oh, he only got 30 days, when in the past we would have done six months.” We need to all be on that same page that thirty days is a long time for somebody to be held in jail, and it’s not because we’re going easy on them, it’s because we recognize that no more than that is necessary.

There are legislative proposals in Vermont to scale back the length of long prison terms. One bill filed this year would have eliminated life without parole sentences, and ensured that anyone is eligible for parole after 25 years. Is that a reform that you would support, and what other measures do you think could curb excessive sentences?

I do support it. I worked with the individuals who submitted that bill, and am still hopeful that it will get more traction in the next session. I think it’s certainly a great start. It’s not a huge number we’re talking about. But I think the conversation leads to, who are the people who are serving life without parole, and is that really necessary. 

Our bail statute has recently changed. That has eliminated a significant amount of people serving jail terms pre-conviction, which has lowered our incarceration rate, which is really fantastic. I support that as well. We have some legislation going about our  habitual offender statutes and using that less in more specific circumstances, that should keep more people out of jail. 

My colleague Vaidya Gullapalli wrote last month that officials visiting jails or prisons can only go so far, as they may see a curated version that does not capture the experiences of people detained there. How will your office also ensure to incorporate voices of people impacted by the criminal legal system in your work?

I struggle with that. Half of the staff went yesterday, and half of the staff is going next month. I was speaking with all of them, I asked did you feel like that experience was fake, did you feel like you didn’t see things that you wanted to. Most of the attorneys felt like they got a good enough impression, but they didn’t see a solitary confinement cell. They didn’t actually go into one. That was something that was disappointing to me, something I want to work on for the next one. I don’t know how to get around that. Obviously jails have the policies and procedures in place for people visiting the jail that they have to follow, so what do you do? Getting people in there in whatever way that the Department of Corrections will let us in is my first step.

For me, the next step is something that I try to do when I’m in court. If somebody has spent some time in jail, I’ll ask their attorney, can I talk to your client for a few minutes? I’ll ask them what was your experience like, which jail were you in, how did they treat you, what did they do well, what could they work on? I also do that on Twitter. There’s a couple of people who are out of jail now but I know are vocal about their how they were treated in the Department of Corrections. I’ve had conversations with them, I’ve called them, I’ve talked to them. I’m trying to find ways because I fully acknowledge that us going on a two hour, three-hour tour at DOC is going to be what DOC wants us to see. And I don’t know if that’s their fault either. So doing that, plus talking to people and hearing their experiences is the best we can do right now.

On solitary confinement, the prison we’ve been talking about was recently hit by a lawsuit this year over the death of a man held in solitary confinement. What can your office do about potential abuses or complaints regarding detention conditions in jail?

The county I’m in only has only one jail, and it’s an-all female-only prison. We do handle any allegation that come from that. We have prosecuted several guards from the past for sexual assault in that facility. Other than through the media, I don’t know about other facilities because they don’t come from my office.

I think that the Department of Corrections has a lot of work to do to have some of their own safeguards in place that don’t require inmates to even report things—more video that is being fed to some other facility—so there isn’t a requirement on an inmate who is already in a very vulnerable position to have to tell on a guard who is in charge of their safety. I don’t know how as prosecutors we can facilitate it because we don’t know about it until it’s already happened, but it’s certainly a good question. I think there needs to be more community oversight in general on all of thee facilities, and more community members or boards that are allowed to just drop in randomly and talk to inmates, and what they say is protected.

Vermont is one of the two states where people who are incarcerated have the right to vote. That resonates with what you are saying about the importance of the perspective of those affected by the system. My question is whether you support that, but also how you think Vermont’s system of universal enfranchisement shapes conditions in prisons, and what would you say to other states that may be considering a move like this?

I absolutely support it, I am very proud of Vermont for doing that, and I think every state should allow them to vote. From my perspective, in Vermont and I think nationally, a vast majority of people who are incarcerated are ultimately released. They are still a community member, and they should still have a say in the way their community is run, whether they’re in jail or not. 

When I was just elected in 2018, I asked a lot of people who had been incarcerated whether or not they voted while they were in, and a lot of them either didn’t know that they could, or tried and weren’t able to get an absentee ballot as easily as I think they should have been. So I talked to the Secretary of State about how, in the 2020 elections, we’re going to try to find some better ways that inmates can get easy access to absentee ballots to actually be able to vote. Although we are proud of ourselves for saying that inmates can vote, I don’t think we do enough to make sure that they do and that they actually can in practice and not just in theory. 

I don’t have an election in 2020, I have a four-year term, so I’m hoping to spend my get out the vote on the inmate population in Vermont. There are a lot of inmates who don’t recognize that they haven’t lost their ability to vote, so we have some work to do, and that education is going in these facilities around election day. You know, of all the governor’s races we’ve had, I can’t recall a governor ever visiting a jail and speaking to those individuals. That’s a place where we could really work on, making sure that they know what their rights are, and making sure that their leaders do care and want them to vote.

Explore the Political Report’s interactive page on the politics of prosecutors.

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In Vermont, new legislation (House Bill 382) would abolish sentences of life without the possibility of parole and replace them with sentences of 25-to-life, which would make incarcerated individuals eligible for parole after 25 years of incarceration.

“It’s inconsistent with our values to lock people up and throw away the key,” said Tom Dalton, the executive director of Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform, a group that supports this bill. “We have an ethical and moral obligation to not incarcerate people beyond reasonable punishment. I think that decades in prison is significant penalty, and it’s a value judgment that after decades of punishment it’s reasonable to assess whether someone can safely be released to their community.” Dalton emphasized that this bill would not create a guarantee of release, but rather “an opportunity to go in front of the parole board and have an individual assessment.”

The legislation also targets virtual life sentences, namely sentences that are handed for a finite duration or that technically permit parole but with an eligibility for release that is so far into the future as to make it meaningless in the context of a human life span. “You might not be able to get in front of the parole board before life expectancy,” Dalton said.

Massachusetts lawmakers have also introduced legislation to end life without parole sentences, and to make individuals serving life sentences eligible for parole after 25 years (bills S.826 and H.3358).

If Vermont or Massachusetts adopted such proposals, they would be the first state to effectively bar life without parole sentences. All states but Alaska allow sentences of life without parole, and Alaska’s 99-year sentence is the functional equivalent. Last year, Pennsylvania state Senator Sharif Street launched a similar push by proposing that people serving a life sentence should be eligible for parole, but his bill did not move forward.

A report published by the Sentencing Project in 2017 documented the nationwide growth of life and virtual life sentences, which have been the target of recent litigation. Take the case of Arthur Franklin, who was 17 at the time of non-homicide offenses for which he received three concurrent 1,000-year sentences in Florida. While these sentences came with the possibility of parole, the state’s Parole Commission calculated that his parole year was 2352. Franklin challenged this on the grounds that this timeline made his punishment indistinguishable from life without parole and that it was thus unconstitutional; the U.S. Supreme Court held in Graham v. Florida in 2010 that juveniles cannot serve life without parole for crimes other than homicide. But the Florida Supreme Court rejected Franklin’s petition in November, ruling that “because Franklin’s sentences include eligibility for parole there is no violation of the categorical rule announced in Graham.” “There is no indication that Franklin has even a chance of being released before the end of his natural life expectancy,” Justice Barbara Pariente wrote in dissent.

The details of the Vermont legislation are still missing because the bill was introduced in short form. But the stated intent of the bill is to bar “a sentence that, in effect, amounts to life without parole due to the length of the sentence and restriction on parole,” and to replace such punishments with a sentence of 25-to-life. State Representative Brian Cina, one of the bill’s sponsors, told me that he was open to negotiating how to define what “amounts to life without parole” with the House Committee on Judiciary, or with the state’s Sentencing Commission.

“The idea is that there should be an opportunity to be released while a person is still alive,” Cina said. “We want to leave the door open for hope and redemption.” He characterized the legislation in terms of restorative justice, an approach that aims to involve offenders, victims, and communities in a resolution process. “We want there to be some pathway and some consideration in sentencing for people to be able to redeem themselves and make amends for what they did, to restore their place in society and repair the harm they did,” he said.

Sarah George, the state’s attorney for Vermont’s largest county, Chittenden, retweeted a petition of support for HB 382. She did not reply to a subsequent request for comment on her views about the legislation.

“It’s terrific that the state is broadening life-sentence reforms to include those who will likely not outlive their sentence because of its length,” Ashley Nellis, senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project and co-author of the recent book “The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences,” told me of Vermont’s bill in an email.

But Nellis also encouraged Vermont to stay bold in rethinking excessively long sentences, especially as lawmakers works out the details of this legislation, and of resisting the introduction of carve-outs. “A progressive state like Vermont, which has relatively few lifers, could establish itself as a leader by limiting sentences to at most 20 years,” she said. Limiting incarceration to 20 years is the goal of the Campaign to End Life Imprisonment, which the Sentencing Project started in 2018.

German Lopez of Vox wrote an essay this month that makes the case for “capping all prison sentences at no more than 20 years.” He argued that “empirical research has consistently found that locking up people for very long periods of time does little to nothing to combat crime, and may actually lead to more crime as people spend more time in prison,” and also that “a cap will force us to think of prison as a place for rehabilitation.”
Reformers have already been successful this last decade in curtailing lifetime imprisonment for minors.

Following a series of Supreme Court rulings that constrained life without parole sentences for juveniles, states adopted a wave of further reforms. Today, 21 states plus D.C. allow no life without parole sentences for juveniles. Eighteen of them have abolished that sentence since 2012, according to a tracker of reforms that is maintained by the Juvenile Sentencing Project. (That said, because of disparate retroactivity and resentencing provisions, people are still serving life without parole sentences over offenses they committed as minors in some of these states.)
Will that movement progress further in 2019?

The Political Report knows of four states with still-active legislation in the current session to abolish life without parole sentences for offenses people commit before they are 18: Oklahoma (Senate Bill 112), Rhode Island (House Bill 5333), South Carolina (Senate Bill 47), and Tennessee (House Bill 876, Senate Bill 842). Some of these bills, like Tennessee’s, also expand parole eligibility for minors with lengthy sentences that come with a distant possibility of release.

Only Oklahoma’s version has moved forward a legislative step as of now, making it out of one House committee. (That said, similar bills have already been defeated in at least two states this year: Montana, where the House Judiciary committee tabled legislation on Feb. 19, and Arizona, where the deadline for a proposed bill to move out of committee expired last week with no action.)

As drafted, these bills differ as to how long someone sentenced for an offense they committed as a minor has to wait parole eligibility. For instance, Rhode Island’s would make people eligible for parole after 15 years, while South Carolina’s timeline is 20 to 30 years. Of course, when parole eligibility actually kicks in is a major factor in whether sentences are effectively curtailed, as is what that process actually looks like once it happens. “Parole boards are problematic in many places,” Nellis told me. “Boards that are overly politicized or considering cases in name only can set individuals back even though they are prepared for life on the outside.”

Dalton, of Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform, said that some of the same reasons to not impose life without parole sentences on minors apply to older individuals as well.

“The reality is that brain development continues well into your 20s,” he said, also citing research like that conducted by the Stanford Criminal Justice Center that found that the risk of recidivism among “recently released lifers” was “minimal.” Dalton argued that these factors make it unreasonable “to punish somebody for life, to take away their freedom for their entire life span when there may be significant circumstances that would indicate that they could be safely released.”

He added, “The question is, is there a point at which punishment has served every purpose that it can be reasonably expected to serve?”

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