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.

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

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

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

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

Kentucky | Secretary of state

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

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

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

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

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

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

Maine | Question 8

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

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

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

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

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

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

Mississippi | Secretary of state

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

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

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

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

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

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

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

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

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

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

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

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

Virginia | Legislative control

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

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

Washington | King County director of elections

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

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

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

In the summer of 2019, Scott Jenkins was hunting for cash to fuel his reelection campaign for sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, when he texted one of his supporters asking for help. Jenkins, a Republican who hewed hard to the MAGA wing of his party after the rise of Donald Trump, said he was starting to build his “war chest” and needed donations to start rolling in soon. In a text to a supporter identified only as “Individual 1” in federal court records, the sheriff wrote, “Looks like my opponent is hooking up with Democrats to run an attack campaign soon so we’re starting to spend. Let me know if you have luck with anyone.” 

The sheriff’s fixer texted back with an update the following month, “I think I got a big fish for you.” The catch, according to court records, was a businessman who lived three counties away named Rick Rahim, whom the text warned had “a little baggage”—namely, previous criminal convictions that prevented him from legally owning firearms. Rahim, the text said, wanted Jenkins’ help to get his gun rights back and also for the sheriff to make him an “auxiliary deputy”—volunteer officers who perform many of the same duties as paid deputies, and in return receive sheriff-issued firearms, body armor, cards declaring them law enforcement officers and even a badge that says “deputy sheriff.” 

Federal prosecutors say that Jenkins helped Rahim petition to get his gun rights back and made him an auxiliary deputy in exchange for $6,000 cash and a $17,500 loan. The allegations were part of a 38-page indictment the feds filed against Jenkins this summer, charging the sheriff with accepting more than $70,000 in cash and campaign contributions since 2019 in exchange for making people auxiliary deputies and helping them access guns. In the case of Rahim, who was also charged in the case as well as two other Virginia men, prosecutors allege that Jenkins pressured a local judge to restore his right to firearms and even arranged for the businessman to lease a rural property where the sheriff held fundraisers to make it look like he resided in the county.

Jenkins, who didn’t respond to requests for an interview, is still running in the Nov. 7 election despite facing over a dozen felony counts, including bribery and mail and wire fraud. The U.S. Department of Justice seized $10,000 of his campaign funds, which was nearly all he had, according to campaign finance reports. 

Despite calling himself a Republican, Jenkins is technically running as an independent. The local Republican Committee has endorsed one of his opponents, Joseph Watson, a longtime local police officer who was a captain at the sheriff’s office before Jenkins took over; Jenkins didn’t seek the local GOP endorsement this year. Tim Chilton, Jenkins’ other opponent, is another longtime local cop who is running as an independent and has promised to equip all deputies with body cameras and implement policies that he says would modernize the office. Neither Watson or Chilton responded to requests for an interview. 

Jenkins seems undeterred despite the looming criminal case against him, which is set to go to trial in May 2024, well after the election. His lawyers started a GoFundMe page to pay for his legal expenses, with donors including Michael Flynn, the disgraced former Trump national security advisor who maintains that the sheriff has been “completely railroaded.” 

At a candidate forum put on by the Culpeper Chamber of Commerce in early October, Jenkins stressed his ties to Trump in a county that overwhelmingly voted for him in 2020, while also highlighting his involvement with hard-right sheriffs groups and anti-immigrant advocates at the national level. 

“I’m well known as a Republican member since the mid 1990s. I ran independent in my early campaigns, and last time, four years ago, I became your Republican sheriff here in Culpeper, and you know where I stand with that committee locally and what I’ve done on the national scale,” Jenkins said. “I am your Republican sheriff until December. I ran independent in the past and I’m running that way now.” 

First elected in 2011, Jenkins quickly made a name for himself as an ultra conservative politician, willing to be involved in a variety of national projects that gave the sheriff a large media platform. He wholly supported Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration. Taking a page from Trump, Jenkins’s old campaign website declares “Make Virginia Great Again” and describes the sheriff as “a recognized thought leader in the areas of Second Amendment rights, secure communities, constitutional government, and law enforcement.”

Jenkins also advanced an anti-immigrant agenda by attending multiple conferences, rallies, and lobbying events sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-immigrant hate group. 

He hired John Guandolo, a disgraced ex-FBI agent who ran xenophobic law enforcement training sessions, to train Culpeper County deputies on “jihadi networks in America.” Even when Virginia refused to give law enforcement training credits for Guandolo’s classes, Jenkins held them anyway. Jenkins made Guandolo an auxiliary deputy despite him also not really living in Culpeper County—which was discovered when emergency responders in Texas pulled Guandolo from his mangled pickup truck after a car crash last October. Guandolo told emergency responders he was a Virginia peace officer, and inside the truck they found a pricey assault rifle that was registered to a sheriff’s office halfway across the country. 

In early 2018, Jenkins joined the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, which allows law enforcement agencies to act as immigration agents within their jail. The Culpeper County program is currently the only one in the state of Virginia. Deputies who participate in 287(g) arrangements often question non-white residents for small infractions, like a missing driver’s license or a traffic violation, leading to an arrest and potential deportation proceedings.

While Chilton has not said whether he would move to exit the program, he has expressed concerns about its impact on immigrant communities and promised to re-evaluate it. “It’s the only one in the state of Virginia for a reason so that would lead me to believe it has no benefit,” he told the Culpeper Star-Exponent. “I don’t think local and state people should be enforcing any type of federal law.” Watson has not publicly commented on the sheriff’s involvement in the 287(g) program.

Jenkins is affiliated with many far-right sheriff groups, like Protect America Now and the Sheriffs Fellowship program at the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute. He is also part of the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which believes that sheriffs have supreme authority to interpret and enforce the U.S. constitution within their jurisdictions.

Jenkins has sought to bring that doctrine to life by resisting gun control. He said in 2019 that if the Virginia legislature adopted new regulations, he would deputize his entire county to circumvent it. At 2020 Lobby Day, sponsored by the Virginia Citizen Defense League’s (VCDL), a Second Amendment group whose slogan is “Defending Your Right to Defend Yourself,” Jenkins spoke in front of a crowd of 20,000 heavily-armed people. 

“As a Virginia sheriff, I know full well the authority vested in all our sheriffs,” he said during the 2020 event. “You the citizens directly elect us to office.” He called sheriffs “the final line that says no encroachment on your Second Amendment rights” and vowed to “deputize thousands of my citizens to see that they’re able to keep their lawful legal firearm.”

Ed Dunphy, political action committee chair of the Culpeper NAACP, says that Jenkins helped continue a tradition of racist politics in the county, which was one of the last in the state to desegregate its schools. In September of 2020, Jenkins posted a message to the official Culpeper Sheriff’s Office Facebook page saying Black Lives Matter activists were “not peaceful and at their heart are violent”; some local Black activists said they didn’t feel safe after his comments.

“That’s the way they run things,” Duphy said. In contrast, Dunphy said Chilton, the independent candidate, has taken a different tone in leadership at the local police department, including fostering positive relationships with local activists who marched after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Dunphy said Chilton, the only person running for sheriff who attended a recent NAACP candidate forum, seems to embrace community policing and would be “less involved” with ICE. “[He] has realized if victims of crime don’t trust the police, it’s more difficult to solve crime,” Dunphy told Bolts.

Tracey Corder, a consultant for the Local Accountability PAC, which hasn’t endorsed any candidate in the sheriff’s race, also praised Chilton, saying he “has worked to have deep community partnerships, from his work with the NAACP, his advocacy to support families navigating drug addiction and even as a substitute teacher for the Culpeper Technical Education Center.”

Even if Jenkins loses his reelection fight, that may not itself quell the right-wing atmosphere he cultivated as sheriff. Dunphy with the local NAACP pointed to Marshall Keene, a longtime officer at the sheriff’s office who rose to captain under Jenkins, who was also a member of the local school board and chair of the Culpeper County Republican Party, which rented three buses to transport people to Washington, D.C., on January 6. While Keene has since left the sheriff’s office to run security for a neighboring school district, both of Jenkins’s brothers also work in the sheriff’s office, one of them as the county’s chief jailer.

There was no mention of the bribery and fraud charges pending against Jenkins at the chamber of commerce forum earlier this month. According to a local news reports, two dozen deputies were in the audience to support him. Jenkins had also set up a table with “Make Virginia Great Again” t-shirts.

Only Watson, this year’s Republican candidate, made even vague references to the scandals on Jenkins’ watch. He told the crowd that he felt a duty to run for sheriff after “hearing from my neighbors, family and friends about eroding confidence in law enforcement.” 

“Like you, I’m concerned about the current situation,” Watson said. “I’m concerned for our county and for our dedicated men and women in the sheriff’s office.”

The post Bribery and Fraud Charges Loom Over a MAGA Sheriff Seeking Reelection in Virginia appeared first on Bolts.

But Shelton knew this was wrong. While she has a felony in her past, Virginia’s then-Democratic governor restored her voting rights in 2021 and she has had no new convictions since.

“I was like, ‘This isn’t right. I had my rights restored and I’ve already been voting. I shouldn’t be getting this letter,’” she recalls. 

Still, she dared not participate when this summer’s primary elections rolled around in June. “I knew that it was illegal if I voted, that I could be criminally charged,” she told Bolts. “I was worried they would try to come after me.” 

She was finally vindicated in early October, when Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s administration acknowledged a major error: It had incorrectly marked some Virginians as receiving a new felony conviction that they’d never actually received, instructing local election officials to remove them from their voter rolls. (Virginia disenfranchises people when they are convicted of a new felony, and Youngkin this year made it much harder to regain those rights.)

The state’s admission, first reported by Virginia Public Media, has triggered an outcry among voting rights groups and state Democrats. Virginia’s two U.S. Senators have called for a federal investigation into the erroneous removals, whose visibility bubbled up throughout the summer as some Virginians removed from the rolls went to court in protest. 

Even after Virginia’s delayed acknowledgment, it took the state two additional weeks to reinstate Shelton onto voter rolls. She found out Monday when she checked her registration status on the state’s site.

Shelton says neither state officials nor her county registrar have reached out to tell her that she has been reinstated. “I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I just happened to be checking online,” she said. “If I wasn’t checking, I would not have known, and I would keep on assuming I was denied.”

There is little time before Virginia’s Nov. 7 elections, which will decide control of the legislature and other local offices; half of the early voting period is over, and the deadline to ask to vote by mail looms next week.

Voting rights advocates warn that Virginia is doing too little, too late to stave off confusion and correct its costly mistake in the lead-up to Election Day.

They say they don’t even know how many people the state has reinstated so far and how many remain improperly purged, since the state is sharing little information. “They’re very tight-lipped about what they’re doing now, how this happened, and how they’re going to rectify it,” says Sheba Williams, who helps formerly incarcerated people regain their rights as the founder of the Richmond-based nonprofit Nolef Turns. “I don’t think they care.”

Even if Virginia restores everyone on the rolls, the confusion sparked by the error would be hard to walk back in such a short amount of time if officials are not proactively reaching out to voters, and Williams explains that it’s difficult for outside groups to step in. “It’s really hard to pinpoint who’s been removed and how to do outreach for people who have been removed,” she says.

The Virginia Department of Elections told Bolts that it was working with the Virginia State Police to identify the people incorrectly booted from voter rolls, and that once it had those names it would notify local election officials to reinstate them, with no action needed on the part of those whose rights were wrongly denied. But Andrea Gaines, a spokesperson for the Department of Elections, specified no timeline for this correction. Macaulay Porter, a Youngkin spokesperson, similarly told Bolts that the governor “ordered a review,” but provided no sense of timing.

Neither responded to follow-up questions about the timeline and how the state intends to reach out to wrongly purged voters.

The state’s explanation, relayed by Gaines, is that the mistake is due to a data classification error in a database maintained by the Virginia State Police. 

The police share this database with election officials, who then consult it to determine who to remove from voter rolls. Gaines said the police wrongly recorded people who violated the conditions of their probation as having a new felony conviction. This would be a problem because voters are supposed to lose their voting rights over a new conviction, but not over a probation violation, which can occur over events like a failed urine test or a missed appointment.

Youngkin’s administration has minimized the issue’s scope. Elections Commissioner Susan Beals told The Washington Post this month that the state wrongly purged at least 270 people, and that the number was not expected to grow much higher upon further review. 

But voting rights advocates worry that the problem is much larger. They point to a Department of Elections report released last month, in which the agency touted that it removed more than 10,000 people from voter rolls between September 2022 and August 2023. “These were individuals who had their rights restored following a felony conviction, and then were convicted of a new felony and were not subsequently removed from the voter list,” the report said. Released weeks before officials admitted an error, the report immediately raised alarm bells among voting rights groups worried that this purge was too aggressive, Virginia Public Media reported in September.

The same groups are now skeptical that only 270 people were affected, given the revelation that state police were classifying probation violations as new felonies. 

Galen Baughman, a Virginian who was wrongly disenfranchised in the same way as Shelton and who advocates for criminal justice reforms, said he suspects the state’s estimate is but “the tip of the iceberg,” an analysis echoed by politicians and attorneys who spoke with Bolts.

Thousands of Virginians violate their probation each year, according to state data. Virginia State Police spokesperson Corinne Geller told Bolts that the police database that records probation violations—the database that the state says is responsible for the wrongful disenfranchisement—does not pick and choose which violations it records and refers to elections officials. Youngkin’s spokesperson did not answer Bolts’ question about how they reached the estimate of 270. 

Questions also remain about why the state coded probation violations as new felonies in the first place. Bolts talked to Geller, the police spokesperson, in mid-September, before the Youngkin administration admitted the error and attributed it to her agency. Geller said her office hadn’t recently changed anything about how its databases record information. “Our portion of this picture is just that we maintain the database,” she said. “As far as who’s determining rights lost, rights gained, rights restored—that is all under the Department of Elections.”

The suspicions of voting rights advocates are deepened by other policies that the Youngkin administration has pursued this year to drastically tighten the rights of Virginians with felony convictions.

He announced in March that he was rescinding his predecessor’s executive policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights when they leave prison. This made Virginia the only state to enforce a lifetime of disenfranchisement on anyone with a felony conviction, absent a discretionary decision by the governor. (Tennessee has since joined Virginia.)

Youngkin’s decision barred voting for thousands of Virginians who have been released from prison during his governorship and would have had their rights restored under the policy he ended, Bolts reported before the June primaries. It also led to widespread confusion for many Virginians whose rights had already been restored by Youngkin’s predecessors. Still, his announcement only applied going forward, as he could not strip voting rights already restored by past governors.

In June, Baughman walked confidently into Swanson Middle School, in the northern Virginia city of Arlington, to cast his vote. His voting rights were restored in 2021 by Northam, and he had made a point to vote in every election since; he follows local politics closely and, on that day at Swanson, was excited to weigh in on the local sheriff and prosecutor contests, among others.

Baughman was shocked when poll workers could not locate his name on the voter rolls, and even more so when the precinct chief informed him he’d been removed from those rolls. He cast a provisional ballot, which he later learned was never counted, left the school, and started to investigate why this had happened.

Baughman got a judge to issue an order in July saying that he should be reinstated on voter rolls. Still, it took months longer for the Youngkin administration to acknowledge that his and other residents’ exclusion was the result of a systematic error. 

“The fact that it took somebody in my position to figure this out—it suggests to me that this problem is way bigger than we realize,” Baughman told Bolts. He is a white man with professional ties to criminal justice organizations that work on court and legal issues. “Too often, the people that are impacted by these problems are too marginalized to be able to do anything about them.”

Shelton suspects that the erroneous exclusions that were exposed this fall go hand-in-hand with Youngkin’s policy announcement this spring. After all, the report in which the state congratulated itself for purging over 10,000 people with felony convictions comes from the same agency that has implemented the governor’s decision to tighten voter eligibility. 

“I think that Governor Youngkin has cultivated a culture of marginalizing people and really putting a negative face on reformed criminals,” Shelton said. “I just think, personally, that this is malicious and it is with every intent to keep away voices that are not aligned with Governor Youngkin.“

Baughman has little confidence as he watches the officials who ignored his cries over the summer now helming the crisis response. 

“There are a lot of people who could’ve stepped up and chose not to, who chose the easy, bureaucratic thing,” Baughman said. “I’m very leery of having those same people now fix the problem.”

Local elections officials don’t seem to have a clear plan, either. When Bolts talked last week to Kathy Davenport, Northumberland County’s registrar, who heads the office in charge of voter registration where Elizabeth Shelton lives, she said she was only vaguely aware of the scandal. The state had not notified her of any county resident wrongly stripped of voting rights, she said. In a follow-up call on Monday, after Shelton learned her voting rights were reinstated, Davenport declined to detail how her office is addressing this and how it would reach out to wronged voters, telling Bolts to call the state instead. 

Thalia Simpson, a spokesperson for the Prince William County Office of Elections, initially told Bolts that it may cause “unnecessary panic” for her office to reach out to people to inform them that they were affected by an erroneous purge. Simpson called back shortly after to say her office would actually mail letters to any county residents affected by the illegal purge. “The burden of correction has fallen completely on our office,” she said.

Voting rights advocates in Virginia want the state to reach out to voters as promptly as possible. “People may not be checking their status,” said Williams, the head of Nolef Turns. “A lot of people won’t check their status until it’s time to go vote, if they check at all.”

Even if state and local officials correctly identify everyone wronged by the purge and send them all letters, it may not be enough to mitigate the harm.

At least some of those affected by this purge received letters from their county registrars informing them they had lost their voting rights, and advocates are concerned that this did lasting damage even if they were to now receive a notice correcting the matter. 

“At a bare minimum, somebody should go knock on their doors and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and make sure they got the message,” Baughman says. “A lot of people don’t check their mail and, a lot of times, mail doesn’t get to people.” 

Jon Sherman, litigation director of Fair Elections Center, a group that promotes rights restoration, worries that the error will undermine people’s trust in government. “Many people, if they have a conversation with their local registrar or the Virginia State Police or the secretary of the commonwealth, will accept their authority, not contest it, and be intimidated. Most people aren’t lawyers,” he said.

And some harm cannot be undone. Baughman, like Shelton, already lost the opportunity to cast a ballot in the primary. “Even though I did everything right and made every effort at every opportunity to try to correct this problem, the other side still won by default. My ballot wasn’t counted,” he said. “It was legally cast, and I should have properly been registered, and yet they won.”

Now he fears others will experience the same frustration next month. “Voting is already going on,” he said, “so the time is now.”

The post “I Don’t Think They Care”: Virginia Is Slow-Walking the Fix to a Wrongful Voter Purge appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

In Mississippi, the GOP is defending its existing trifecta. 

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

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

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

Kentucky 

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

What’s on the ballot: The governorship

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

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

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

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

Louisiana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mississippi

Current status: Republican trifecta

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

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

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

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

New Jersey

Current status: Democratic trifecta

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus: New Hampshire 

Current status: Republican trifecta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kentucky 

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

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

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

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

All Kentucky counties are hosting regular elections next year.

Mississippi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What other elections to watch in the South 

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

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

Alex Burness contributed reporting.

Explore Bolts primers of the other prosecutor elections in 2023

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

Steve Descano, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, and Buta Biberaj were swept into office on reformist platforms four years ago in Fairfax, Loudoun, and Arlington counties, respectively. They quickly joined forces as part of a statewide alliance, the Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice, that lobbied for changes like abolishing the death penalty and stepping up expungements. They also drew anger from conservative politicians and local law enforcement for not pursuing cases more aggressively, and clashed with judges and police—but survived recall efforts.

On Tuesday, each faced primary challengers who accused the incumbents of mismanagement and who, to varying degrees, threatened to unwind reforms enacted since 2019 and kneecap the progressive coalition. Local police unions endorsed the challengers in Arlington and Fairfax counties, while in Loudoun County the local Republican Party invited its base to cross over to support challenger Elizabeth Lancaster in the Democratic primary. 

The incumbents all prevailed with leads of 10 to 13 percentage points, and they cast their wins as vindication.  

“Make no mistake: this is a referendum,” Descano told Bolts inside The Auld Shebeen, the Fairfax pub where he gathered with supporters on Election Night. “We’ve had police unions come at us, Republican money coming in, the GOP actively telling people to come and vote in these open primaries.” 

“Victory is going to show that the appetite for reform is maybe even bigger than it was before,” he added.

Dehghani-Tafti echoed Descano’s language in a statement to Bolts: “If this election was a referendum on reform, our voters emphatically responded that they will not go backward.”

Some reform advocates and defense attorneys have voiced disappointment over the last four years, criticizing the three incumbents for not being bold or consistent enough in pursuing local reforms. Arlington’s lead public defender, Brad Haywood, wrote an essay last year laying out how this band of “progressive prosecutors” had fallen short of their promises.

But Haywood, who has also founded a statewide reform organization Justice Forward Virginia, expressed relief at Tuesday’s results given the alternatives. “We’ve gotta make baby steps in this movement to get to a point where people are ready for more transformative change,” he told Bolts, adding that Dehghani-Tafti’s win in Haywood’s own county is “significantly more than a baby step” because he sees her as the most committed to meaningful reform.

The Working Families Party, a national progressive organization, also endorsed the three incumbents. Vidal Hines, their political director in the mid-Atlantic region, says the trio’s victory shows that reform policies are more politically viable than many may assume. “Voters recognize that these DAs came in four years ago and were focused on reform,” Hines said, “and at the same token recognize that locking people up won’t get us out of this problem of crime, and that we’ve got to be much smarter and more strategic about how we approach that. 

These three prosecutors represent suburban areas that combine to make up the wealthiest swath of Virginia. Winning in such areas can be tricky for candidates who run on reform, since they must win over and turn out a large number of white, affluent suburbanites who have not personally faced arrest or prosecution.

One such suburban voter, Bruce Waxman, said at Descano’s election watch party that he’s had good feelings toward law enforcement in the past and has hosted multiple fundraisers for the local sheriff, but has been moved by the call for prosecutorial fairness.

“If you have money, if you have resources, you’re not going to spend time in jail,” he told Bolts. “Whose ox is being gored? Is it the more established person with better resources, or the person for whom justice has been difficult to achieve?”

Since their victories in 2019, the three incumbents have each overseen a decline in their local jail populations, and boosted diversionary programs meant to keep people who have committed crimes out of jail and in their communities. 

Dehghani-Tafti and Descano also followed through on their campaign promise of not prosecuting simple marijuana possession, leading them to fight with local judges who refused to let them dismiss police arrests over marijuana. (The legislature ended up legalizing marijuana in 2021.) Biberaj has made fewer concrete policy announcements. But she too has clashed with public officials who object to policies that reduce incarceration; one Democratic county supervisor slammed Biberaj for getting “as many people out of jail as possible.”.

These incumbents’ primary opponents accused them of being responsible for increases in crime, which they dispute; in Arlington, reform advocates accused local police of manipulating crime data ahead of the election. Jason Miyares, Virginia’s Republican attorney general, has also frequently attacked these prosecutors and unsuccessfully lobbied lawmakers to undercut their powers.

Descano called out Miyares during his victory speech Tuesday night for thinking “that his path to higher office is by undercutting reforms here in Fairfax County.” When a supporter in the crowd yelled back that Miyares is an “asshole,” Descano smiled wide and said, “He said it, not me.”

But the incumbents have also drawn fire from their left. Descano, for instance, announced his office would no longer seek cash bail, though local public defenders later denounced his office for objecting to pretrial releases during the pandemic. The county’s lead public defender told The Appeal at the time, “While there may be a person at the top who suggests that there is a policy in place, it’s not actually being implemented in the courtroom.” 

Haywood also singled out Biberaj as falling short of his hopes. “Buta has actually ticked off most people who are actually criminal justice reform advocates,” he said. “She nevertheless kept holding herself out as a criminal justice reformer, progressive type.” He cautioned that there are “massive ideological differences” among the trio that won on Tuesday.

In separate interviews with Bolts this month, Descano and Dehghani-Tafti said their ability to carry out greater reforms has been hampered at every turn by uncooperative partners in law enforcement and in court. They also said that they’ve faced internal resistance from line prosecutors in their own offices who resisted their policies. Josh Katcher, the losing candidate in Arlington County, was a former employee of Dehghani-Tafti’s office. 

Now, Tuesday’s winners exit the primaries emboldened. “The idea of reform has really taken root,” Dehghani-Tafti said. “The idea that we should be doing treatment and taking the approach of creating diversion and rehabilitative programs have taken root.”

These three elections were the only contested Democratic primaries for prosecutor anywhere in Virginia on Tuesday. All counties are electing their commonwealth’s attorney this year.

Descano and Dehghani-Tafti will have no Republican opponents in November. Descano represents Fairfax County, the state’s most populous county with more than one million Virginians, as well as adjacent Fairfax City. Besides Arlington County, Dehghani-Tafti’s district also covers the independent city of Falls Church.

In Loudoun County, which leans blue but is the least Democratic of the three counties, Biberaj will face Republican Bob Anderson, who served as the county’s commonwealth’s attorney from 1996 to 2003 and is starkly criticizing Biberaj’s tenure.

Notably absent from Tuesday’s electorates were scores of people with intimate understanding of crime and punishment. Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, ended his predecessor’s policy of automatically restoring voting rights to people once they leave prison, effectively barring thousands of Virginia residents released in the past couple years from participating.

Erin Apgar, who lives in Fairfax County, said she has applied for voting rights after she was released from prison last year but has not heard back from the state. It’s “ridiculous,” she told Bolts, that she was locked out of voting on Tuesday—doubly so since sheriff and prosecutor races were on her local ballot. 

“It’s completely unfair and really creates a sense of discouragement,” Apgar said. “When you’re trying to turn your life around, and even if you have successfully turned your life around, you’re still unable to vote on things that are important.” 

She added, “The people that are most affected by criminal justice reform, or lack thereof—we’re the ones that are silenced.”

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George Hawkins had a long to-do list when he left the Greensville Correctional Center on May 3, a free man for the first time in his adult life: stay out of trouble, find work, enroll in school, and relearn the streets of Richmond, which he hasn’t known since he was locked up at age 17. 

And, crucially to him: register to vote.

Since his release last month, Hawkins, who spent 13 years in prison, has secured stable housing with his father, made money by painting houses and repairing cars, and started taking college courses in business administration. But he will not be able to vote in Virginia’s elections on Tuesday, barring a last-minute reprieve, due to a new policy Governor Glenn Youngkin announced in March. 

Under Youngkin’s predecessor, Virginians automatically regained the right to vote upon leaving prison, an approach that would have made Hawkins eligible to vote. But Youngkin has revived the state’s lifetime ban on voting for people with felony convictions. Now Hawkins and the approximately 12,000 people released from Virginia prisons each year—a population in which Black people are massively overrepresented—must apply to the governor, who determines on an individual basis who deserves to regain their right to participate in the democratic process. 

Hawkins has never voted, but says he dreamed of doing so while he was incarcerated. He applied for voting rights soon after leaving lockup, hoping he could participate in the June 20 primary elections. As that date approaches, he still isn’t sure where his application stands, or even how or where to ask for an update. Unless the governor deems him worthy of casting a ballot in the coming days, Hawkins will miss out on the first election since he was freed.

“It’s like I completed my sentence, but it’s not really complete,” Hawkins told Bolts this week. “I feel like I have to pay way beyond the 13 years I already did.”

Virginia is one of few states that give governors the power to decide whether people who have lost their voting rights can regain them. Previous Virginia governors prioritized voting rights restoration by standardizing and automating the process, leading to the re-enfranchisement of some 300,000 Virginians since 2013. 

Republican Governor Bob McDonnell kicked this off a decade ago by restoring voting rights to about 8,000 people who’d completed sentences for nonviolent offenses. His successor, Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe, dramatically expanded the process by announcing in 2016 that Virginia would automatically restore people’s voting rights—no application needed—when they completed their full sentence; about 170,000 Virginians regained their rights under McAuliffe. By the time the last governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, left office, the rules were simple: the state would restore the voting rights of anyone convicted of a felony upon their release from prison, whether or not they’d finished probation, parole, or any other post-release sentencing condition. 

Youngkin, a Republican who came into office in early 2022, told lawmakers in March that he was reversing that approach. He said at the time he would assess applicants “on an individual basis according to the law and take into consideration the unique elements of each situation, practicing grace for those who need it and ensuring public safety for our community and families”—but he’s not said much else publicly since then, and his office did not respond to an request for comment for this story. 

Now, Youngkin alone chooses which people with felony convictions get to vote, making Virginia’s policy on disenfranchisement uniquely harsh: it is the only state where someone who is convicted of any felony is presumed to be barred from voting for life. 

Lawyers and voting rights advocates say Youngkin’s change has led to mass confusion about voting rights for formerly incarcerated Virgininans. People returning from prison say the policy makes them feel demoralized and even alienated from the rest of society.

Because he cannot vote, Hawkins said, he is dogged by his criminal record and unable to see himself as fully reintegrated in his community. “It’s second-class citizenship,” he said, “where you’re still an ‘ex-convict, an ‘ex-felon.’ It’s almost like it’s forever following you. That’s another form of incarceration.”

Voting rights advocates say Youngkin’s reversal caused major headaches for returning citizens. For one, they worry many people leaving prison simply won’t know how to apply to regain their voting rights to begin with. 

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who as the state’s former secretary of the commonwealth under McAuliffe helped build the now-shuttered program to automatically restore voting rights, said he’s also heard concerns from people who won back their voting rights before Youngkin was elected. Youngkin cannot, by law, strip voting rights from anyone who has already had them restored, but Stoney and voting rights advocates in the state told Bolts that Youngkin’s policy has spooked some people who already regained their right to vote under previous governors.

“There are voters—restored voters—who are afraid that maybe they may go to the polls, that maybe they may find out that [their] restoration is expired,” Stoney said. “They fear that could lead to a violation, a criminal offense.”

Officials in Florida and Tennessee have weaponized nebulous eligibility rules to arrest some people who mistakenly believed they could vote. There’s no evidence of any such enforcement in Virginia under Youngkin, but, Stoney said, “It certainly has sent a chill down the spines of many people.”
Virginia governors are limited to one term, so Youngkin, who is reportedly considering a 2024 run for president, will exit office no later than January of 2026. Stoney, the Democratic two-term mayor of Virginia’s capital, has all but confirmed he’ll run for governor in the state’s November 2025 election. He made clear to Bolts that he would, if elected, resume standardizing and automating the process for restoring voting rights.

But Stoney says it’s inherently problematic for Virginia to place so much power in anyone’s hands, including his own. That’s why he and advocates across the state have broadly supported efforts to put a ballot measure to voters that would amend the state constitution by creating permanent, objective criteria for regaining voting rights, and stripping the power from the governor’s office.

“My fear is until we get that constitutional amendment, you’re going to see this yo-yo effect, going back and forth between Republican and Democratic governors,” Stoney said. 

Under Virginia law, constitutional amendments must be approved by the legislature in two consecutive sessions, split by an election, before appearing on the ballot. An effort to amend the constitution to change the rights restoration process failed this session, and the next statehouse election after the coming one won’t be held for two years—meaning supporters can’t try again for a ballot measure until 2025, and wouldn’t be able to put one before voters until 2026 at the earliest.

In the meantime, Youngkin’s opponents are trying to find leverage. The governor faces a federal lawsuit from the Washington-based Fair Elections Center, which alleges Youngkin has acted unconstitutionally. Oral arguments in that case are set to begin next week, too late to help voters in Tuesday’s primaries. In the legislature, Democratic Senator Creigh Deeds has floated the idea of trading rights restorations for tax cuts that Youngkin seeks. Democrats control the state Senate, leaving them a critical check on a GOP that holds the governorship and the state House, though control of the legislature is at stake in the November elections.

“It’s just a matter of getting past these primaries next week before we can have serious conversations about it,” Deeds told Bolts. “The governor wants a billion dollars in tax cuts. We don’t want to give him a billion dollars. Is the cost we’re willing to pay for a billion dollars restoration of rights? I don’t know. I don’t know how everyone would feel.”

Senator Mamie Locke, Deeds’ Democratic colleague and a longtime voting rights advocate, said she thinks a constitutional amendment, far off as it may be in even the speediest scenario, remains the better route.

“I’m not interested in giving him any budget cuts,” she told Bolts. “A billion dollars in cuts is absolutely ludicrous, and I don’t think that we should be negotiating with him on what is an absolute right and not a privilege, exchanging voting rights for budget cuts.”

Locke and others have tried to “appeal to the governor’s heart” on this, she said, with no apparent success to this point. “You have to have a heart in order for someone to appeal to it,” Locke added.

Blair Dacey, who was formerly incarcerated, says she has tried personally appealing to Youngkin to regain her voting rights. Upon release from prison in 2022, she secured a job as a legislative aide to Virginia state Senator Joe Morrissey, allowing her far greater access to power than most of the state’s disenfranchised population. At the governor’s mansion in February, she got to meet Youngkin face-to-face.

Dacey, who has never voted and applied for her voting rights after her release from prison, thought she had a good chance at winning him over. A white woman, she was sentenced as a teenager to prison for kicking and killing a man—accidentally, she says—while defending her friend. Northam pardoned her midway through a 20-year sentence, and her release, like her original case, garnered substantial local media attention. 

When Dacey met Youngkin, she says, “he was really nice, really engaging—him and his wife, both.” She told him about herself and her work in government.

“He said, ‘That’s such a beautiful story,’” Dacey recalled. If this governor wants to evaluate disenfranchised applicants on a case-by-case basis, she thought, someone like her would seem a likely candidate.

But Dacey’s application is still pending. Unless Youngkin restores her rights in the next few days, she won’t get to vote for her boss, who faces a primary challenge on Tuesday.

“It makes me feel like it does not matter what I get out and do, or how many people I try to fight for. “If anybody would be more supportive of what’s going to help the community, it’s me. I’m putting forth the effort to show I’m trying to be the best and most positive example I can be.” 

“But I can’t even show it, because I’m canceled out already,” Dacey said.

While Hawkins, Dacey, and others wait on their applications, which seem to be pending indefinitely, the governor’s reversal on voting rights has scared off others returning from prison from even trying to regain their rights.

Deshun Watkins, 34, who befriended George Hawkins at Greensville and who was also recently released, has heard Hawkins detail the murkiness of his own re-enfranchisement process, and the feeling of dejection with which he’s grappling. “It makes me not even want to waste my time,” Watkins said.

He voted once in his life, for former President Barack Obama, and he remembers feeling proud to have played a part in Obama winning Virginia. Watkins would like to vote again, especially now that he’s got kids for whom he wants to be a role model. “If I get back to voting, at least I’ll feel like a normal citizen,” he told Bolts. “I’d get to do something my friends who aren’t felons get to do.”

But he’s concluded that Youngkin would probably not grant his application, and so, he says, he won’t subject himself to judgment. “Why would I want to get smacked in the face?” he said. “Who wants to take punishment like that?”
Watkins added, “I got friends that are waiting to apply for anything until Youngkin gets out of office. They don’t even want to deal with him. Like with parole, I got a homeboy who’s got 10 years left, and he doesn’t want to even think about that. He goes up for parole every year, and he’s not even excited.” (In addition to curtailing voting rights, Youngkin has also taken steps to limit what were already narrow paths to release for people eligible for parole in Virginia.)

Like Watkins, Alonzo Bland Jr., who was released from prison about a year ago, says he doesn’t want to apply for restoration of voting rights. He’d rather not involve himself at all with the Youngkin administration, he told Bolts at a church in Richmond, and so he plans to wait until he gets off probation before he explores applying. “I want to make sure I have no discrepancies,” he said. “I don’t want anyone saying, ‘Yeah, but…’ and I’d rather have my things in order before I put my ten toes down.”

Bland, 31, pays attention to politics, and was a habitual voter before he was locked up for two and a half years. Inside prison, he says, he and peers paid attention to candidate debates and watched election-night returns on TV. Bland has a degree in criminal justice and keeps tabs on policy decisions in that space, especially as they pertain to living conditions for the incarcerated. It sickens him to feel judged by Youngkin for his criminal history, given his strong sense of self-worth and the many steps he’s taken to improve his station during and since his time  in prison. 

“I’m just as much of a citizen as he is,” Bland says. “My values, my opinions about government, are just as valuable as his. Because an individual makes a mistake doesn’t mean a God-given right should be taken away from you, and he shouldn’t be the judge and jury on whether I get it back.”

The post The Virginians Who Can’t Vote Because of Glenn Youngkin appeared first on Bolts.

Going forward, Virginians will no longer regain their rights when released from prison—the most recent policy announced by Virginia officials in 2021—nor at any later point, unless Youngkin deems them to be worthy on an individual basis. 

His decision, which a future governor could alter, sidelines many residents who expected they would get to vote in Virginia elections. 

“I’ve never voted in my life. I was looking forward to voting this year,” Sincere Allah, who was released from prison the week Youngkin was inaugurated in 2022 and who has since waited to learn if his rights will be restored, told Bolts, in reference to the state’s upcoming legislative and prosecutorial elections. “I can pay taxes, I can be held to the same standard as everyone else when it comes to laws and rules and regulations, but I have no say-so or representation.”

Youngkin’s announcement also puts Virginia in a category all its own: It is the only state where someone who is convicted today over any felony is presumed to be barred from voting for life, with no remedy other than receiving a discretionary act of clemency from the governor. 

Virginia’s constitution permanently disenfranchises people with a felony conviction. Only Iowa and Kentucky have such a harsh rule on the books—other states with a lifetime ban, like Mississippi, do not apply it to all felonies—but their sitting governors have each issued executive orders that automatically restore at least some people’s voting rights upon completion of their sentences. 

For much of the last decade, Virginia governors adopted a similar approach, enabling hundreds of thousands of people to regain the franchise. Anyone whose rights have already been restored will retain the ability to vote. But for others, Youngkin has now rolled back those reforms.

“We are back to 1902-era policy,” Democratic state Senator Scott Surovell tweeted last week after Youngkin’s administration notified him of the change, in reference to the 1902 convention that designed Virginia’s disenfranchisement system with the explicit goal of disenfranchising Black residents: “discrimination within the letter of the law,” as one delegate termed it. That legacy lived on; as recently as 2016, 22 percent of Black Virginians were barred from voting.

“This language in our constitution is from extraordinarily dark origins,” Surovell told Bolts in a follow-up. “I thought we’d settled this debate over the past twelve years of reform, but apparently… anything’s on the table.”

In 2013, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell took a first step in the final months of his administration by announcing he would restore the voting rights of people convicted of nonviolent offenses after they complete their sentences. His Democratic successor, Terry McAuliffe, dramatically expanded the process in 2016 when he issued a blanket order that restored the voting rights of any Virginian once they completed their sentence; after Republicans sued, the state supreme court said the governor did not have the authority to issue a blanket order, but McAuliffe circumvented that limit by issuing individual orders to all those who’d have been affected by his original policy.

Democrat Ralph Northam maintained that approach once in office, and in 2021 he extended it by scrapping McAuliffe’s requirement that people first complete their full sentences, including any terms of probation or parole. Instead, Northam began restoring people’s voting rights upon release from incarceration.

Under McDonnell, 8,000 people regained their voting rights. The number then exploded to more than 170,000 under McAuliffe and 126,000 under Northam.  

Democrats tried and failed for years to refer a ballot measure to voters that would amend the state constitution to make rights restoration automatic. Absent that change, the future of the reforms implemented from McDonnell through Northam hinged entirely on the result of the 2021 governor’s race, which was won by Youngkin. During the election, Youngkin criticized McAuliffe, his Democratic opponent who was attempting a comeback, for his 2016 policy but he also remained vague as to what he’d do as governor. 

Even after he won, Youngkin adopted no public policy stance on rights restoration until this month. He restored the rights of roughly 5,000 people in 2022 but that alarmed observers because it was a far lower yearly number than his predecessors. About 12,000 people are released from prison annually in Virginia. 

Senator Lionell Spruill, a Democrat, sent Youngkin a letter earlier this month asking him to clarify what his administration was doing. The secretary of the commonwealth, a Republican appointed by the governor, replied last week that the governor’s office has a new approach: It is now evaluating whether to restore people’s voting rights on a case-by-case basis. This eliminates from state policy the notion that everyone can expect to have their rights restored at some point. 

Instead, Youngkin will be reviewing applications to decide who should have the right to vote. His office has shared no criteria as to how he’s deeming some people more deserving than others. 

Youngkin’s spokesperson, Macaulay Porter, said in a statement, “Restoration of rights are assessed on an individual basis according to the law and take into consideration the unique elements of each situation, practicing grace for those who need it and ensuring public safety for our community and families.” 

Porter did not respond when Bolts followed up by asking how, specifically, the governor would differentiate among applicants. “Every applicant is different,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Kay Coles James wrote to Surovell last week.

Democratic state Senator Mamie Locke, a longtime champion for rights restoration, says she personally pressed Coles James for more information. She told Bolts she has concluded that the vagueness is intentional.

“They did not want there to be any kind of hard and fast rules in terms of any kind of written criteria,” Locke said. “I have absolutely no idea what they consider to be the optimum candidate to have his or her rights restored.”

Virginia’s new status quo is similar to the rights restoration system that Florida had until 2018, when a landmark ballot initiative made it automatic for many residents. Until then, the only way for Floridians to have their rights restored was to apply and be grilled in live hearings by a panel of state officials who asked intrusive questions such as whether they had children from multiple partners. “There’s no standard, we can do whatever we want,” then-Governor Rick Scott, who sat in these hearings, said in 2016.

Sheba Williams, who directs the Virginia nonprofit Nolef Turns (“nolef” is “felon” spelled backwards), has helped thousands of formerly incarcerated people navigate the process of regaining their voting rights. She says she is in contact with about 100 people who applied to have their voting rights reinstated last year but who have heard nothing. Many, like Allah, expected they would be able to vote in the November midterms given Northam’s policy but Youngkin’s administration did not restore their rights or reply to their application. 

At the start of 2023, Williams noticed that the Youngkin administration had quietly updated the form it was asking people to fill when applying to have their rights restored. The new form asks people to state whether they were convicted of a nonviolent or violent offense and whether they still owe restitution or court fines and fees; those questions were not on the form that Youngkin’s administration inherited. Voting rights advocates in other states have denounced using court debt to determine voting eligibility as a modern-day poll tax.  

It is not clear whether and how the Youngkin administration is even using either piece of information to decide whether someone should be disqualified from voting. 

“Each governor can change the process however they see fit, and that’s the problem,” said Williams, who used to be disenfranchised herself due to a felony conviction. “It’s not a data-driven process, but a person with real emotions saying ‘I believe in this’ or ‘I don’t,’ saying ‘I think this person has been rehabilitated’ or ‘I don’t.’”

Williams helped the application of a woman, Grace, who told Bolts she now feels demoralized. She asked that her full name be withheld from this story because she fears retribution by the state. “I’m in limbo,” Grace said. “I know there are some people that don’t vote or register at all, but change only happens when you have the right to vote or speak on certain things. Right now, because I can’t vote, it doesn’t even mean that I’m going to be heard.”

“It makes me feel like I’m not a citizen,” she added. “I did the time for the crime, but I still have lost my rights. I don’t know if I’ll ever get them back or not.”

Shawn Weneta, a formerly incarcerated Virginian who is now a policy strategist at the ACLU of Virginia, said Youngkin’s approach has already created mass confusion. Speaking to Bolts last week, Weneta said he has recently gotten calls from people who have regained the franchise in the past wondering if their rights might now be revoked. They won’t, Weneta assured those people: Youngkin cannot reverse the restorations granted by previous governors. 

Still, those worried calls underscored for him the need for clarity on this issue. “Now it’s totally opaque,” Weneta said.

Weneta and other Virginians are also afraid that Youngkin’s policy could open the door to prosecutions in the future. In states that have confusing rights restoration procedures, some residents have been targeted with criminal charges if they get it wrong. 

“Florida has arrested people who have attempted to register and don’t qualify—and that’s a real concern here,” Williams said, alluding to the recent arrests by Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration of Floridians who erroneously thought they had cleared the state’s muddled criteria; in some cases, a public agency had told them they were eligible. The dynamic played out in Tennessee last year.

Virginia’s new approach is also drawing concern from Americans for Prosperity, a conservative organization that supported McDonnell a decade ago and has since backed several failed statehouse attempts at a statewide ballot measure to standardize and automate rights restoration.

“The community that is impacted by this, they want to have the confidence and clarity that if they do everything right they’re going to get their rights restored,” said Ben Knotts, legislative director of the group’s Virginia branch. “This creates a process where people don’t feel confident.”

Virginia is voting for its lawmakers this year, plus most of its prosecutors and sheriffs. The primary is in June, with a mid-May deadline for voter registration. Advocates and lawmakers will be watching closely to see whether Youngkin announces a new batch of people whose voting rights he’s restoring, and whether any particular pattern emerges among those who are and aren’t included in such an action.

In the meantime, Locke points to the long shadow of racism in Virginia history.

“What this administration wants to do is to retain vestiges of the 1902 constitutional amendment in Virginia,” she said. “They want to retain vestiges of Jim Crow, as a means of prohibiting individuals from voting.”

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