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

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

Stackhouse was convicted and later incarcerated for 12 years. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belladonna lives in protective custody inside a men’s prison, a housing assignment for people at higher risk of victimization that separates her from the rest of the prison population. She calls the isolation excruciating. “[Protective custody] is so locked down that the world doesn’t know it’s actually a form of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts by email. She said the prison does little to help her deal with the devastating mental health effects of the isolation. When she does get recreation time, she says she spends it in tiny one-person enclosures that she says are known as “dog cages.”

Trans women in New Jersey prisons say they are routinely isolated for all but one or two hours a day, despite recent reforms to reduce solitary confinement in the state. Gia Abigaill Valentina, another trans woman inside NJSP, said she’s usually locked in her cell for almost the entire day and similarly is given little help coping with the near total isolation. “There is no programming for the transgender women here. The only counseling provided is routine mental health services, in which someone from mental health comes around every two weeks,” Valentina said in an email from the prison. “In this lock down unit I am made to stay in my cell for 23 hours a day. I am allowed out for kiosk and shower.”

The isolation that trans women endure inside New Jersey prisons demonstrates the limits of a landmark reform law that state lawmakers passed in 2019 to reduce solitary confinement. The law, the Isolated Confinement Restriction Act, hailed as the most progressive solitary reform at the time, put strict limits on “isolated confinement”, which it defined as holding someone in a cell for 20 or more hours each day with “severely restricted activity, movement and social interaction.” The law also prohibited isolation of vulnerable groups, including LGBTQ+ people, but still left corrections officials with broad discretion over when to use isolation, including for protective custody. While the law spells out specific guidelines related to vulnerable populations like pregnant or disabled prisoners or those under 21 and over 65 years old, there are none regarding those who are or perceived to be LGBTQ+.

When prison officials do use isolation, the law says it cannot go longer than 20 consecutive days or 30 days in a 60-day period. But Belladonna says she has been isolated since early February—roughly ten months, as of the date of publishing. 

Isolation of trans women in protective custody is just one of the ways solitary conditions persist in the New Jersey prison system despite the reforms. A recent investigation by HuffPost and the Inside/Out Journalism Project found that more than three years after the 2019 law was passed, the prison system’s main alternative to isolated confinement—so-called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), where incarcerated people are isolated as punishment for breaking prison rules—is largely solitary by another name and seems to defy the reforms. Days after that investigation was published, in early October, New Jersey’s Office of the Corrections Ombudsman, a state prison watchdog, published a report echoing those findings.  

“We found that on any given day, 700+ people are confined to a prison cell for 22-23 hours per day,” Terry Schuster, the New Jersey Corrections Ombudsperson, said in an email. “People spend months or years in these disciplinary tiers, called Restorative Housing Units (RHUs), and reached out to our office in large numbers to draw attention to the apparent violations of state law.” The office confirmed to Bolts that it has also received reports from transgender people about the extent of their isolation. 

A spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Corrections (NJDOC) did not respond to questions for this story, including how many transgender people are in isolation conditions inside the state’s prison system. 

Research has consistently shown that solitary confinement has disastrous consequences on mental and physical health. According to psychiatric experts, isolation can both exacerbate existing mental health issues and even cause the onset of mental illness. And according to a recent study, time in isolation can also increase someone’s risk of death in the first year after release from incarceration, namely from suicide, homicide and opioid overdose. 

There is also overwhelming research to indicate that LGBTQ+ people face egregious and disproportionate violence behind bars. More than half of respondents to a 2022 national survey by legal advocacy group Lambda Legal and prison abolitionist organization Black & Pink said they had been sexually harassed by jail or prison staff, while 1 in 6 said they had been sexually assaulted. A stunning 87 percent reported verbal assault. 

Alongside this pervasive abuse, trans people in prison often land in isolation. A recent report in The Nation detailed how trans people disproportionately face isolation in federal lockups, citing data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 2017 to 2022 that showed incarcerated trans people are typically two to three times more likely to be put in “restrictive housing” than cisgender people.

Valentina said she landed in isolation at NJSP after being transferred from the state’s only women’s prison, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, earlier this year after Governor Phil Murphy announced his plans to shutter it following years of scandals there. Her path out of isolation isn’t as simple as moving to a women’s prison, particularly in light of a policy NJDOC quietly enacted late last year that gives prison officials greater leeway to override trangender prisoners’ housing preferences. Under the new policy, prisoners have a “rebuttable presumption” that they are housed according to their wishes, but officials now can override that preference based on factors including “reproductive considerations.” 

The new policy was enacted months after another trans woman, Demi Grace-Minor, impregnated two women at Edna Mahan during what NJDOC officials said were consensual sexual relationships. A resulting media firestorm and transphobic criticism preceded the policy change, which now bars many trans women from easily obtaining housing that experts say could make them safer while behind bars.

The new housing policy could also put the New Jersey prison system at odds with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which tasks prison officials with giving serious weight to a trans person’s housing preferences; still, recent reporting shows that trans women are almost always housed in men’s facilities. PREA also requires housing to be decided on a case-by-case basis, which Valentina said isn’t happening for trans women in New Jersey prisons. 

Valentina alleges that under the new policy, prison officials won’t send trans women to women’s units until they get bottom surgery—referring to surgeries that often include an orchiectomy and vaginoplasty—to eliminate any “reproductive considerations.” Valentina, Belladonna, and other trans women have repeatedly said that they face agonizing, oftentimes bureaucratic, delays in actually obtaining these surgeries, leaving them trapped not just in men’s prisons but in continued isolation. Trans women in New Jersey prisons also allege that medical and mental health care are grossly lacking.

“I truly suffer every second of every day with not having my full surgery, although I feel so much better since my first gender affirming surgery,” Belladonna said. 

“I can honestly express with truth and sincerity that I have NEVER in my life encountered or felt such discrimination, hatred and transphobic opposition as I have experienced since coming out here in the NJDOC,” Valentina said. 

Some trans people have been pushed to extremes to alleviate their suffering. Belladonna has thrice mutilated herself, including trying to cut off her penis, and recently tried to remove her testicles, in order to relieve herself of the debilitating dysphoria she faces without gender affirming procedures. 

Belladonna said that even if she were to be offered less restrictive housing, she would still have to turn it down out of concern for her own safety—meaning she will likely stay isolated until she can move to a women’s prison. 

“I signed into protective custody because in a man’s prison PC is the safest place versus the prison’s ‘male population’ for someone as advanced in her transition as me,” she said. 

Like Belladonna, Valentina also detailed efforts to remove her penis herself amid delays in obtaining gender affirming care and a lack of adequate mental health care. 

And when weeks after Grace-Minor was sent back to Garden State Youth Correctional Facility after the pregnancies at Edna Mahan, she similarly tried to remove her testicles. At the time of the incident, Grace-Minor was housed in isolation and said she felt unsafe surrounded by men. Grace-Minor is now incarcerated in Northern State Prison in Newark. 

“It has been pure hell back here in solitary: lack of food, being sexually harassed and housed around men who flash their genitals and refer to me as ‘he-she bitch,’” Grace-Minor wrote on a public blog in September 2022. “I doubt that I will survive all of this.”

Surgeries aside, trans women in New Jersey prisons say they’ve also had to fight for months to get basic necessities like hair ties, proper underwear and even deodorant. Their complaints mirror allegations from a lawsuit filed against NJDOC in 2019. The plaintiff in that lawsuit alleged that corrections officers misgendered her, denied her female commissary items and failed to prevent harassment against her, all of which trans women say still happens in New Jersey prisons. 

That lawsuit, brought by the ACLU of New Jersey on behalf of an anonymous trans woman, ended with a settlement in June 2021 and a change in NJDOC’s housing policy to give trans prisoners a “presumption” that they would be housed in line with their gender identities, a policy it had to maintain for at least a year. Four months after that time period lapsed, NJDOC rolled back the policy to give prison officials greater discretion over housing assignments for trans people.

Amid the constellation of struggles these women face behind bars, they agree that moving to a women’s prison would make them feel safer, but that likely won’t happen until they obtain bottom surgery, which all of them are desperately waiting for. And until then, their isolation and the anguish that comes with it—compounded by their continuing dysphoria absent gender-affirming surgery—will continue.

Belladonna called her situation “agonizing,” writing in a recent email, “It is torture for me because I only have half of my bottom surgery and so I’m stuck in the room all day with this part that doesn’t belong to me.”

The post New Jersey Prisons Isolate Trans Women Even After Reforms to Reduce Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

The final result: Democrats won five additional legislative seats this year, Bolts calculated in its second annual review of all legislative elections. 

That’s a small change, since there were more than 600 seats in play this year. But it goes against the expectation that the party that holds the White House faces trouble in such races. In 2021, the first off-year with President Biden in the White House, the GOP gained 18 new seats out of the roughly 450 seats that were in play, according to Bolts’ calculations. (Three special elections will still be held in December, but none is expected to be competitive.)

It also mirrors Republicans’ disappointment in 2022, a midterm cycle that saw Democrats defy recent history by flipping four legislative chambers without losing any. They pulled off a similar feat this year: Democrats held off GOP hopes of securing new chambers in New Jersey and Virginia and instead gained one themselves in Virginia, the fifth legislative chamber they’ve flipped in two years.

Still, these aggregate results mask regional differences, with Democratic candidates continuing their descent in much of the South. That too is an echo of 2022, when the GOP’s poor night was somewhat masked by their surge in a few red states like West Virginia, where Democrats still haven’t hit rock bottom; this year, Republicans surged in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Districts are not all created equal, with vast differences in the populations they cover in different states; the seats Democrats gained correspond on average to twice as many residents than those Republicans gained. 

The results of the 2023 cycle have been dissected at length for any hints as to who will fare well in the far-higher profile races in 2024.

The encouraging case for the GOP, as laid out last week by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is that Republicans overperformed in Virginia compared to the last presidential race, even as they failed in their bid to win the legislature. But they also came close to suffering much greater losses in the state, the Center for Politics notes: Virginia’s seven tightest legislative elections this fall were all won by the GOP, all by less than two percentage points.

The encouraging case for Democrats is the national view: They’ve overperformed in special elections throughout the year—as documented by Daily Kos Elections, their nominee improved on President Biden by an average of 6 percentage points across 34 special elections—a measure that has had predictive value in the past. They also did very well this fall in Pennsylvania, the only presidential battleground that hosted a significant number of elections. 

But the results of the 2023 legislative races matter first and foremost for themselves—not for what they signal for other, future elections. Just as the Democratic gains last year in Michigan and Minnesota opened the floodgates to major progressive reforms in both states, the newly-decided composition of legislative chambers will shape power and policy within Virginia, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Below are four takeaways from the elections.

1. The GOP’s state goals flail, with one major exception

These legislative races, alongside three governor’s elections, decided who will control state governments over the next two years.

Democrats denied the GOP’s bids to grab control of Virginia and Kentucky by winning the House and Senate in the former, and the governorship in the latter. In addition, Republicans hoped to break Democrats’ trifecta in New Jersey, pointing to supposed voter backlash against liberal school policies and trans students to fuel talk that they may flip the Assembly or Senate; instead, they lost ground and now find themselves down a 24-seat hole in the lower chamber.

The GOP’s best results came in Louisiana, where the party flipped the governorship to grab the reins of the state government, a result that will likely open the floodgates of staunchly conservative policy. Republicans also retained their trifecta in Mississippi by holding onto the governor’s office.

2. Abortion mattered, again 

Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, tried to win the legislature for his party by selling his constituents on new abortion restrictions. His failure has been widely held up since Nov. 7 as the latest evidence of voter alarm about the bans that have multiplied since the Dobbs decision. But abortion also mattered in New Jersey’s campaigns this fall, with Democratic candidates arguing that their continued majority would protect abortion rights and funding.

The question, Rebecca Traister writes in NY Mag, is what Democrats do next after winning on the issue and what affirmative policies they adopt. Earlier this year, Democrats who run the Virginia Senate adopted a constitutional amendment to codify abortion rights; the measure died in the state House, which was run by the GOP but just flipped to Democrats. Scott Surovell, Senate Democrats’ incoming leader, confirmed this month that he plans to advance the amendment again now that his party controls the full legislature. 

Virginia Democrats can advance the amendment while circumventing Youngkin but it would be at least a three-year process. The legislature would need to adopt it in two separate sessions separated by an election to send it straight to voters—so they’d have to do it now, then defend their legislative majorities in the 2025 elections, then pass it again in 2026, and then win a referendum that fall. 

3. GOP attacks on crime fell flat, again

The GOP in both New Jersey and Virginia banked that it would make inroads by attacking Democratic lawmakers on crime, repeating a strategy that already did poorly in the 2022 midterms. Democrats won swing districts in both states in which Republicans assailed their opponents for endangering public safety.

Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, stresses that these elections took place in the wake of New Jersey adopting major criminal justice reforms, which the GOP tried and failed to turn against the party electorally. “New Jersey is the nation’s leading decarcerator, reducing state prison populations by more than 50 percent since 2011, and we’ve shown that decarceration is possible and crime rates across all major categories continue to decline,” he told Bolts. 

Still, he wishes the lawmakers who passed the reforms would have been bolder in defending them on the trail given recent evidence they’re not politically harmful. “The lesson for candidates running in 2024 and 2025 is that reforming unjust systems and promoting public safety are not at odds with one another.”

Since their wins on Nov. 7, Virginia Democrats have chosen two new legislative leaders with a history of supporting criminal justice reforms. Incoming Speaker Don Scott is an attorney who spent years in federal prison, a fact that GOP strategists have tried using against Democrats, and he has championed issues like ending solitary confinement. Surovell, Democrats’ new Majority Leader, was a force behind the criminal legal reforms Democrats passed while they controlled the state government in 2019 and 2020. He played the lead role within his party this year in calling out Youngkin’s administration for making it harder for people with felony convictions to vote, Bolts reported this spring.

4. Competition evaporates in Louisiana and Mississippi

Just six years ago, the GOP held 86 legislative seats in Louisiana (out of 144) and 106 in Mississippi (out of 174). After the 2023 elections, they’ll hold 101 in Louisiana and 115 in Mississippi, a surge born not just from election results in recent cycles but also party switches. 

Both legislatures are also disproportionately white, and both drew attention this year for targeting underrepresented Black communities. (Black voters in both states vote overwhelmingly Democratic.) 

Gerrymandering is contributing to these dynamics, even if white Republicans also dominate statewide races in both states. A coalition of civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against Mississippi’s current legislative maps for diluting the voting power of Black residents, saying that both House and Senate maps lacked enough Black opportunity seats; the lawsuit argues that the state should have drawn seven more Black-majority districts across Mississippi’s two chambers. In Louisiana, the legal battles have revolved around the congressional map, which a federal appeals court recently struck down for violating the Voting Rights Act; Democrats raised similar concerns about Louisiana’s legislative maps.

“When you gerrymander people’s power away, you can’t elect candidates of choice,” says Ashley Shelton, executive director of Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a Louisiana organization that focuses on voter outreach. “We understand the power of gerrymandering: It’s not that Black people don’t care or don’t want to vote, it’s that the power of their vote has been lessened.”

Gerrymandering this fall contributed to a startling dearth of competition: Not a single legislative race in either state was decided by less than 10 percentage points between candidates of different parties. (That’s out of 318 districts!)

In fact, many districts didn’t feature any contest at all. No Democrats were even on the ballot in the majority of districts in each of Louisiana and Mississippi’s four chambers, mathematically ensuring that the party couldn’t win majorities before any vote was cast. 

In Louisiana, some critics of the state Democratic establishment also faulted the party for neglecting to mount a proper campaign this fall. “I didn’t see any get out of the vote effort,” one progressive lawmaker told Bolts after the October primary, which saw the Democratic Party spend very little money. 

Shelton told Bolts last week that the state’s traditional establishment similarly didn’t work to turn voters out in the lead-up to Saturday’s runoffs, which featured statewide elections for attorney general and secretary of state as well as a scattering of legislative runoffs; she saw little noise and outreach outside of nonprofit groups like hers and their partners. 

“When I think about the political machines, there’s no money being spent to engage voters,” Shelton told Bolts. “We can certainly create the energy that we can, but there’s something to the bigger momentum and energy that comes from the machine actually working.” She added, “It’s very quiet in the state of Louisiana, and that’s crazy to me.” 

The post Democrats Held Off the GOP in Legislative Races This Year, Again Bucking Expectations appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kentucky: Democrats keep a foothold in a ruby red state

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia: Democrats grab full control of the legislature

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

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

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

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

Mississippi: Republicans hold off Democratic hopes for an upset

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

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

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

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

New Jersey: Democrats put 2021 behind them

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

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

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

And don’t forget about New Hampshire

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

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

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

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

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

In Mississippi, the GOP is defending its existing trifecta. 

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

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

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

Kentucky 

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

What’s on the ballot: The governorship

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

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

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

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

Louisiana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mississippi

Current status: Republican trifecta

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

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

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

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

New Jersey

Current status: Democratic trifecta

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: New Hampshire 

Current status: Republican trifecta

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced last month that he was nominating Michael Noriega, an immigration and criminal-defense lawyer, to the state’s supreme court. If confirmed by the Senate, as seems likely given the reception so far, Noriega would be the Democratic governor’s fourth appointment on the seven-member court. 

Noriega would also be the first former public defender to join the New Jersey Supreme Court in the state’s history.

Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, expects this milestone to enrich the court’s deliberations. 

“Having someone like Mike Noriega, who has been a public defender, has represented people with lesser means, and has represented immigrant New Jerseyans, will bring necessary perspectives to the court,” he told Bolts. “An increase in diversity on the bench–in terms of race, immigrant history, and professional experience–is powerful.”

In his speech, Murphy didn’t shy away from Noriega’s public defender background, highlighting this work as a key reason for selecting him. “Public defenders see firsthand how the law impacts ordinary people,” Murphy said. “More often than not, they represent individuals from our most marginalized communities in their greatest moment of need.”

“That is an obligation we hold sacred because in America every defendant is guaranteed legal representation regardless of their ability to pay. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, powerful or powerless,” he added. 

He also highlighted Noriega’s background as the child of Peruvian immigrants, praising his life as a “quintessentially Jersey story.” Noriega would be the court’s only Hispanic justice.

Murphy’s selection and words were signs of how quickly the ground is shifting for judicial nominations.

Judicial nominees nationwide and historically are far likelier to have built their career as prosecutors and in corporate law firms than representing indigent defendants. But progressives have called for more professional diversity on the bench and, with particular attention given to judges with experience in public defense and civil rights litigation. President Biden has responded by considerably expanding who makes it on the federal bench, getting more former public defenders confirmed to circuit courts in two years than President Barack Obama did in eight, let alone President Donald Trump. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s sole U.S. Supreme Court appointment, is a former public defender, as is Judge Arianna Freeman, the first judge he selected for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers New Jersey.

Most governors have not followed suit and public defenders are still largely missing from state supreme courts, as Bolts reported last year, but the tide is turning in some states. Governors in Oregon and Washington added public defenders to the bench, and progressives are pushing back elsewhere. New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul recently saw her judicial nominee Hector LaSalle, a former prosecutor, defeated in the Democratic-led Senate, in part over concerns about his record on criminal justice. Nonetheless, a majority of the members of New York’s highest court are former prosecutors and none have worked as a public defender.

Similarly, in New Jersey, three of the justices are former prosecutors. Noriega would break that streak.

Parimal Garg, the governor’s chief counsel, credits Biden’s work on the issue from before he even took office. Biden stressed to senators that he would be seeking to enhance demographic and professional diversity—including, specifically, public defenders—in his judicial nominations. 

“I think if you’re looking at a seven-member body, you really want a court that reflects the totality of the legal profession,” Garg told Bolts, referring to the New Jersey high court. “It’s a recognition of the fact that, if you spent a large part of your career as a public defender, you’re going to have a very different perspective on the criminal justice system than if you had spent the majority of your career as a prosecutor.”

The absence of experiential diversity, he added, can harm the court. Without it, “it becomes challenging for that court to come up with jurisprudence that really understands where everyone is coming from in terms of the different roles that people have to play.” 

Jennifer Sellitti, training director at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, used to work with Noriega in the Essex County defenders’ office and says she is happy for him personally. She is also glad to see that someone who worked in a public defender’s office may join the supreme court.

“The fact that that Mike Noriega has sat next to a person to whom he was appointed, to whom he had built a relationship of trust and understanding, and handled those kinds of cases before the court, it just gives him a window and a perspective that is something that, quite frankly, up until now our court had been lacking,” she told Bolts.

If confirmed, Noriega would take the seat of Barry Albin, who was seen as a leading liberal voice on the court until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2022. Albin worked as a prosecutor early in his career but also had substantial criminal-defense experience—though not public defender experience—before joining the court in 2002. Garg said that Murphy “thought that Mike [Noriega]’s experience and values really made him an ideal successor to Justice Albin.” Among other reasons, Albin had been president of the New Jersey Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Noriega was the association’s president-elect at the time of his nomination.

Albin told Bolts that someone with Noriega’s background will benefit the court. “I believe that Michael Noriega is going to give a different, unique viewpoint—from a person who has mostly specialized in immigration work and criminal defense work,” he said. 

“Experience makes a difference,” he added. “Currently on the state supreme court, there are three former assistant United States attorneys.” 

Albin said his own work as a criminal defense attorney and other aspects of his career were important to his tenure on the supreme court. “I found that to be very helpful in the discussions that we had on the court. I was able to provide knowledge that other members of the court did not possess. And that was true of other members of the court, who had specialized in other areas of the law, who were able to inform me and others from their perspective,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that other members of the court necessarily assent to whatever somebody else is saying, who may have specialized in a particular area of law, but it certainly informs deliberations on the court, makes discussions much more rich, and much more informative.”

In a rare study of the effects that former public defenders can have on the bench, two political scientists found last year that former public defenders are less likely to sentence people to long prison sentences. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued important decisions that helped relieve the prison population, though it has also taken a cautious approach to issues touching criminal justice.

Adding Noriega’s perspective could be important in future cases likely to come before the court, Sellitti, from the public defender’s office, said. 

“I’m really excited about having his voice on the court when it comes to Fourth Amendment issues, cases that involve discussions of race and systemic racism,” she told Bolts, before also mentioning cases that touch police accountability, discovery, and immigration detention.

In some ways, the New Jersey Supreme Court is an easier court than most to advance this changed perspective because the court itself already has, as an essential element of its organization, an appreciation for what Albin called “institutional balance.” 

“There is an unwritten rule in New Jersey that there has to be a political balance,” he said. “So there cannot be more than four members of one party on the court at any one time. And that has been respected by every governor” since New Jersey updated and modernized its state constitution in 1947. 

What that means in practice is that Murphy has already appointed one Republican to the bench, Justice Douglas Fasciale, and is likely to appoint a second when Justice Lee Solomon reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2024. Because of this system, virtually all of the lawyers Bolts talked with about the nomination said that New Jersey’s court and nominations tend to be less partisan than at the national level and in other states. 

Still, Murphy’s earlier nomination to the court stalled for a very long time. As his first nominee to the court in 2021, the governor chose Rachel Wainer Apter, a former advocate with the ACLU, but a Republican state senator from Apter’s home county blocked her confirmation for more than a year under a convention in the state Senate known as senatorial courtesy, Bolts and The New Jersey Monitor reported last year.

Apter was confirmed in October as part of a deal that also involved the confirmation of Fasciale. 

Noriega is unlikely to face similar delays. He has the support from all of his home-county senators, including Republican Jon Bramnick, who is Noriega’s law partner. 

The governor’s office says it hopes for quick consideration of Noriega’s nomination in coming weeks, and Garg is looking forward to Noriega’s voice—and experience—being added to the court. 

“All of them bring something very different to the table,” he said, “and we think that’s really important.”

The post New Jersey Is Poised for Its First Ever Public Defender Justice appeared first on Bolts.

An unwritten rule that gives state senators virtual veto powers over gubernatorial nominees has stalled the confirmation for months or longer of top state officials nominated by Democratic Governor Phil Murphy.

Tahesha Way was renominated as secretary of state in January but lawmakers have not considered her nomination yet. There’s been no movement on acting Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan’s nomination since October 2020. Murphy’s choice for attorney general, Matt Platkin, appears headed for a similar fate.

And Rachel Wainer Apter, a former advocate with the ACLU who is Murphy’s pick for the New Jersey Supreme Court, has awaited a hearing for more than a year. And unlike non-judicial appointees, Wainer Apter cannot be seated unless her nomination goes before the full Senate. A supreme court decision against expanding the rights of defendants last month may have gone the other way had she been on the court.

Each of these nominations has run into an immovable roadblock: senatorial courtesy. The rule, which appears nowhere in New Jersey’s constitution, state law, or legislative rules, allows upper-chamber lawmakers to indefinitely block nominees from their home counties or who live in their districts. Senators don’t have to give a reason—and they often don’t.

“No governor likes senatorial courtesy, and every senator loves it,” then-Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, said in 2011.

In the cases of Way, Allen-McMillan, and Wainer Apter, two Republican senators have blocked the appointments despite Democrats’ majority in the chamber. A Democrat is behind the delay on Platkin’s nomination.

The practice is similar to one in the U.S. Senate, where court nominees can be blocked if either of their home state senators does not return what’s known as a “blue slip,” a piece of paper indicating the senator supports the nominee. Most recently, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin used the “blue slip” tradition to block the appointment of a federal judge in his state.

In Congress, the tradition has grown into a source of controversy. Republican leaders disregarded some absent slips by Democratic senators during the Trump administration, and now some Democrats who associate it with counter-majoritarian mechanisms like the filibuster that most of their party has come to oppose are demanding that it be done away with.

Those demands are largely not present in New Jersey. And despite national Democrats’ anger toward Republican refusal to move forward on former President Barack Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, there is no parallel firestorm in New Jersey over a Republican senator forcing a vacancy on the state Supreme Court.

New Jersey’s unwritten rule exists at the pleasure of the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and, ultimately, the Senate president, both of whom are Democrats. Lawmakers could approve legislation or rules changes to bar the practice.

Nicholas Scutari, the chamber’s Democratic president and the former longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, declined to comment through a spokesperson.

New Jersey governors have expressed mixed feelings about senatorial courtesy. Murphy has said he supports it. Christie didn’t nominate judges in Essex County as punishment for two of the county’s senators invoking senatorial courtesy for one of his nominees. Brendan Byrne in 2004 criticized its “abusive use.” And Tom Kean Sr. cautioned the practice empowers interest groups to stall the appointments of regulators and enables “government by corruption.”

Though officials and advocates occasionally rail against individual senators who have invoked courtesy to block a nomination, there is no formal campaign to do away with the practice.

Even groups like the New Jersey State Bar Association, which decades ago backed a constitutional amendment that would have required the Senate to vote on gubernatorial nominations within 90 days, have backed away from advocating against senatorial courtesy.

“For the most part, the system’s worked,” said Domenick Carmagnola, president of the State Bar Association. “I’m not a big believer, and the state bar’s not a big believer, in ‘let’s look at a major overhaul because of an exceptional circumstance if, for the most part, it’s worked.'”

He added any effort to do away with courtesy would likely fail to gain traction in the Legislature.

Courtesy is the greatest source of individual power for most of New Jersey’s senators. Legislators have—and continue to—use courtesy as a bargaining chip to win nominations for political allies, legislative concessions, or funds for pet projects. The late Senator Anthony Bucco used it in 2004 to force a meeting between himself and the state’s environmental protection commissioner.

Republican Senators Kristin Corrado, who represents Passaic County and has courtesy over the nominations of Allen-McMillan and Way, and Holly Schepis, who represents Bergen County has so far blocked Wainer Apter’s confirmation, did not return calls seeking comment.

Schepisi has previously said she was withholding courtesy to ensure New Jersey’s high court maintains its tradition of partisan balance.

The delay in confirming Wainer Apter has created a vacant seat on New Jersey’s high court, which now has just six members instead of its usual seven.

Chief Justice Stuart Rabner appointed Judge Jose Fuentes on a temporary basis in December to fill the seat that Murphy named Wainer Apter for. But after Justice Faustino Fernandez-Vina stepped down upon hitting the mandatory retirement age of 70 in February, Rabner said he will not make an interim appointment for Fernandez-Vina’s seat because the next judge in line for the appointment is a Democrat whose elevation would disturb the court’s partisan balance. (The Murphy administration is not naming someone to fill this new vacancy until Wainer Apter’s nomination is heard by the Senate.)

So far, the vacancy has only led to one Supreme Court ruling that might have gone a different way if the court had seven judges. In a 3-2 decision from March, justices reversed a lower court ruling that would have expanded Miranda rights for people accused of crimes. Two of the court’s three Democratic-appointed justices dissented, warning that the decision will “erode faith in our criminal justice system.”

If Wainer Apter had taken part in this case and sided with the two dissenters, the resulting tie would have left the lower court’s ruling in place.

In Platkin’s case, Democratic Senator Dick Codey has invoked courtesy. Codey declined to say why.

When asked about it last week, Codey said, “Next question.”

For officials who are appointed to executive positions like Way and Allen-McMillan, a delayed confirmation by the Senate changes little. Holding the position in an acting capacity puts no limits on their authority. But for people appointed to judgeships, state boards, and similar bodies, senatorial courtesy is consequential since they must be confirmed to take their posts.

Stalled nominees for New Jersey posts with lax residency requirements can also skirt the rule by moving to a different county or legislative district, though the sprawling nature of some legislative districts means some would have to move far. Corrado, for example, has courtesy over all of her home county of Passaic and 12 towns in Bergen, Morris, and Essex counties.

Before New Jersey adopted its 40-district legislative map in 1966, legislators only had courtesy over nominees from their home counties.

There are other ways for senators to delay or kill nominations.

The Senate president and the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee—Democratic Senator Brian Stack is the panel’s current chairman—can withhold a committee hearing or floor vote.

Former Senate President Steve Sweeney kept the nomination of New Jersey State Police Superintendent Pat Callahan in limbo for more than two years with no invocation of courtesy (Callahan lives in Warren County, Sweeney in Gloucester). The Senate unanimously confirmed Callahan in December, after Sweeney lost re-election and shortly before Scutari replaced him as the Senate president.

Murphy, who stands to gain the most from the rule’s removal, isn’t pressing for courtesy reforms. A spokesperson for the governor declined to comment on the rule’s continued existence, deferring to comments the governor made last May.

“I have to say my bias, just being asked it for the first time, is it’s a rightful element of a balance of power, even where it may frustrate you one day or another,” Murphy said at the time. “At the end of the day, I think the notion of having the equal branches of government exercising their rights is, I think, a good thing.”

The post The Unwritten Senate Rule Blocking New Jersey Governor’s Nominees appeared first on Bolts.

Two years ago, faced with local anger over immigration detentions, Hudson County’s Democratic leaders promised a “path to exit” their contract with ICE by the end of 2020. ICE has long been paying this New Jersey county to supply it with jail space to detain people. But by 2018, the firestorm that President Trump’s family separation policies caused had made it difficult for county officials to stand by the agency.

It took less than a month after Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden for Hudson County officials to change course and reaffirm their detention contract with ICE. The move is raising alarm among advocates that the presidential election will stretch what Democratic politicians think they can get away with, giving them cover to maintain relationships with ICE unless the public keeps up the pressure.

Hudson County’s board of freeholders—New Jersey’s term for a county commission—rushed a vote just days before Thanksgiving to extend the detention contract for another 10 years. The heated meeting featured more than 10 hours of public comment during which every participant urged freeholders to break off the arrangement and stop holding immigrants at the Hudson County Correctional Facility. Earlier this year, immigrants in the jail went on hunger strike to protest dismal conditions and a lack of protections from the novel coronavirus. Advocates have long faulted medical neglect and other inhumane conditions in this jail. 

“These contracts have been enabling the cruelty of ICE for years now,” said Amol Sinha, head of the ACLU of New Jersey. “The whole structure of immigration detention is awful to begin with. We are detaining people solely because they are suspected to be undocumented.”

Some county officials openly cited financial motivations: Hudson County receives $120 a day for each immigrant they detain, and one spokesperson said ending immigration detentions would hurt the budgetary “bottom line.” But local officials also used Trump’s loss and the change in federal leadership as a cover. On the eve of the presidential election, County Executive Tom DeGise already said that, should Biden win, “we’ll have somebody that we can talk to” when it comes to immigration detentions. 

“One of the excuses is that Biden will come in and solve our issues with detentions,” Tania Mattos, an advocate with Freedom for Immigrants who has worked to end the county’s contract, told The Appeal: Political Report. “[The election] gave a pass for the freeholders to make this decision because now they can put the responsibility of the detention centers on the Biden administration.”

“That’s wrong, in my opinion,” she added. “It’s not time to go back to sleep. We have to keep pushing.”

Katy Sastre of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice echoed Mattos’s warning. “What ICE represents,” she said, “doesn’t change because there’s a Democrat in office. They represent family separation, and this contract with ICE [in Hudson County] brings family separation right into our own backyard.” 

Trump’s presidency heightened the cruelties of immigration enforcement. But his unpopularity also boosted immigrants’ rights organizing and brought unprecedented attention to municipal and county governments’ long-overlooked complicity with ICE. Powerful local officials who had flown under the radar have been ousted in part over their collaboration with Trump’s immigration regime. 

From Minnesota, Maryland, and North Carolina in 2018 to Georgia, Ohio, and South Carolina this year, voters replaced sheriffs and county executives who were helping ICE with candidates who pledged to break contracts and establish protective policies. These elections were fought not just over lucrative detention contracts like Hudson County’s, but also over other deals that empower local law enforcement to arrest people they suspect to be undocumented.

Will this dynamic fizzle once Trump is out of office and the agency is overseen by a Democrat?

In conversations over the last week, immigrants’ rights advocates expressed relief that the president lost and hope that Biden will curtail some of ICE’s most aggressive practices. But they also expressed concern that it may become more difficult to hold local officials accountable for cooperating with ICE, even in the nation’s more liberal jurisdictions. Democratic officials could say that the agency they’re helping is not so bad anymore, as they did in Hudson County, and the issue of complicity with ICE could lose some of the electoral salience it acquired at the height of resistance to Trump.

“There’s no question that it is going to be harder,” Sophia Gurulé, an immigration attorney who spoke about abusive detention conditions during the freeholders’ meeting, told the Political Report. “But this is when the real grassroots organizing work is the most important. Just like people were arguing under Trump, ‘We need to end ICE detention, point blank period, there is no real justification to detain a human being for violating immigration law,’ the same argument is going to persist. And it has to keep being that same argument.”

Biden has promised a slew of reforms, including a temporary freeze on deportations, a reactivation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and a narrowing of ICE’s targets that may chip away at immigration detentions. 

But there are no signs that he will shut down the data streams from local agencies to ICE that help federal agents identify people who they believe to be undocumented, nor that under his leadership ICE will stop detaining people on immigration grounds. And during the Democratic primaries, some activists were wary that Biden might carry on with an approach similar to that of President Barack Obama, whose administration oversaw deportations of 3 million people.

Sastre said this week that Democratic politicians should “remember that defending a system of immigration enforcement and detention that disproportionately impacts certain communities, that is Black and brown communities, upholds ideas that voters around the country, and specifically in New Jersey, roundly rejected.”

During the Hudson County meeting, some freeholders who favored the contract argued that renewing it is in immigrants’ best interest since ICE may otherwise detain them farther away from their families and from the legal help available in New York City. Their point echoed a statement made in 2018 by legal aid groups, though these groups did not stake that same position this year. Advocates have said that public officials’ use of this argument is belied by the sorry state of detention conditions in these jails and by their financial considerations.

“I don’t have faith that the people that are making these decisions have the best interests of immigrants in mind,” Sinha said, “because even some of the county executive staff said … that they needed the money to fill the budget gap. And I think that’s one of the worst, if not the most perverse reason to detain somebody. It’s immoral and unethical to say the least.”

This week, New Jersey’s Democratic U.S. Senators, Cory Booker and Robert Menendez, called on Hudson County and its two neighboring Democrat-run counties with similar immigration detention contracts (Bergen and Essex) to break off the arrangements. Menendez, himself a former local official in Hudson County, said in a statement that these deals were a way of “taking blood money from ICE.”

These same conversations are resonating far beyond New Jersey. 

Angela Chan, the policy director for the Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus in California, helped draft the sanctuary law that California adopted in 2017, mandating that counties break their contracts with ICE. (Illinois and New Jersey adopted laws or executive measures similar to California’s, though these protections stalled in many other states.) Chan now urges people to stay vigilant about ICE’s actions, and about the relationships between their local governments and the federal agency. 

“Local and state law enforcement are the primary way community members are funneled into ICE’s inhumane immigration detention facilities and deported not just under Trump, but also Obama and likely under President-elect Biden,” she said. “In order to reduce deportations, protect due process, and keep immigrant families together, local and state law enforcement must be completely disentangled from ICE.”

Concerns aside, many of these same advocates are also hopeful that the mobilization against local cooperation with ICE will maintain momentum and pay off during Biden’s presidency.

After all, this activism far predates 2016, even if it gained new recruits during Trump’s term. Chan stressed that, even though California’s sanctuary law passed in 2017 in part because elected officials were motivated by Trump’s overt xenophobia, the state had adopted other reforms to protect immigrants earlier in the decade in response to “President Obama’s record number of deportations and the fact that ICE is a rogue agency that has committed human rights violations.” 

Going forward, Chan said, “there will continue to be community outrage and organizing.”

Gurulé is also cautiously optimistic that people will not forget what they saw in recent years. “The Trump administration … has really exposed just the total callousness and lack of humanity that ICE has for human life,” she said. “How do you scale back from that to be like, ‘Oh, well, this detention is better, or this detention isn’t so bad’? You can’t really.” 

Even over the last few years, resistance to Trump was far from the only catalyst for immigration organizing. The Black Lives Matter movement helped expose the abuses that people, including immigrants, suffer at the hands of law enforcement around the country. This strand of activism exploded in the public consciousness under Obama. And BLM protests have frequently aimed demands directly toward municipal officials in big cities who are often Democrats. The resonance of this movement, which has worked alongside immigrants’ rights organizers, should easily outlast the Trump era.

Still, to stave off any complacency that some may feel as Biden takes charge, Mattos says she would remind people that “our ultimate ask, even under Trump, even under Obama, was to end detention centers and to end the suffering and torture of people.” 

Until that’s accomplished, she added, “I would invite them to join the organizing that’s happening.”

The post As Trump Departs, Some Democrats May Seek Cover to Maintain Ties with ICE appeared first on Bolts.

On Nov. 3, voters in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota approved ballot initiatives to legalize cannabis for recreational use.

“Americans across the country have embraced the idea that marijuana legalization is the policy decision that best serves the interests of public health, public safety, and, most importantly, justice,” said Matthew Schweich, deputy director of the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocated for the measures.

The results are a clean sweep for marijuana legalization, and a dramatic acceleration for a movement whose first wins came in Colorado and Washington in 2012. Many other states have since followed suit. 

With Tuesday’s four successes, there are now 15 states, alongside Washington, D.C., that have opted to legalize the recreational possession and sale of marijuana.

In addition, voters in Mississippi and South Dakota approved initiatives that enable the use of marijuana for therapeutic purposes; voters in Oregon legalized psilocybin therapy and decriminalized drugs; and partial returns showed voters in Washington, D.C. opting to largely decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, though that result is not yet final.

Marijuana legalization will make for a stark change in Arizona because the state has had harsh marijuana laws. Possession of even a small amount of cannabis is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Since incarceration can become a barrier to employment, education, housing, and even the right to vote, one marijuana conviction can upend people’s lives—especially people from marginalized communities.

Arizona’s Proposition 207 will now set up a system of marijuana sales in the state.

With legalization, Arizona, alongside Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota, will have an opportunity to reverse the effects of the war on drugs on marginalized communities. 

And advocates say that racial justice should be central to legalization efforts.

“People of color are arrested at far higher rates for marijuana possession than white people,” Jared Moffat, campaigns coordinator at the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Appeal: Political Report in October, “and that’s not due to any difference in usage. That’s just due to a racist policy.”

In South Dakota, for instance, Black people are five times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession.

But when it comes to making amends for racial injustice, this year’s four legalization measures vary. 

Only Arizona’s initiative includes provisions to ensure that communities harmed by drug criminalization benefit financially from legalized cannabis.

It allows people with past cannabis convictions to apply to have their records expunged. Everyone who applies would be presumed qualified unless proved otherwise, according to Stacy Pearson, a spokesperson for Smart and Safe Arizona, the campaign promoting Proposition 207. 

Its cannabis initiative would place a 16 percent tax on marijuana sales, which would fund social services as well as a social equity ownership program to help those with past marijuana convictions get licenses to produce and sell their own cannabis.

But the majority of early priority licenses for recreational cannabis would go to existing medical dispensaries. Only 26 out of 160 licenses would be reserved for social equity applicants and rural counties without a dispensary, according to Pearson.

Advocates have pointed out similar shortcomings in other states. Illinois is considered to have the most robust social equity program, but people who qualify still struggle to secure enough capital to start a business. 

New Jersey’s initiative doesn’t specify regulations beyond tax limits. Now that it has passed, other details will need to be worked out by the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission. Advocates plan to push for social equity provisions in that process. 

Provisions that are specifically meant to advance social equity are also absent from the initiatives in Montana and South Dakota.

In recent years, other states have legalized marijuana without provisions to repair the harms of criminalization, but later made reforms to address that issue. Michigan voters approved an initiative to legalize marijuana in 2018, and in October of this year the state adopted a law that enables the expungement of past convictions.

This article is adapted from an October story previewing these four referendums. Daniel Nichanian updated it with the incoming results.

The post Four States Just Legalized Marijuana appeared first on Bolts.

In December, Kentucky advocates began hosting in-person meetings and going door-to-door, informing people with felony convictions that they might now be eligible to vote due to an order by Governor Andy Beshear that restored the right to vote to about 140,000 residents. 

But when COVID-19 hit, said Debbie Graner, “everything went to hell in a handbasket.” 

As a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC), a nonprofit group that advocates for voting rights, Graner had pushed the state to expand the right to vote for years. She was disenfranchised herself and promptly registered to vote after Beshear’s order. 

But plenty of other Kentuckians with felony convictions, she said, don’t know that they are now eligible, and they may not have heard of the executive order. They will be harder to reach now that social distancing rules have stalled in-person organizing efforts.

Across the country, the pandemic has posed serious challenges to the campaigns that voting rights groups had planned to reach new voters and help them register. Registration drives usually consist of in-person events and public interactions. Advocates are now doing their best to reach people largely through phone calls, texts, and social media, though these methods pale next to the task at hand when it comes to assisting those whose rights have recently been restored.

Since the 2018 midterms, the last national election, six states—Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, and New Jersey—have expanded the right to vote and restricted the disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions. They did so to varying degrees: some enfranchised people who have completed their sentence, while others enfranchised people who are on parole or on probation. Collectively, they restored the voting rights of more than 1.8 million people.

But the sort of outreach that is now sidelined is crucial to ensuring that these newly enfranchised individuals register to vote, advocates stressed, often emphasizing that the state has not done nearly enough to help. People who have interacted with the criminal legal system are less likely than others to register. In some of these states—especially Kentucky, Louisiana, and Florida—this is compounded by the additional hurdles that the newly enfranchised must overcome in order to register. These include figuring out if they are even eligible to vote amid insufficient state information and taking extra steps to register. Now more than ever, these government-imposed burdens are threatening to keep people from exercising their right to vote in a key election year.

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Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey each adopted a simple rule in 2019: “If you’re not incarcerated, you can vote,” as Henal Patel, director of the Democracy and Justice program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice put it. Their new laws enfranchised people who are on parole and on probation, along with anyone who is done with a sentence. As a result, there are now 18 states where anyone who is not in prison can vote; that includes Maine and Vermont, which enable incarcerated people to vote as well.

This makes eligibility a straightforward matter. Having such a “clean law,” Patel stressed, makes a huge difference for voter registration. 

These three states also take on active roles in registering people to vote. Each has a system to automatically register eligible people when they come in contact with particular state agencies, usually a Department of Motor Vehicles. 

That said, none of these states’ new laws mandated that agencies automatically register those whom they newly enfranchised, nor that they give them registration forms when they come in contact with parole or probation officials. 

Advocates with the NJISJ and the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition said state officials are working with them to set up mechanisms to inform newly enfranchised people, for instance by distributing informational material upon contact with parole and probation offices. 

They have also launched efforts to maximize the impact of the new rules and to inform people that they may have newly gained the right to vote. The NJISJ had planned events on March 17 in three cities, hoping to draw hundreds or even thousands of people to register. 

But then the pandemic hit and the events were canceled.

Instead, Ronald Pierce, a fellow at NJISJ who has been on parole and who regained the franchise for the first time since 1985, and Antonne Henshaw, another state advocate, signed registration forms during a live streamed event in Newark. “I am now back as a part of the community,” Pierce later told the Political Report.

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In Florida, Kentucky, and Louisiana, by contrast, residents with felony convictions still face much more complicated rules to figure out their eligibility. Even with the new reforms, these states are continuing to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people who are not incarcerated—many of whom have completed their sentence—relying on often-complex legal distinctions as to who can vote and who cannot. 

These distinctions—including type of conviction, length of time since incarceration, financial obligations, and other factors—make it far more difficult for prospective voters to know if they are eligible and for nonprofit groups to help them register.

Public authorities, for the most part, are not helping inform or register their newly enfranchised residents. 

Advocates across several states told the Political Report that this situation has a chilling effect. People don’t want to risk voting when ineligible—even if unintentionally—and being punished for it. 

In Kentucky, for instance, Beshear’s order enfranchised people who have completed sentences for a felony defined as nonviolent. But as in many states, it’s not always clear to the public, including those with convictions, what counts as “violent.” The state is doing little to help sort out this confusion and actively inform people that they are eligible, Graner and others at KFTC said, beyond setting up a website where people can enter their name to check if they are now able to vote. 

Blair Bowie, who leads the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center’s Restore Your Vote campaign across several states, including Kentucky, said, “there’s a lot that the state can and should be doing [in Kentucky and elsewhere] to help overcome the persistent notion that you can never vote again after a felony—which is really seared into the public zeitgeist.” Kentucky’s tool for people to figure out if they are eligible to vote compares favorably with those of states like Alabama and Tennessee, which have made it difficult for people to even get such information, Bowie added, but Kentucky could be reaching out more proactively. She said the Restore Your Vote campaign is now placing targeted ads on social media and partnering with local advocacy groups to use texting to individually help people register.

Louisiana has entertained uncertainty as well, according to organizers with the Louisiana-based nonprofit Voters Organized to Educate as well as its sister organization, the criminal justice advocacy group Voice of the Experienced.

The state’s new law allows people on parole and probation to vote if they haven’t been incarcerated for at least five years. (All Louisianans with a completed sentence could already vote.) In the run-up to its implementation in 2019, the law proved to be confusing to the very politicians who passed it: Some had not realized that many people on probation were never incarcerated and had their rights restored with no waiting period.

Last year, Louisiana’s secretary of state said that he expected third party groups, rather than the government, to spread the word about these new rules. 

“How are they going to put that on formerly incarcerated people and on advocates to make sure that all 35,000 people know that they have the right to vote?” asked Checo Yancy, policy director of Voters Organized to Educate, referring to the number of people directly enfranchised by the law. “We don’t have the resources to do that.” 

Asked for comment on its outreach plans, the secretary of state’s office pointed to a statute requiring that correctional officials inform people of the procedures to regain their rights and give them a voter registration form upon their release from prison. Many people have to wait for years after their release, though, and this mandate would not inform those who were already on probation and parole when the law passed.

Last year, Voice of the Experienced began going to parole and probation offices to find newly enfranchised people and inform them of their newfound eligibility. But the pandemic shut down those offices, which has made it more difficult for the organization to reach people and help them register. 

Most of the organization’s outreach is now virtual, said Bruce Reilly, its deputy director, and there are challenges to reaching people with limited access to the internet. 

Florida advocates have faced similar obstacles, and The Appeal reported in March that state residents have been afraid of registering to vote. The Florida Department of State “sat on its hands for a year” instead of helping inform people, said Jonathan Topaz, a fellow at the ACLU’s Voting Rights project, and “we know as a matter of fact that many people have been chilled from voting in elections that they may well have been eligible to vote in.” The secretaries of state offices in Florida and Kentucky did not answer requests for comment. 

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Beyond insufficient state outreach, prospective voters in Florida and Louisiana must overcome state-imposed administrative and financial burdens, which is harder now due to the pandemic.

In Louisiana, newly enfranchised residents who wish to register to vote must obtain a form from the office of probation or parole attesting that they are eligible, and then bring it to their parish registrar’s office in person, unless they are “disabled and homebound.”

This was already a prohibitive burden. But during COVID-19, these steps have become even more difficult and hazardous for the health of would-be voters. The registrar’s office in Orleans Parish told the Political Report on the phone this week that, even now, during the pandemic, it was requiring residents to bring the form in person and was not offering expanded mail, email, or fax alternatives. 

The biggest threat to the promise of expanded enfranchisement this year may be the burden that Florida put into place in 2019. In 2018, state voters overwhelmingly adopted Amendment 4, a ballot initiative championed by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) and other groups that restored the voting rights of Floridians who complete their sentence for most felony convictions. But the following year, the state’s Republican legislature adopted a new law that required people to pay off the financial obligations related to their conviction before they could register. Civil rights groups sued, arguing that the law amounted to an unconstitutional “poll tax” because it tied the franchise to one’s wealth. 

They won a major victory on Sunday. A federal judge, Robert Hinkle, struck down the requirement that people pay off court fees before registering to vote, and ruled that people who owe fines can still register if they genuinely cannot afford payment. The ruling once again restores voting rights to hundreds of thousands, though the governor has said he will appeal. 

Hinkle stressed in his ruling that Florida did not even have a system to tell people whether they owed financial obligations. 

Andrew Warren, state attorney of Hillsborough County, warned that Hinkle’s ruling is complex enough that outreach is as essential as ever. It “crystallized some of the constitutional issues,” he said, but “anytime you have legal battles about what peoples’ rights are, it requires some healthy communication and education for people to understand.” 

Third-party groups such as the FRRC are helping people work through this informational minefield, but the pandemic has slowed contact.

It has also slowed down separate efforts by Democratic-leaning counties, including Hillsborough County, to ensure that people with financial obligations can register. Warren’s office, for instance, partnered with other county officials and the FRRC to set up a new process in which people go before a judge to show their inability to pay fines and fees in so-called “rocket dockets” that could waive some of these financial obligations. 

Warren told the Political Report they had planned to begin the court process in early March, but that COVID-19 delayed it for months. The first hearing, with 19 people, is now planned for next week. 

The pandemic “just slowed down everything,” Warren said, particularly since many of the people who will benefit did not have online video conferencing access. (The first hearing will be in person.) He added that his office will stay the course it had planned prior to Hinkle’s ruling. “We want to protect against the possibility that the system that the judge set up is struck down or changed or challenged in any way,” he said.

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Part of the challenge of registering people during the pandemic is that job losses, housing insecurity, and illness are taking a huge toll on people. “People are trying to stay alive right now,” Yancy said. “Voting is probably in the back of their mind.“ 

In Florida, the FRRC was collecting money to pay off people’s court debt. It had raised enough funds to register about 1,000 people, Desmond Meade, executive director of the FRRC, told the Political Report, and is continuing to pay off their debts. It is now also focused on donating thousands of protective face masks to local jails, among other places.

Incarcerated people throughout the country are often denied basic protective gear, and they are getting sick and dying at exceptionally high rates.

New Jersey has the highest rate of death from COVID-19 among incarcerated people, at 42 people as of mid-May. 

Pierce of the NJISJ said this has made him more committed than ever to push for change. He argues that the dire conditions in state prisons is, in part, a consequence of denying incarcerated people the right to vote. 

The NJISJ has pushed New Jersey to be bolder than its 2019 law and join Maine and Vermont in also enfranchising incarcerated people. “I don’t believe that the most fundamental right, the right to protect all other rights, should be denied to people just because they’re incarcerated,” Pierce said.

Meade also thinks that public officials’ failure to protect their constituents makes accountability more important than ever. “I believe that COVID-19 has presented a great opportunity to really highlight the importance of voting, especially with newly registered returning citizens,” he said. “And we encourage them to really pay close attention to how elected officials are responding to this COVID-19 crisis.” 

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