For more than 25 years, Mike Rose felt alone. After his son Jeremy was arrested at age 17 in 1994, sentenced to life in prison, Mike and his wife had no community with which to share the pain of losing a son to prison. “In the battle to help your loved ones, it feels like you’re by yourself, fighting this battle on your own,” he says. Jeremy was shipped to an out-of-state prison, as New Mexico does with many kids serving long sentences, deepening his parents’ isolation. 

Then, about four years ago, Mike says his world opened up after he stumbled upon a coalition that had assembled in New Mexico to fight extreme sentences imposed on children. 

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” he told Bolts. “I was able to join them and it’s like, I’m not by myself anymore. We’ve got resources, we’ve got people who are in the same situation, we can pull our knowledge and our strengths and start working on the passage of legislation. It was a godsend.” 

The coalition has for years pushed legislation to give every ‘juvenile lifer’ a meaningful chance at release, which faltered in repeated legislative sessions until they finally succeeded this spring: In March, lawmakers adopted Senate Bill 64, a law abolishing sentences of life without parole for children. 

The law also addresses other extreme sentences by making anyone convicted of a crime they committed under the age of 18 eligible for parole hearings—usually after 15 years in prison, though in some cases after 20 or 25 years behind bars. 

“In a moment of pretty extreme political polarization around crime and public safety, our community was able to pass one of the more progressive juvenile parole laws in the country, and we did it with bipartisan support,” said Denali Wilson, an attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who co-founded this coalition, though she also stresses that 15 years remains too long a time. “For people that went to prison when they were 15-16 years old, we’re talking about a lifetime to wait for just an opportunity—just an opportunity to come home.”

The law does not guarantee release for anyone. It only provides review by a parole board, a shot to showcase one’s rehabilitation inside and ask for a second chance that the governor-appointed board can still deny. Many people newly eligible for review will still likely remain in prison for decades. 

Still, Mike Rose calls himself “eternally optimistic” and says the law’s passage opens the door to having his son home by the end of the year. Jeremy, who was convicted of murder alongside two other minors for the stabbing deaths of two elderly people three decades ago, received a sentence that made him eligible for parole after 30 years in prison, and likely would have had a parole hearing next near even without the new law. But Mike, whose wife died of cancer two years ago without seeing her son have a hearing, is keenly aware of what shaving even just a few years off his sentence could have meant—and now he’s eager to help others besides his son get a second look. 

“He left a boy of 17 and hopefully I get the opportunity to have him here shortly as a man of 47,” Mike said of his son. “There’s a huge push across the country to recognize the fact that we as a society cannot sentence our juveniles to a life behind bars… You’re not doing things to solve the crime problem, what you’re doing is throwing the next generation away.”

So far in 2023, two other states besides New Mexico have adopted similar reforms, making people convicted as children eligible for release after some lengthy term of incarceration: Illinois with House Bill 1064 in February, and Minnesota, which included the reforms in a large public safety package, in May. 

They are just the latest states to adopt such laws over the last decade, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions in the late 2000s and early 2010s affirming that minors deserve “meaningful opportunities to obtain release.” The laws passed in New Mexico, Illinois and Minnesota mean there will now be 28 states that no longer sentence kids to life without parole.

“Every state that ends the practice of condemning children to die in prison creates pressure for the next state to do so,” said Preston Shipp, a policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, a national organization that is helping spread those reforms.

Shipp traveled to Santa Fe and St. Paul this year to lobby lawmakers and share information about the many similar reforms that have already been implemented elsewhere, pointing to the low recidivism rate for people who have been released on parole in other states. He also tries to talk to lawmakers about research in neuroscience and psychology showing developmental differences between adults and youth.

“We know from the science of adolescent brain development that [kids] don’t appreciate all the consequences of their conduct; peer pressure hits differently,” Shipp said. ”In a flash point, this person does something that’s tragic, and it changes people’s lives, but it doesn’t mean that they cannot experience rehabilitation. It doesn’t mean that they’re beyond the hope of redemption.”

More states could soon make reforms. Shipp has traveled to Lansing three times this year to help bills that would end juvenile life without parole in Michigan. Connecticut already adopted similar reforms in 2015 for kids under age 18, but in June lawmakers passed a bill that extends parole eligibility to people with long sentences who were convicted before age 21. (The new Illinois law also applies to people up to age 21.) That measure now goes to Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat who has blocked other efforts to curtail long sentences for juveniles. 

Despite the similarities, the youth sentencing reforms that three states have passed so far this year will vary widely in actual impact. In Illinois, people already serving extreme sentences for juvenile convictions are still set to spend their lives behind bars without review: The bill that passed this year—just like the 2019 law it builds on—isn’t retroactive. 

In New Mexico and Minnesota, by contrast, dozens of people incarcerated for decades are now suddenly poised to receive parole hearings very soon because of the new laws. “There are just a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in prison being introspective and growing and developing into adults,” State Representative Sandra Feist, a Democrat who helped shape Minnesota’s legislation, told Bolts. “And I’m just excited for them to get a second chance.”

For advocates like Wilson who hope to reduce the prison population and spent years guiding these bills through the state legislatures, that effort was just about setting up the difficult parole processes that are only now starting.  

“It’s the moment that our community has been preparing for,” Wilson said. “We knew that passing the law was only the first step. Making the law mean something, making it mean real opportunity for people to come home, is the next chapter.”

The states that adopted new juvenile sentencing reforms this year significantly limited if not eliminated discretionary parole in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period during which many states toughened sentencing and gutted paths to release throughout the country. That gives advocates a chance to start fresh—after all, established parole boards are typically dysfunctional and punitive—but creating a new process out of virtually nothing is also a daunting task. 

Wilson warns that legal services in New Mexico aren’t trained to counsel the people who are newly eligible for parole, even as their hearings are coming up soon. “The work ahead is happening outside of existing institutions in the state because this is new work,” she said. “This reform was passed without any kind of budget allocation from the state, and so much of the work is around shoring up resources to make sure that people are supported in the way that they deserve.” Wilson has set up an organization, Deserving Life, that’s crowdfunding to help provide people with this support. 

Wilson says she knows of at least 75 people incarcerated in New Mexico who were given decades-long sentences for crimes they committed as minors and will be affected by SB 64. More than half are already eligible for a hearing under the new law because they’ve served more than the minimum period (15 to 25 years, depending on the crime). The actual number is likely higher: ProPublica exposed in March how the state lost track of nearly two dozen people locked up since they were sentenced to life in prison as kids. 

Meanwhile, close to 100 people will be affected by Minnesota’s new law, according to Perry Moriearty, who helps run a law clinic at the University of Minnesota that represents “juvenile lifers” and played a central role in crafting and championing the reforms over the last decade. In Minnesota, like in New Mexico, most people will be eligible after 15 years in prison, though it will be longer for some categories of crimes. Moriearty says nearly half have been in prison long enough that they are already eligible for a hearing.

But the panel that will review these cases doesn’t even exist yet. Minnesota lawmakers this spring created a brand new review board that must still be staffed. For cases that involve people who were sentenced as minors, that five-member board will be supplemented by two additional members who must be experts in neurodevelopmental science.  

Advocates for the law say these two additional members will be critical to remind the rest of the board of what makes youth different. “One of the things that neurodevelopmental experts may be able to speak to is why, with a lot of kids who are incarcerated, the first few years look bumpy,” said Moriearty, the University of Minnesota professor.  “For kids who are told that they’re entering prison and they’re gonna die there, there tend to be more infractions in those early years.”

Avra Anagnostis was 14 when her 16-year-old best friend, Roberto Lopez-Rios, was arrested and sentenced to life in Minnesota in 2001. “Life in prison, obviously, as kids, we couldn’t really comprehend what that meant,” she told Bolts. “It sounded so scary and overwhelming.” 

For more than two decades, Anagnostis has advocated for her friend to get a second look. She and Lopez-Rios co-founded an organization called Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN, paired up with Moriearty to advocate for reform, and reached out to people who have been incarcerated since they were kids. “Some of these guys are really alone,” she said. “Several have never had anyone reach out to them.” 

“For them to know that this group of people was coming together, people that they’ve never met, and advocating for them and saying, you are more than the worst thing you did as a child, that was huge,” she added.

From prison, Lopez-Rios has developed his painting, working with a group called Art from the Inside to have his art sold and shown at exhibitions. In April, this Minnesota-based organization hosted an art workshop in St. Paul alongside Juvenile Sentencing Reform MN that featured Moriearty and other coalition members talking about their bill.

Moriearty says that most kids sentenced to spend their life in prison in Minnesota come from Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which include the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the most diverse area in the state—and that the vast majority, 81 percent, are also Black and Latinx. The prosecutors who represent these population centers—Ramsey County’s John Choi, who has long backed this issue, and Hennepin County’s Mary Moriarty, who was elected in November in a victory for progressives—both supported the reform this year. 

Nevertheless, the statewide association of county attorneys opposed Minnesota’s bill this year. Robert Small, its executive director, told Bolts that the organization agreed with the principle of ending juvenile life without parole but thought that people should wait for longer periods before being eligible, and that the decision should be made by a judge and not by a parole board. Feist says the support her bill received from Choi and Moriarty helped counter the idea that local law enforcement was uniformly hostile to it.

New Mexico’s prosecutors association, which has a long history of torpedoing criminal justice reforms and opposed prior iterations of this bill, remained neutral on the 2023 version after extracting concessions that extended how long kids have to wait before becoming eligible for parole. (An earlier version of the bill made most minors eligible for parole after 10 years.)

Advocates in both New Mexico and Minnesota say they insisted the bills be retroactive, bringing hope to the very people who were championing them. They also pressed lawmakers to cover anyone who was convicted of a crime as a kid, no matter how serious. 

“The reason why we are so adamant that there should not be carve outs is because this whole policy is all about the difference between kids and adults,” Shipp said. “It’s not about the nature of the offense.”

All three bills adopted this year passed Democratic-led legislatures and were then signed by Democratic governors. In each case, the opposition largely came from GOP ranks, even though the bills in Illinois and New Mexico each received Republican support. (Minnesota’s package, which incorporated many other reforms, passed on strict party lines.) Some GOP-run states have adopted similar legislation—most recently, Ohio in 2021. 

In Illinois, a Republican state senator even played a lead role this year in pushing lawmakers to fix the fact that HB 1064 does not apply to past cases. In the same week Governor J.B. Pritzker signed it into law in February, Senator Seth Lewis filed new legislation, SB 2073, to make it retroactive. Lewis’ bill would also apply to an earlier sentencing reform that Illinois adopted in 2019, which curtailed juvenile life without parole but did not eliminate it. If it passes, it would make hundreds of people incarcerated since they were kids eligible for parole, according to Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Chicago-based Restore Justice. 

SB 2073 drew numerous Democratic co-sponsors but it received no vote by the end of the legislative session in May. Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment on her plans for next year.

While the sentencing reforms in Illinois are limited to only new convictions, the state has still gone further than most others (including New Mexico and Minnesota) in another dimension: age. 

Reforms that take a more rehabilitative approach to youth are traditionally written to apply to people who committed a crime before age 18, but the laws Illinois passed in 2019 and 2023 instead both draw the line at 21. Hammond says the usual arguments for treating kids differently apply to young adults too. “Eighteen isn’t a line that you magically become an adult,” she told Bolts. “The emerging brain science shows that our brains continue to develop till the mid-20s.” 

Hammond says there was interest in the Illinois legislature to set the age of eligibility at 25: “Why are we stopping?”

Back in 2021, Washington, D.C., became the first jurisdiction to eliminate life without the possibility of parole for anyone convicted of a crime committed under age 25. Bolts reported last year that the reform sparked releases but at a slower pace than its proponents hoped for because of pandemic delays and recalcitrant prosecutors. Other states, like Massachusetts and Vermont, have also raised the age until which someone can be treated as a juvenile past 18. Connecticut could join that roster if its governor, Lamont, signs SB 952, the bill that ends life without parole for youth under 21. 

People in other states are watching these developments closely. In Minnesota, Moriearty says they didn’t press raising the age of adult criminal liability in this year’s session but hopes to revisit it in the future. “We didn’t necessarily feel like we had time,” she says.

Some advocates also hope to build on these new laws to make a broader case: They wonder if re-opening the door to parole for juveniles may make people more receptive to the idea that we shouldn’t throw anyone away for life. They’re pushing for reforms to cap prison terms, expand parole hearings for the elderly, or guarantee everyone some form of “second look.”

“If we allow ourselves to believe or to entertain the possibility that a child is more than the worst thing that they’ve ever done,” Wilson says, “it’s really not that far of a leap for people to wonder if that may be true for everybody.”

The post “Just an Opportunity to Come Home” appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pennsylvanians on Tuesday resoundingly rejected the man who had wanted to ignore their vote but now was asking for it. In this perennially tight state, Mastriano lost to Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro by fifteen percentage points.

He was joined in defeat by many other Republicans who echoed Trump’s Big Lie while trying to take over their states’ election administration. (Most states directly elect a secretary of state, unlike in Pennsylvania.) Voters around the country repudiated candidates who signaled they may override the will of the very electorate they were courting.

All election deniers who ran for secretary of state in battleground states—buoyed by endorsements from Trump—lost on Tuesday, blocking major avenues for the former president to manipulate the next election.

Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee in Nevada, came closest, losing to Democrat Francisco Aguilar by two percentage points. In Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, incumbent Democratic secretaries of state crushed their far-right challengers Kristina Karamo, Kim Crockett, and Audrey Trujillo by margins ranging from 9 to 14 percentage points—all far more than Joe Biden’s margins of victory two years ago.

Mark Finchem, an Arizona lawmaker who has since 2020 championed proposals to decertify his own state’s presidential results, repeated just this fall that the votes of Arizona’s two most populous counties should be “tossed out.” He lost his bid on Tuesday, trailing in both of these counties decisively.

Election deniers also failed to take over secretary of state offices in blue states like Massachusetts and Vermont, lost elections for governor in places where the winner can appoint a secretary of state, and fell short for other offices from which they may have exerted significant if indirect influence on elections, such as Michigan’s attorney general or New Mexico’s supreme court. 

“The Big Lie movement has its die hard acolytes, and they’ve captured a huge swath of the Republican Party, but it’s not a winning majority,” Ian Bassin, executive director of the organization Protect Democracy, told Bolts. “In fact, it’s politically toxic, and in competitive states is a lead anchor around the neck of anyone that embraces it.”

Still, Republicans who ran on the Big Lie did not end up empty handed.

A nationwide Bolts analysis in September found that 12 Republicans were running for secretary of state after denying the results of the 2020 election or refusing to affirm the outcome. Eight of them lost. But they won in four red states: Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

“What happened with the election results moved us from the precipice,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law who specializes in election law and has written about the threat of election subversion, told Bolts. “We won’t have many election deniers running elections, and probably none or few in swing states.”

“Still there are hundreds of Republican candidates who embraced election denialism and won their races,” he said. “Maybe it’s just cheap talk and it is less worrisome—but it is still antidemocratic and shows that denialism could easily surface again in 2024 or beyond.”

Election deniers won many offices, from Congress down to county commissions, that have important powers when it comes to deciding how to run elections. And two governors with the authority to select secretaries of state, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, won reelection; both have previously appointed secretaries who refused to affirm Biden’s election or helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 race.

Many states that did not feature outright election deniers still saw conflicts over new restrictions and rules to combat fraud. When the dust settled, incumbents did well: Democrats secured new terms in Colorado and Washington State, and Republicans did the same in Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio. In Connecticut and Vermont, Democrats prevailed in open seats who have signaled interest in expanding ballot access.

Some secretaries of state in recent years have stepped in against threats to election systems—and Tuesday’s results at least removed the threat that local election deniers will be bolstered by more sympathetic statewide officials, at least in blue and purple states. 

Trujillo, the New Mexico Republican, had stood in solidarity with a county commission that refused to certify its primary results this summer over bogus fraud claims. The local county clerk, a Republican who fought back against the commission, told Bolts in September that Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver had backed her and that an election denier taking over instead would make her job trickier.

Some secretaries of state are also tasked with certifying their state’s final results, and election observers worried that an official like Finchem or a Mastriano appointee could try to not certify legitimate outcomes they don’t like. In states where they are not involved in certification, secretaries of state have other significant powers. Michigan, for instance, has one of the most decentralized electoral systems in the country, loosely held together by a secretary of state’s authority. Karamo, the GOP nominee, campaigned on proposals to upend this system, some of which she would not have had the legal authority to order. 

Elections for secretaries of state typically happen away from the spotlight, but Trump’s Stop the Steal agitation morphed into an organized effort to recruit and run far-right candidates willing to follow his lead in disrupting U.S. elections. 

Marchant, the Nevada candidate, played a lead role in putting together a national slate called “America First” that brought together 14 secretary of state candidates, all Republicans who ran on introducing election changes in line with Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies, such as cracking down on mail-in voting or ballot drop boxes. 

In the lead-up to November, election deniers also partnered with far-right organizations and like-minded allies in law enforcement and sheriff’s offices to drum up policing and investigations into elections. Florida voted this year under the cloud of the arrests of formerly incarcerated people, who have been targeted by DeSantis’s administration amid shifting eligibility requirements for people with criminal records.

This national coordination among election deniers sparked a counter-mobilizing effort from Democrats who rushed to bring more voter attention to these races.

“Mr. and Mrs. Minnesota are not getting up every day saying, ‘Gee, I wonder what’s going on with the secretary of state’s office right now,’” Steve Simon, the Democratic incumbent in Minnesota, told Politico in October. “And so I do think that someone running for this office generically—me or anyone else—every four years, you’d have to treat it as an exercise of introducing or reintroducing yourself.”

The New York Times reports that Democrats sank nearly $50 million into TV ads for secretary of state races in the four tightest states featuring election deniers for secretary of state—Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada—and outspent Republicans 10 to 1. Mastriano was also significantly outspent. He was one of only two candidates for governor on the “America First,” alongside the GOP nominee in Arizona, Kari Lake. Both had lost their bids as of Monday night.

Of the 14 “America First” candidates who ran for secretary of state, nine lost in Republican primaries and four lost in last week’s general election.

Those defeated in primaries include Colorado’s Tina Peters, a county clerk under indictment for breaching the integrity of voting machines, and Idaho’s Dorothy Moon, who once defended voter restrictions on the floor of the legislature based on unfounded allegations that Canadians are coming to Idaho to vote illegally. Others lost to Republican incumbents in primaries in Georgia, Kansas, and Nebraska.

The slate’s only victorious candidate is Diego Morales, who is now poised to take over as secretary of state in Indiana.

Morales echoed Trump’s claims about fraud and called the 2020 election a “scam” to oust the incumbent at the Indiana Republican Party’s state convention. He later softened those statements, calling Biden the legitimate president, but he remains on the website of the “America First” organization as of publication. He beat Democrat Destiny Wells, who hit him for his ties with the far-right, by 14 percentage points.

Three other candidates who espoused aspects of the Big Lie prevailed last week, though they were not part of the “America First” slate. 

Much like Morales, Monae Johnson used conspiracist allegations about election systems to oust South Dakota’s incumbent at a party convention. Her general election was largely a formality in this staunchly conservative state.

In Alabama, winner Wes Allen has questioned the results of the 2020 election, and he has already signaled how that may affect his state. He said earlier this year that, should he win, he would withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an organization that helps 32 states, and Washington D.C., maintain voter rolls. He explained his position by naming George Soros, shortly after a far-right website published an article that falsely tied ERIC to Soros.

In Wyoming, finally, Chuck Gray secured Trump’s endorsement to win the Republican nod for secretary of state in August, and then ran unopposed in last week’s general election. Gray has called the 2020 election “clearly rigged,” and has focused his attacks on the use of ballot drop boxes, echoing the debunked claims about the “woke left” using drop boxes to steal elections. He has also traveled to other states to meet with election deniers and observe their efforts to sow doubts on results.

These four states are deeply Republican, and the next presidential race is unlikely to be contested in any of them. Still, Democrats are competitive in plenty of elections in those states. Last week, Democratic U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan’s re-election bid in Indiana was one of the nation’s closest watched. In 2017, Democrats gained a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, in a special election that Republican nominee Roy Moore tried to block in court in an eerie trial run of Trump’s efforts in late 2020. Republican primaries can be competitive and need to be certified as well.

“It’s a danger to American democracy for people detached from reality and in hock to a political cult to hold governing responsibilities no matter what state they’re in,” Bassin said. “That’s true just as a matter of principle and democratic health, but it’s also the case that even the most deep red states have had contentious elections in recent years and will again.”

“No one should have to rely on a delusional partisan to oversee their elections,” he added.

Since Tuesday’s clobbering, few election deniers have shown a willingness to accept the outcomes. Mastriano, perhaps chastened by the magnitude of his defeat, issued a concession on Sunday evening. “Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do,” he said in a statement on social media. 

But Finchem retweeted a message last week from a supporter who called the outcome a “Soros orchestrated psychological operation!” after the media called the race for Democrat Adrian Fontes, and he has since repeatedly insinuated that voter fraud was at play.

And those who won now have a platform from which add the imprimatur of a state agency onto baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud.

On Saturday, four days after becoming Wyoming’s Secretary of State-Elect, Gray posted a picture of himself at an event with a conservative activist, former Trump campaign adviser, and also president of the organization Citizens United, who most recently produced a movie that Trumpworld has embraced about the 2020 election. Gray tweeted, “Really enjoyed meeting David Bossie today and seeing his film Rigged.”

The article has been updated with the most up-to-date results as of the evening of Nov. 14.

The post In Secretary of State Races, Election Deniers (Mostly) Lose appeared first on Bolts.

With over 2,000 elections for prosecutor and sheriff on the ballot this year, Bolts has worked throughout the year on identifying and covering the most critical races—those that feature the starkest choices for voters, or those that deserve the brightest spotlight. The primary season resolved many, from reformer wins in Tennessee and Vermont to reformer losses in San Francisco or San Jose. But a lot remains to be decided on Nov. 8. 

Below is our guide to the 30 prosecutor and sheriff elections that may upend criminal justice next week. 

1. Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor

Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2018, Rachel Mitchell became chief prosecutor of Maricopa County this year when the incumbent resigned. And abortion looms large over her bid for a full term, due to the decision by Kavanaugh and his peers to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Mitchell has said she would enforce a ban on abortion. whereas Democratic challenger Julie Gunnigle has ruled that out, as Bolts reported in May in partnership with The Appeal. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” Gunnigle said. “Not now, not ever.”

In this county of 4.5 million residents, the office has been notorious for decades for its punitive policies, and Gunnigle has deployed a broader reform platform, charging that incarceration is far too high in Arizona. She told Arizona Central that Maricopa prosecutors like Mitchell have “ramped-up sentences…, opting to throw people into unsafe prisons where they are farmed out to prison labor camps.” Gunnigle ran on a similar message in 2020, for instance promising not to seek certain sentencing enhancements as a means of reducing sentence length, but she lost by 1.4 percentage points to Alister Adel, Mitchell’s predecessor who resigned in March.

2. California | Alameda County (Berkeley, Oakland) prosecutor

Retiring incumbent Nancy O’Malley has been a vocal critic of many of the legislative reforms and ballot initiatives that California progressives have championed to reduce incarceration. Running to replace her in this populous county are deputy DA Terry Wiley, whom she has endorsed, and civil rights attorney Pamela Price, a critic of O’Malley’s failure to address racial disparities in the county’s justice system. In a partnership between Bolts and The Nation, Piper French reported on Tuesday on Price’s platform of focusing on gender justice through policies that don’t rely on criminal punishment to address gender-based violence.

Both candidates are running in the shadow of horrible gun violence in Oakland. Wiley casts himself as sympathetic to reform, stressing his efforts to improve the juvenile justice system and reduce racial disparities from within, but he also presents himself as a moderate alternative to Price, which has won him the support of an array of law enforcement unions. Price is more squarely in the mold of progressives who have won other DA offices: she has committed to never charging children as adults and centering restorative justice initiatives.

3. California | Los Angeles County sheriff 

Under Alex Villanueva’s leadership, the Los Angeles sheriff’s department has been marred by scandals and investigations into abuses and organized violence—enough to fill a book, as Piper French reports in Bolts. And the sheriff only drew more scrutiny since then as he ordered the search of the house of one of his chief critics in September.

In the runoff, Villanueva faces Robert Luna, who has accumulated his own controversies while heading the Long Beach Police Department. The incumbent’s critics have still rallied around Luna, including Eric Strong, a more progressive challenger who was eliminated in June after coming in third. Whoever emerges victorious, local progressives have made it clear that they are circumspect about any talk of internal change given a history of failed reform, and they are pressing for more independent oversight: Angelenos are also deciding on Measure A, which would enable the county’s board of supervisors to remove a sheriff from office.  

4. California | San Francisco prosecutor

After the prominent reform DA Chesa Boudin was recalled in June, Mayor London Breed appointed the recall surrogate Brooke Jenkins to replace him. The transition brought a sea change: the dismissal of 15 staffers, including a complete turnover at the unit that investigates police violence against civilians, as Bolts reported, and reversals of key Boudin policies, including his moratoriums on gang sentencing enhancements, on seeking cash bail, and on charging children as adults. 

In the upcoming special election, Jenkins will defend her new seat against two challengers. The first is attorney Joe Alioto Veronese, a critic of both Boudin and Jenkins who is positioning himself as tough on crime and corruption. The progressive lane is occupied by John Hamasaki, the former police commissioner and critic of the San Francisco Police Department, who has lambasted Jenkins for her close relationship with London Breed and acceptance of large sums of money from the recall campaign.

5. California | San Diego County sheriff

San Diego is plagued by deadly jail conditions, even by the standards of the state’s dangerous carceral system, and this has become an unusually prominent issue in the open race for sheriff. Bolts reported in June that candidates are bringing vastly different commitments to the table. 

The contender who went furthest in proposing changes, Dave Myers, lost in June; this paved the way for a runoff between Undersheriff Kelly Martinez, who is endorsed by the association of deputy sheriffs, and John Hemmerling, a Republican who is generally critical of criminal justice reform. 

6. Florida | Pinellas (St Petersburg) and Pasco counties prosecutor

Home to a combined 1.5 million residents, Florida’s Pasco and Pinellas counties share a state attorney but they have not had a contested race for prosecutor in 30 years. Democrat Allison Miller, a public defender, is challenging Bruce Bartlett, a Republican incumbent appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to fill a vacancy. Miller jumped into the race proposing an array of reform proposals, including curbing pretrial detention and the adult prosecution of children; she told Bolts that she was fueled to run by her frustration at a system stacked in prosecutors’ favor.

But the climate transformed in August, as Bolts’s Piper French reported, when DeSantis made the extraordinary decision of suspending Andrew Warren, the elected prosecutor of neighboring Hillsborough County based on Warren’s statements that he would not prosecute cases of abortion and gender-affirming healthcare. Miller made a similar vow to not charge people over abortions, raising the specter that DeSantis could seek to block her from office even if she wins.

7. Indiana | Marion County (Indianapolis) prosecutor

Marion County is one of many places this year where police unions have clashed with local prosecutors who pushed some amount of reform. The local Fraternal Order of Police overwhelmingly approved a vote of “no confidence” against Democratic incumbent Ryan Mears over the summer and endorsed Republican challenger Cyndi Carrasco to replace him.

Carrasco says Mears crossed the line by promising to not prosecute certain behaviors, citing his blanket policy of not charging people for marijuana possession. “I do not want Indianapolis to become a San Francisco, to become a New York City, to become a Los Angeles,” she said at a recent forum. She also disagrees with Mears’ vow to not prosecute cases that touch on abortion. Should Mears win, he may also face retaliation from GOP lawmakers who have already signaled they want to get around the discretion of local prosecutors on that issue.

8. Iowa | Polk County (Des Moines) prosecutor

Kimberly Graham, who says she was inspired to run when she listened to an interview with Boston’s former DA Rachael Rollins on progressive prosecution, won a tough Democratic primary in June in Iowa’s most populous county. Graham, who represents abused and neglected children in court and used to work as a defense attorney, told Bolts that she has never worked as a prosecutor and considers her outsider status an asset. “If you’ve been a prosecutor for 30 years, maybe everything just looks like an opportunity to charge someone with a crime and send them to jail or prison,” she said. “Public safety and being safe is not just policing and prosecution.”

If she wins, her politics would represent a stark break from the status quo in Polk County, where the retiring Democratic prosecutor drew national headlines in 2020 for aggressively charging activists and a journalist after the Black Lives Matter protests. GOP nominee Allan Richards, by contrast, is emphasizing continuity with the outgoing incumbent, and a law-and-order message, despite the party difference. The election is unfolding against the backdrop of a ruling by the state supreme court in June that struck down constitutional protections for abortion in the state; Graham says she would not prosecute cases linked to abortion if it was banned.

9. Maryland | Frederick County sheriff

The rapidly diversifying Frederick County, located one hour north of D.C., has a long legacy of anti-immigrant policies, championed in large part by Sheriff Chuck Jenkins. This fall, Jenkins is seeking a fifth-term and immigrants’ rights advocates hope their longstanding efforts to reverse those hardline policies finally pay off, Bolts reported. Democratic nominee Karl Bickel, a former sheriff’s deputy, told Bolts that he would curtail the sheriff’s department’s relationship with ICE and end the county’s membership in ICE’s 287(g) program. 

Jenkins is also deeply affiliated with national far-right networks and subscribes to the idea that sheriffs are the supreme guardians of the Constitution. “Is it going to come down to my men facing off with a federal agency at gunpoint?” he has said. “I hope not.”

10. Massachusetts | Barnstable County (Cape Cod) sheriff 

Officials in Democratic-leaning Barnstable County publicly expressed support for immigrants last month after Florida’s governor flew dozens of asylum seekers to the region for a political stunt. But as Alex Burness reported from Cape Cod in Bolts, the county also has an unusually tight relationship with ICE: It is the only county in all of New England that contracts into the agency’s 287(g) program.

The local GOP sheriff is not running for re-election this year, which opens the door for possible change to immigration policies. The race pits a Republican lawmaker and a Democratic attorney, who told Bolts she would “rip up” the 287(g) agreement on her first day in office. 

11. Massachusetts | Bristol County sheriff

Thomas Hodgson, the longest-serving Massachusetts sheriff, has overseen jails marred by mounting suicides and complaints of medical neglect, squalor, and malnutrition, Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported this week. Hodgson, a Republican who is deeply embedded in national far-right networks, now faces his first opponent in twelve years, local Democratic mayor Paul Heroux.

Bristol County’s jail system has seen a long trail of lawsuits and investigations, including allegations of violence against detainees that led the Biden administration last year to break a contract to detain immigrants in the county. Elizabeth Matos, who heads an organization that advocates for people incarcerated in this state, told Burness the regime in Bristol is “intentionally dehumanizing.” “He’s earned the nickname ‘The Arpaio of the East’,” she said, referencing Joe Arpaio, the rightwing strongman and former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County.

12. Massachusetts | Plymouth County prosecutor

Back when he worked at the ACLU of Massachusetts, civil rights attorney Rahsaan Hall helped file requests for records from the DA’s office in Plymouth County. The office charged the ACLU $1.2 million dollars, only later relenting when faced with the threat of litigation. Now, Hall is the Democratic nominee against longtime Republican incumbent Tim Cruz, a vocal reform critic.

Hall is hoping to carry the torch for reform prosecutors in Massachusetts, a state that saw two watershed victories for reform-minded DAs in 2018 but is set to lose both this year. “I see it as my responsibility and duty to be, for lack of a better phrase, the voice crying out in the wilderness saying that there is another way,” Hall told Bolts‘s Alex Burness in September. Hall says he would reduce the footprint of the office by establishing a list of low-level charges his staff would have a presumption of not prosecuting, following the example of Rachael Rollins, the former prosecutor in Boston with whom Cruz frequently clashed.

13. Minnesota | Hennepin County (Minneapolis) prosecutor

Voters in the Minneapolis region will elect a prosecutor for the first time since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. For Malaika Eban, deputy director at the Minneapolis-based Legal Rights Center, the race is “a referendum on what we want to do as a community moving forward since George Floyd was murdered.” 

As Eamon Whalen reported last month as part of joint dive into the race by Bolts and Mother Jones, Tuesday’s election features two diametrically opposed visions of the criminal legal system. On the one side is Mary Moriarty, the county’s former chief public defender who long clashed with the outgoing prosecutor over racial inequities in his office and is now carrying the mantle of progressive policies. Her opponent Martha Holton Dimick is a former judge and prosecutor, who champions a law and order message and blames the mere talk of reform for fueling crime.

Hennepin voters are also voting for a new sheriff. The incumbent is not seeking re-election after crashing his car in a drunk-driving incident; both candidates on the ballot have said they will continue the policies implemented under his watch to curtail cooperation with ICE, including directives against sharing jail detainees’ booking information with the federal agency, reports The Sahan Journal. Dawanna Witt, a deputy in the department, is favored as she already received more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round in August.

14. Nebraska | Douglas County (Omaha) prosecutor

Incumbent prosecutor Don Kleine switched to the GOP two years ago after the local Democratic Party accused him of furthering white supremacy during the Black Lives Matter protests; he had brought no charges against the man who killed James Scurlock, a Black protester.

Two years later, Kleine faces a challenge from Dave Pantos, a Democrat and former director of Legal Aid of Nebraska, who is emphasizing some reform promises such as lowering criminal charges for drug possession.

15. New Mexico | Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) sheriff

Elected as a Democrat, Sheriff Manuel Gonzales antagonized his party by associating with Trump and resisting accountability over his office—including the man who this year ended up becoming the Democratic nominee to replace him, former sheriff’s deputy John Allen. Allen says he left Gonzales’s office in 2019 over concerns about compromised investigations into police use of force, and he now wants shootings probed by independent agencies. (Allen himself was hit by a lawsuit over an illegal search during a patrol two decades ago.)

Republican Paul Pacheco, a former police officer and head of the local police union, is using the conservative rhetoric around crime that is so ubiquitous this campaign season, blaming “anti-police rhetoric” for fueling a rise in crime. Bernalillo is one of only two sheriff’s races in which Everytown for Gun Safety, the group founded by Mike Bloomberg, has gotten involved. Everytown launched an ad campaign accusing Pacheco of being beholden to the gun lobby. Also on the ballot: a 21-year Libertarian who says sheriffs are authoritarian and denounces policing as “local tyranny.” 

16. New Mexico | Doña Ana County (Las Cruces) sheriff

Four years ago, Kim Stewart pulled off an unusual feat in this border county: She ousted the incumbent sheriff in the Democratic primary, and then beat a former Republican sheriff in the general election. Both of the men she defeated had entangled their department with federal immigration enforcement, whereas Stewart warned that a sheriff’s department should not be “the immigration police.” 

Stewart’s re-election bid next week offers a similar fork in the road for immigration enforcement in the county. Republican challenger Byron Hollister is advocating for tighter collaboration with federal agents, including by participating in a CBP grant program that Stewart opposed and halted in 2019. Doña Ana County leans Democratic, giving Stewart an edge.

17. North Carolina | Alamance County sheriff

Under President Barack Obama, U.S. Department of Justice accused Terry Johnson, the county’s longtime anti-immigrant sheriff, of making racist remarks and engaging in an “egregious pattern of racial profiling.” Two presidents later, Johnson is still sheriff, still demonizes immigrants, and still draws federal attention; the Biden administration canceled an ICE contract with Alamance this year. 

Johnson ran unopposed in both 2014 or 2018, despite the DOJ’s 2012 report. But this year, he landed a challenger, Kelly White, right before the final deadline. White, a Black Democrat, took part in a Souls to the Poll event last week meant to encourage voting. Just two years ago, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Johnson’s deputies pepper-sprayed voters who were marching to the polls as part of a similar event.

18. North Carolina | Columbus County sheriff

A bizarre story, as recounted by WECT:  Jody Greene, the Republican sheriff of a county that is home to the city of Whiteville, started making phone calls to Jason Soles, a Democrat who had briefly replaced him, to unleash hateful, racist tirades. Soles recorded the conversations. When the tapes became public, and amid broader allegations of abuse of power against Greene, the sheriff resigned from his job in mid-October to avoid a judge removing him from office.

But Greene is not giving up on power: He is still running in the Nov. 8 sheriff’s election. And his opponent will be none other than Jason Soles, the man who recorded him.

19. North Carolina | Forsyth County (Winston Salem) prosecutor

As the former president of North Carolina’s association of state prosecutors, Republican DA Jim O’Neill has been a vocal proponent of a tough-on-crime approach, including pushing back on legislation to legalize recreational marijuana, The Winston-Salem Journal reported in a profile last month. He said the state should be more aggressive in pursuing death penalty cases, and proposed a curfew on young people based on incorrect crime data. And when the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission found evidence that two people convicted in Forsyth County may be innocent, O’Neill called for its dismantling. 

O’Neill now faces Democrat Denise Hartsfield, a retired local judge. Hartsfield has sought to capitalize on the county’s blue lean and has criticized O’Neill’s style but has steered clear of a reform platform, including telling the Journal that she is not opposed to the death penalty. That has not stopped O’Neill from saying she embodies “the path of lawlessness, destruction.”

20. North Carolina | Pasquotank County sheriff

Pasquotank County sheriff’s deputies shot Andrew Brown Jr., an unarmed Black man, last year, and Brown’s death was met by protests in Elizabeth City that drew national attention. “We cannot go back to the way it was before Andrew Brown, Jr.’s murder,” the head of the local NAACP told WUNC in April, as protesters decry broader racial inequities in local policing. But local conservatives responded by rallying behind Republican Sheriff Tommy Wooten and defending the deputies. 

Wooten now faces Eddie Graham, a Black Democrat. “Let’s face it, Andrew Brown Jr. did not have to die,” Graham told The Daily Advance. “We cannot have a cowboy-style SWAT that lacks training, standards, and protocols.” Graham is proposing changes to deescalate interactions, such as banning no-knock warrants and having mental health professionals accompany sheriff’s deputies in responding to some emergency calls, though not necessarily to reduce them. 

21. North Carolina | Wake County (Raleigh) sheriff

During his tenure as Wake County sheriff, Donnie Harrison demonized immigrants, falsely blaming them for rising property and violent crime in the state, while increasing his department’s cooperation with ICE, including participating in its 287(g) program. That hardline stance became a liability at the polls when he sought re-election in 2018, as Trump’s presidency changed the way voters viewed the issue, especially in urban counties like Wake. Harrison lost that year by a whopping 10 points to a challenger who eventually made good on his promise to pull Wake out of 287(g). Other sheriffs who collaborated with ICE in North Carolina lost as well in 2018.

Harrison is now running for his old job back. He continued to defend 287(g) until flipping his position this summer when asked about it by Jeffrey Billman for Bolts; he said he would no longer rejoin the program—a sign that ICE collaboration remains a potent issue in some local races. Willie Rowe, a former deputy who ousted the incumbent sheriff in the Democratic primary, says Harrison couldn’t afford to let this year’s election become a referendum on ICE, telling Bolts, “He wants to win. That’s the motivating factor. The numbers aren’t there to support that kind of policy.”

22. Oklahoma | Oklahoma County (Oklahoma City) prosecutor

Kevin Calvey, the Republican nominee for DA in Oklahoma’s largest county, is running on a striking vow: to drop the charges filed by the outgoing DA against five Oklahoma City police officers who shot and killed 15-year Stavian Rodriguez outside a convenience store. “I would have shot him (Rodriguez) myself,” Calvey said at a forum last year.

Calvey, a conservative firebrand and state lawmaker turned county commissioner, faces Vicki Behenna, a former federal prosecutor who served on the team that convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and who later worked with The Innocence Project, Bolts and the Oklahoma-based The Frontier reported in October. Behenna has said Calvey is pandering to the police, but she too has criticized the outgoing prosecutor for having trained relationships with local law enforcement.

23. Texas | Bexar County (San Antonio) prosecutor

Joe Gonzales made jail diversion and other criminal justice reforms the focus of his winning DA campaign in 2018. But the Democrat said it was a personal threat from the county’s former DA that first inspired him to run. As a then-defense attorney, Gonzales claimed that then-DA Nico LaHood threatened to destroy his law practice after Gonzales confronted him about withholding evidence in a case. Gonzales unseated LaHood in the Democratic primary and then won the general election that year, while LaHood eventually faced probation and a fine by the state bar.  

Nico LaHood’s younger brother, Marc LaHood, is now challenging Gonzales with support from both local and state police unions, which have been predictably hostile to diversion programs Gonzales has implemented since taking office meant to prevent arrest and convictions for people accused of minor offenses, like misdemeanor marijuana possession. Marc LaHood says he will crack down on even low-level offenses, using the language of “broken windows.” He has also vowed to enforce the state’s criminal abortion ban; Gonzalez said after the Dobbs ruling he planned to not prosecute abortion cases but added he would not pledge that to avoid possible Republican preemption.  

24. Texas | Dallas County prosecutor

John Creuzot helped turn Dallas County a deeper shade of blue in 2018 when he beat a sitting Republican DA on a reform platform that promised to help “end” mass incarceration. Over the past four years, he has followed through on promises to implement policies to divert people from jail, including by simply refusing to charge people for certain low-level crimes that often stem from homelessness and drug addiction. And yet, as he runs for re-election this year touting those reforms, Dallas’ jail population is now at a six-year peak. Degrading conditions inside the local lockup have grown even worse in recent years because of overcrowding and the pandemic. 

Writing in Bolts in October, Tyler Hicks reports that the landscape in Dallas highlights the limits of Creuzot’s reforms and also the challenges facing reform-minded DAs in red states, where top officials are often actively hostile to decarceration. Creuzot faces the same opponent that he beat in 2018, former DA Faith Johnson, who has since then dialed up her tough-on-crime rhetoric.

25. Texas | Hays County prosecutor

The criminal legal system in fast-growing Hays County has long been defined by punitive, zero-tolerance policing and prosecution despite its close proximity to Austin, Texas’s liberal capital city. In large part that has been thanks to GOP officials like the current DA Wes Mau, who has taken a notably hard stance on low-level charges like marijuana possession. 

This year’s DA election to replace the retiring Mau highlights the groundswell of local activism in recent years challenging the status quo, Michael Barajas reports in a Bolts story highlighting the work of the group Mano Amiga. Democratic nominee Kelly Higgins vows a “sea change” in the county, promising to decline prosecution of cannabis possession and implement the kind of pretrial diversion that local activists have demanded for years. Higgins faces David Puryear, who is leaning into the anti-reform, tough-on-crime rhetoric of state and national Republicans. 

26. Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) prosecutor

Tarrant County is the GOP’s last urban stronghold in Texas, but it has also started to break for Democrats at the top of the ticket in recent years. This year’s DA race is one of many local elections that could test that trend. Two longtime fixtures of the local court system are running to replace outgoing Republican Sharen Wilson, who had become notorious among voting rights advocates because of her selective enforcement of election laws that led to lengthy prison sentences for Rosa Ortega and Crystal Mason—women who mistakenly thought they could vote. 

Tiffany Burks, the Democratic nominee and a longtime prosecutor in the office, told Bolts earlier this year that she disagreed with the direction of the office under Wilson, but she has steered clear of the kind of systematic reforms other Democratic prosecutors and candidates have pushed, like declination or diversion policies for low-level offenses. Still, Burks told Bolts that she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever—Tiffany Burks has no plans to do that.” Republican nominee Phil Sorrells, a longtime local judge running with endorsements from Trump and local police unions, seems determined to enforce the state’s abortion ban. And he has tried to paint Burks as a radical; an outside group tied to Virginia’s GOP attorney general also recently attacked Burks by sending mailers across Tarrant County with fake quotes in an attempt to make her look soft on crime. 

27. Washington | Clark County (Vancouver) sheriff

Just north of Portland, Oregon, Clark County is a politically divided county that may elect a sheriff who is associating with the far-right. Rey Reynolds, a Voucouver police officer, is running as a so-called constitutional sheriff, and pledging to not enforce laws he deems unconstitutional. The growing movement of constitutional sheriffs, which has a number of adherents in the Northwest, preaches that sheriffs enjoy ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.. (In a recent letter, Reynolds denied belonging to a movement even as he embraced its central tenets.)

Reynolds also faces an internal police probe over statements he made on an online show that mirrored the conservative fearmongering against trans people and suggested he would ramp up arrests over it. Reynolds, who is endorsed by the state’s Fraternal Order of Police and the local GOP, faces John Horch, who has called this constitutional sheriff rhetoric “dangerous.” But Horch, a longtime sheriff’s deputy, is himself critical of state efforts to reform policing and of county efforts to increase oversight of the local jail.

28. Washington | King County (Seattle) prosecutor

Dan Satterberg is retiring this year after fifteen years as Seattle’s chief prosecutor, and local reformers have rallied behind Leesa Manion to replace him, The Stranger reports. Manion is Satterberg’s chief of staff, and she touts the launch of reforms like a program to divert people accused of a first offense away from criminal prosecution and toward social services.

Manion has cast herself as a cautious reformer, rather than embrace progressive priorities. Still, fault lines are stark between Manion and her opponent Jim Ferrell, who is running on tough-on-crime messaging, wants prosecutors to crack down on minors, and touts the backing of local police organizations. (Manion says a prosecutor should be independent from police groups.) Ferrell was part of a group of local mayors last year who called on Satterberg to end his diversion program; the group wrote another letter this summer that assailed the state’s recent criminal justice reforms and called for ramping up prosecutions, including of drug cases.

29. Washington | Klickitat County sheriff

Klickitat is a sparsely populated county in southern Washington, 100 miles east of Portland, but Sheriff Bob Songer has earned it outsized attention, including the spotlight of a New Yorker article in 2020 after he rejected the state’s COVID-19 restrictions. To justify his stance, Songer has said he had pledged an oath to the “Supreme Judge of the Universe,” which he says ties his function as sheriff to Christianity. Songer is part of the far-right movement of “constitutional sheriffs,” which says sheriffs have supreme authority when it comes to interpreting the constitution, and he has threatened to arrest state officials who pursue laws he believes are unconstitutional.

Songer now faces a tricky re-election race against fellow Republican Garique Clifford, after finishing narrowly ahead by about one percentage point in the first round in August. Clifford says Songer is too extreme and combative, but has also taken pains to not reject some of his premises regarding a sheriff’s role.

30. Washington | Spokane County prosecutor

Prosecuting Attorney Larry Haskell, a Republican, has been under a cloud of controversy since early this year, when the Inlander exposed racist statements by his wife, who publicly describes herself as a “proud white nationalist.” First elected in 2014, Haskell has also fought against criminal justice reforms passed by state Democrats, using his discretion as local prosecutor to effectively circumvent sentencing reforms to dial back the state’s three strikes laws, as HuffPost reported this summer.

Haskell now faces Deb Conklin, a local pastor who is running as an independent and a former prosecutor who has not practiced law since 1987. Conklin has criticized Haskell’s tough on crime approach and has proposed reforms like pretrial diversion for nonviolent offenses, The Spokesman-Review reports.  Haskell and Conklin moved to this runoff after a tight first round in August, where Haskell received 28 percent and Conklin received 27 percent, with two other candidates close behind. 

And some honorable mentions

There are plenty of other elections that are worth keeping an eye on. 

Bolts is also watching sheriff races in California’s Monterey County, where the sheriff’s office is marred in scandals; Florida’s Duval County (Jacksonville), where an incumbent’s summer resignation triggered a special election; Washington’s Thurston County, where a right-leaning incumbent fell behind in the first round of his re-election race in August and now face a runoff; and Wisconsin’s Dane County (Madison), a heavily blue area where the Democratic sheriff told Bolts over the summer that he would not arrest people over abortion.

As for prosecutors, we are also keeping an eye on Delaware’s race for attorney general, the office that oversees prosecution in a rare state that has no elected DAs; Massachusetts’s Cape and Islands district, where a tough-on-crime prosecutor who sparred with reformers is retiring, Nebraska’s Lancaster County, where a Republican DA faces a challenger who founded a progressive political organization; and New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, where the former chair of the national Libertarian Party is challenging a Republican incumbent.

Prosecutors and sheriffs are just one slice of the pie when it comes to criminal justice, of course. Tuesday will also decide control of governorships and legislatures in most states, many attorneys general who often have prosecutorial power, the mayors meant to oversee the police, and judicial races that might change the outlook of the bench at the level of state supreme courts, with clear stakes for sentencing in a place like Michigan, or of local judgeships like in California. 

Piper French contributed to the reporting. This piece also draws from earlier guides Bolts has published throughout 2022, including a national introduction to the DA and sheriff races of 2022 in February by Daniel Nichanian, a guide to elections that matter to abortion in July by Daniel Nichanian, and a guide on California elections in October by Piper French and Daniel Nichanian. Our cheat sheet of elections to watch on Nov. 8 also has other elections of import to criminal justice.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the results of the August primary in Klickitat County.

The post The 30 Prosecutor and Sheriff Races that Will Shape Criminal Justice Next Week appeared first on Bolts.

But Commissioner Couy Griffin was adamant. As the founder of Cowboys For Trump, he was steeped in election conspiracy theories that sprung up after Trump’s loss in 2020. At an August 11 meeting Griffin pushed for their county to eliminate election ballot drop boxes and voting machines, which he argued could be tools for voter fraud. He also wanted to sue Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who months earlier had gone to court to force them to certify primary election results that Griffin didn’t trust. 

The other two commissioners, also Republicans, weren’t buying it. As their county lawyer RB Nichols made clear, the use of voting machines and drop boxes is dictated by state law. “It won’t matter what we vote, we have no authority to do anything,” said Gerald Matherly. Fellow Commissioner Vickie Marquardt agreed, saying “this is out of our purview.”

Hours later, after a raucous community meeting that included shouting, allegations of fraud, and calls for resignations, Griffin prevailed. The commission voted 2-1 to do away with drop boxes and voting machines, as well as to sue the secretary of state. 

These moves kicked off an intra-party showdown between Republican elected officials following the rule of law and others who are trying to overturn the system as they pursue election conspiracies in a county that voted 62 percent for Trump in 2020. 

They offer a preview for the types of fights that could ensue as more election deniers seek positions of electoral power in New Mexico. So far those on the side of following the law are winning, but that is only true as long as key positions are filled by people willing to resist pressure from constituents who have bought into Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies. 

Otero County Clerk Robyn Holmes, also a Republican, is refusing to comply with the commission’s directive. Holmes says she has the power to decide how local elections are run and the voting machines and drop boxes will stay.

“They cannot create laws. I took an oath of office to follow the law and that’s what I’m going to do,” Holmes told Bolts. 

Holmes has the benefit of knowing that in her showdown with the commission, she has Toulouse Oliver backing her up. Back in June the Otero Commission refused to certify primary election results—despite one commissioner, Matherly, being on the ballot and needing his own candidacy to be certified. The commission had no discretion to refuse to certify results under state law, and Toulouse Oliver went to court to force the commission to reverse course. The state supreme court stepped in and sided with her.

Asked if having an election denier as secretary of state would change the dynamic and make her job more difficult, Holmes said “I think absolutely it would.” 

New Mexico is one of several states this fall where an election denier is vying to take over the secretary of state position. The Republican challenger to Toulouse Oliver is Audrey Trujillo, a pro-Trump candidate who rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election and called Biden’s victory a “coup.”

Trujillo has endorsed various conspiracy theories and claimed that school shootings were conducted by “the deep state” in order “to push an agenda” to take away guns. She is campaigning heavily on conspiracies about election security, saying that current New Mexico leaders weaponized voter laws and the Covid-19 pandemic to “secure their elections for at least 100 years.” Similar to the movement in Otero County, she claims voting machines manipulated election results and has called for hand counting ballots. In June, Trujillo publicly urged the state’s county commissioners to not certify their primary election results without a hand recount and encouraged them to stop using voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.

“I just want to improve the system we have in place; I’m not here to recreate the wheel,” Trujillo told the Las Cruces Sun News in September. “But if there are questions on those machines, we’re going to do our damnedest to do our research and see how we can do it a better way and an easier way.”

A secretary of state sympathetic to conspiracy theorists could embolden controversies that are already bubbling at the local level, either by sitting back and doing nothing when local officials refuse to certify results or, more dramatically, themself refusing to certify the lists of candidates running for state office. They could also disrupt other key roles that the office plays in overseeing elections, with responsibilities ranging from producing election rules to investigating complaints of lawbreaking. 

New Mexicans are also voting on two supreme court elections this year. The high court is sure to remain in Democratic hands, but Republicans could narrow their deficit and at least one of the GOP candidates has echoed conspiracies about election administration. 

County commission meetings across the state are regularly beset by residents expressing unfounded conspiracy theories about how drop boxes and voting machines are tied to election fraud. Occasionally commissioners take their side. 

“It’s the overall system that comes into question,”one exasperated county commissioner told the AP. “So how do you challenge that, how do you get your answers?”

The source of many of these theories is a husband and wife couple, David and Erin Clements, who have traveled all across the country to evangelize their brand of election denialism. They happen to be from New Mexico, one county over from Otero. In their home state they have dubbed themselves the New Mexico Audit Force and released an extensive report full of voter fraud allegations that fall apart under scrutiny.

Neither have a background in elections. Erin Clements was a civil engineer. David Clements was a business professor at New Mexico State University who was fired after refusing to comply with the school’s Covid safety policies on masking or vaccinations. He amassed a large following online and raised over $300,000 from a crowdfunding campaign.

The couple travels from state to state urging people to show up at their local government meetings to demand voting machines and drop boxes be removed. They have been particularly active in New Mexico—and it’s working. County clerks have been receiving steady pressure to dismantle the machinery of elections. 

“It’s consistent, it is unrelenting, it is sometimes aggressive. I’ve had to report a couple of threats to the FBI,” said Doña Ana County clerk Amanda López Askin. “I hate to say it but it’s part of the job at this point, sadly.”

She counted 141 Freedom of Information Act requests from election deniers, including requests for in-person tours to audit election machinery. “They have really weaponized public records requests. If I let them they would incapacitate my office to the point where we would not be able to run an election,” said López Askin.

In Otero County, this dynamic exploded into a chaotic community meeting the evening of August 11.

The Clementses were welcomed onstage to discuss their report. When County Attorney RB Nichols reiterated that the commission had no legal authority to do away with voting machines or ballot drop boxes, David Clements lambasted the local officials for cowardice. 

“It’s tyranny. And you don’t help them. You don’t help us. You don’t fight. You just do whatever the secretary of state tells you to,” he said.

Supporters in the public gallery cheered along. Nichols was insistent, saying he would not go along with the Clementses demands that the county sue the secretary of state. “I’m not going to file a frivolous lawsuit, David. I have to have a good-faith basis.”

When an audience member called for following the law, Clements said that Nazis under the direction of Hitler were also following the law. When commissioner Matherly discussed downgrading the motion to a request so that they would not risk going to jail, Clements shamed him. “And why are you scared of going to jail?”

The Clementses, along with commissioner Griffin, waged a steady pressure campaign. Griffin argued that the commission should sue Toulouse Oliver for forcing them to certify primary results that he claimed were later proven to be fraudulent.

The basis for Griffin’s fraud claim is that a hand recount changed the results of one primary race by three votes. Clerk Holmes explained that three people filled out their ballot incorrectly and that the machine would have notified them of their mistake and directed them to get a new ballot, but sometimes people do not want to start over and submit it anyway. She said during the hand recount election workers determined that voter intention of those three ballots were clear enough to be counted.

Despite this explanation, Griffin continued to insist that the discrepancy was proof of voter fraud. 

“If there were three votes that weren’t counted in that race, how many other races were the same?” he said. “And how does that affect the big picture, OK? Again, I’m just fighting for the truth up here and I see it pretty clearly right now.”

David Clements jumped up to a microphone to shout down Holmes. “You need to resign,” he said. “Disgusting how you fight the people.”

Griffin and the Clementses won the day, convincing commissioner Marquardt to vote for removing drop boxes and voting machines, as well as for suing the secretary of state. 

Returning to hand counting ballots would turn the clock back on decades of advances in voting infrastructure. In modern times, hand counting is generally only performed in small jurisdictions dealing with a few hundred votes. In Otero County, which has 67,000 people, a full hand count would be enormously time consuming and could delay election results by weeks. 

While many people see voting machines as mysterious and consider hand-counting ballots to be the gold standard, research has consistently shown that machines are more accurate than people. One 2012 study on post-election audits published in the Election Law Journal found that when humans hand count complex paper ballots they can easily count ballots multiple times, skip over ballots, or misread a voter’s intent. 

“Hand counting indisputably takes more time, more money and is less accurate,” said Victoria Bassetti, senior advisor to the States United Democracy Center.

America’s fervor for democracy has created a democratic system not suited to be tallied by humans. Ballots in other developed nations may feature a single question. American ballots can run multiple pages as people vote on governors, secretaries of state, judges, sheriffs, comptrollers and so on. That leads to a lot of tedious counting, a lot of concentration required, and a lot of opportunity for slip-ups.

“Reading ballots is a repetitive and boring task and humans lose focus. They just do,” said Bassetti. 

When using voting machines, states build in a series of checks and balances to ensure accuracy. The specifics vary by jurisdiction but typically include pre-election certification and accuracy testing, post-election statistical and risk-limiting audits, plus optional or automatic recounts in close races. 

The machines have limitations—they can’t interpret someone changing their vote by crossing out a box or writing in the margins—but they can tally in hours what would take humans days or weeks to count. 

In Otero County, the August 11 meeting would prove to be the high water mark of the rebellion. Griffin would end up being removed from office. He had attended the January 6 riots at the Capitol and was later convicted of breaching restricted Capitol grounds. In September, he became the first elected official in over 150 years to be disqualified from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone involved in an insurrection against the United States from serving in public office.

Holmes has ignored the commission’s directives. Early voting has already started for this fall’s elections, with voting machines and secure ballot drop boxes currently set to be part of the system.

So far no lawsuit has been filed by RB Nichols, the county attorney who publicly declared he would not file a lawsuit he knew to be in bad faith.

The most recent polling shows incumbent secretary of state Toulouse Oliver with a healthy lead over challenger Trujillo. Since Griffin was removed as a commissioner, the drop box and voting machine issues he was crusading for have not made it back into discussion. Instead, commission meetings have returned to focusing on typical local governance issues.

But the election conspiracies have not died down. In rural Torrance County, county commissioners approved a hand recount of primary election results and recently tried to oust the county clerk over her handling of voting machine certification.

López Askin, the Doña Ana County clerk, is one of the most vocal clerks in the state in responding to election conspiracy theories, which she finds are regularly brought up at community meetings. She recalled one resident at a meeting shaking with anger and demanding officials look into fraud as she held up the Clementses self-described audit.

López Askin said that she and her colleagues try to explain the multiple levels of security built into the system—certification of machines, accuracy tests, recounts in close races, post-election audits of results—but ultimately she fears people will opt out of the democratic process because they believe the people telling them it’s a sham.

“These folks get up there and they are fully angry and emotional. They believe it. I don’t know if there’s anything I could say at this point that could continue otherwise,” she said. “So I actually feel mostly compassion for them.”

The post A New Mexico County Went To War With Voting Machines. It May Gain a Powerful Ally in November. appeared first on Bolts.

If they win in November, Trump-endorsed election deniers like Arizona’s Mark Finchem and Michigan’s Kristina Kamaro could seize the reins of election administration in key swing states on agendas built on disproven fraud claims and destabilizing changes like eliminating mail-in voting. But these high-profile candidates are just the tip of the iceberg: 17 Republicans are running for secretary of state—or for governor in states where the governor appoints the secretary—after denying the results of the 2020 election, seeking to overturn them, or refusing to affirm the outcome. A handful of additional Republicans haven’t outright questioned Biden’s win but have still amplified Trump’s false statements about widespread fraud.

Trump’s Big Lie, then, is defining the political stakes in most of the 35 states where the secretary of state’s office is on the line, directly or indirectly, in November. 

But beyond the threats of election subversion, secretaries of state affect voting rights in many more subtle ways. Long before Trump, they already featured heated debates around how states run their elections—and how easy or difficult it is for people to register and cast ballots. Secretaries of state may decide the scope of voter roll purges, instruct counties on how many ballot drop boxes to set up, or implement major policies like automatic voter registration. And their word carries great clout in legislative debates over voting. The Big Lie is overshadowing those functions, but in many places these broader issues remain at the forefront. 

This new Bolts guide walks through all of those 35 states, plus Washington, D.C., one by one. Voters are electing their secretary of state directly in 27 states; in another eight, the secretary of state will be selected after the election by public officials—the governor, or lawmakers—who are on the Nov. 8 ballot. (The 15 other states and Puerto Rico will either select theirs after the 2024 cycle or, in a few cases, don’t have a secretary of state at all.)

The stakes are highest in the presidential swing states that election deniers may capture, namely Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania (via the governor’s race). But many other states feature such candidates, from Alabama to Maryland; in Wyoming, a Trump-endorsed election denier is the only candidate on the ballot.

And other pressing voting concerns are also shaping these battles. In Ohio, for instance, voting rights groups have repeatedly clashed with the sitting secretary of state on voting access in jails or the availability of ballot drop boxes. In Georgia, the midterms are unfolding in the shadow of new restrictions adopted last year, with the incumbent’s support. In Vermont, the likely next secretary of state says she wants to support local experiments to expand voter eligibility. 

Not all secretaries of state handle election administration; in a few states such as Illinois and South Carolina, they have nothing at all to do with it. Even where secretaries of state oversee some aspects of the election system, the scope of their role can vary greatly. Arizona’s secretary of state, for instance, must certify election results; Michigan’s secretary, by contrast, plays no role in the certification process (that role is reserved to a board of canvassers) but does oversee and guide municipal officials on how to run their elections. 

To clarify this confusing landscape, Bolts published two databases this year. The first details, state by state, which state offices prepare and administer an election (Who Runs our Elections?). The second details, state by state, which state offices handle the counting, canvassing, and certification stages (Who Counts Our Elections?). 

Explore our state breakdown of the 2022 midterms below, or click on a specific state in this interactive map.

Secretaries of State in 2022

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AR

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AZ

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#CA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#CO

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections//#CT

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#FL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#GA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ID

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IN

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#KS

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MD

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ME

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MN

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ND

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NE

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NH

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NM

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NV

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NY

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#OH

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#OK

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#PA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#RI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#SC

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#SD

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#TX

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#VT

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WY

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#DC

For further reading, also dive into Louis Jacobson’s electoral assessment of all secretary of state races, and the FiveThirtyEight analysis of how each state’s Republican nominee is responding to questions about the 2020 elections. And you can

Alabama

Wes Allen, a Republican lawmaker who won a tight summer primary for secretary of state, has already shown his conspiracist leanings: He said earlier this year that, as secretary of state, he would promptly withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a organization that helps 30 states maintain voter rolls, citing George Soros to explain his decision shortly after a far-right website published an article that falsely tied ERIC to Soros. 

Allen faces Democratic nominee Pamela Laffitte in November. In this ruby red state, he is likely to win and replace John Merrill, the retiring Republican; Merrill is known for blocking people who criticize his handling of voting rights on social media and for denying the state’s history of voter suppression.

Arizona

Mark Finchem is arguably the election denier with the best chance to win and take over a swing state’s election system. A member of the far-right Oath Keeper militia, which was involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection, Finchem falsely claims that the 2020 election results were fraudulent, has pushed for controversial election audits, and wants to see sweeping changes to Arizona’s election system, including ending early voting and ending the use of electronic voting machines. If he wins, he would oversee the 2024 election, including being in charge of certifying the next presidential results. His intentions would be in question given his continued statements about 2020. He introduced legislation earlier this year to decertify the last election and “set aside” the ballots in three counties, including Maricopa and Pima counties, which together cover two-thirds of the state, as “irredeemably compromised”—a position he repeated in a debate last week.

“When we have conspiracy theories and lies like the ones Mr. Finchem has just shared, based in no real evidence, what we end up doing is eroding the faith that we have in each other as citizens,” responded Adrian Fontes, the Democratic nominee, during the debate. Fontes ran elections in Arizona’s most populous county as Maricopa County Recorder during the early stages of the pandemic; in March 2020, he tried to mail ballots to registered voters during the presidential primary, though his effort was ultimately struck down by courts, and Finchem has criticized him for it. Fontes has also been supportive of expanding voting opportunities through reforms like automatic voter registration. 

Arkansas

Republican incumbent John Thurston says elections are secure in Arkansas, but he also echoes those who sow doubts about how the 2020 election unfolded across the country, and his staff attended a conspiracist symposium hosted by Mike Lindell at state expense. In this staunch red state where Democrats have not won any statewide race since 2010, Thurston faces Democrat Anna Beth Gorman in November.

California

When U.S. Senator Kamala Harris became vice president in 2021, it sparked a game of musical chairs in California politics. Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Secretary of State Alex Padilla to replace Harris, and then appointed Shirley Weber to replace Padilla as secretary of state. A former Democratic lawmaker who championed civil rights legislation, such as a landmark law in 2020 to fight racism in juries, Weber is now seeking a full term. She crushed the all-party primary in June with 59 percent of the vote; Republican Rob Bernosky, who she will now face again in November’s Top 2 runoff, received 19 percent. (Two candidates who, unlike Bernosky, ran as election deniers won a combined 13 percent.) 

Colorado

Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, has clashed since 2020 with Tina Peters, the Trump-aligned Republican county clerk who is now under indictment for allegedly allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment. The two seemed headed for a showdown in 2022 , but Peters lost the Republican primary in June to Pam Anderson, a former county clerk who, unlike Peters, accepts the results of the 2020 election. (Other election deniers also lost Republican primaries in Colorado at the county level in the primary, Bolts reported.) 

Griswold has still centered her campaign on the threat of election subversion, pointing to her efforts against Peters but also speaking out against election deniers in the national press. “The country could lose the right to vote,” she told The Guardian in August. Anderson, who is a career election administrator, says she would bring a “professional ethic” into the office, and is making the case that Griswold is too focused on advancing her party’s goals. Anderson also supports the major features of Colorado’s system, notably universal mail-in voting.

Connecticut

Stephanie Thomas, a Democratic lawmaker, faces Republican Dominic Rapini in an open contest. Rapini is the former board chair of an organization that promoted conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election, and he himself has raised doubts and false claims of fraud about the legitimate outcome of the race. While Thomas is favored in this blue-leaning state, observers stress that the rhetoric about voter fraud and election denialism can erode public confidence in voting systems even if Rapini loses. In addition, the two candidates disagree on rules around voter ID, which Rapini wants to tighten, and early voting. The state is holding a referendum in November on authorizing in-person early voting, an issue that Thomas supports and Rapini opposes.

Florida (via the governor’s race)

The power to appoint the secretary of state lies with the governor in Florida. Earlier this year, DeSantis—who has a penchant for filing government offices with his allies—appointed Cord Byrd, a staunch conservative who had championed the state’s recent voter restrictions while in the legislature. Byrd has refused to say whether he believes the 2020 election results were legitimate, and he has amplified false rhetoric about widespread fraud. The state’s new elections police force resides in the secretary of state’s office, and Byrd was involved in August in trumpeting the criminal charges against 20 people who had been previously allowed to vote for alleged voting law violations. 

DeSantis is up for reelection against Democrat Charlie Crist, who was the state’s Republican governor more than a decade ago and had a very different approach to voting. Crist would have the authority to replace Byrd should he win.

Georgia

Incumbent Brad Raffensperger famously rebuffed Trump’s attempts to “find” more votes in the 2020 election, and proceeded to defeat a Trump-endorsed election denier in the Republican primary with surprising ease. But Raffensperger has also supported the new voter restrictions that Republicans have adopted since 2020, including tightening procedures around mail-in and early voting, and banning groups from passing out food or water to voters waiting in line. He defended the measures in 2021 as a way to “restore voter confidence.”

Raffensperger faces Democratic nominee Bee Nguyen, a state representative who voted against the 2021 law, has criticized this record and is running on a platform of improving ballot access in Georgia with voter outreach efforts such as translating election materials into more languages and establishing sites for people to submit vote-by-mail applications. 

Idaho

Phil McGrane, the county clerk of Ada County, narrowly defeated two conspiracy theorists in the Republican primary for secretary of state in May. In a state as conservative as Idaho, that was the hard part; he is now favored in November over Democrat Shawn Keenan. On the one hand, this primary marked a defeat for fervent election deniers, who attacked McGrane for accepting grants from a private foundation—as did more than a dozen other counties in Idaho alone—to help run the 2020 election. 

Yet, when asked by Bolts if he agreed that Biden was the legitimate president, McGrane demurred, only saying that Biden was in the White House. He has spoken against Democratic proposals to strengthen voting rights. As county clerk, McGrane has also taken initiatives to make voting more accessible, such as setting up “food truck voting,” i.e. mobile voting centers, and setting up on-demand ballot printers, Bolts reported.

Illinois

This secretary of state’s office is not involved in election administration. (Alexi Giannoulias, the last Democrat to lose a U.S. Senate race in Illinois, faces Republican lawmaker Dan Brady. Incumbent Jesse White is retiring after 24 years leading an office that handles driver’s licenses and state records.)

Indiana

Diego Morales rode the Big Lie to oust the incumbent secretary of state, Holli Sullivan, at the Republican Party’s state convention; he echoed Trump’s claims about fraud in the 2020 election, which he called a “scam.” He has since softened those statements, including calling Biden the legitimate president, and has walked back his previous call to cut Indiana’s number of early voting days by half. Still, he has courted controversy, as the Indianapolis Star reported in July that he used campaign funds to buy a personal vehicle. Morales also twice left jobs at the secretary of state’s office over poor performance.

Democrats see an opening to win a rare statewide office in this reliably red state, and Democrat Destiny Wells is hitting Morales for his ties with the far-right and for wanting to limit voting options like mail-in ballots. 

Iowa

Iowa Republicans have tightened access to voting in recent years with a pair of measures that restrict mail voting, among other policies. Democratic nominee Joel Miller, who currently serves as an elections official in the state’s second most populous county, said in an interview with Bolts that he is running because he opposes those reforms and wants to “make voting easy again” in Iowa. He faults his opponent, Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, for failing to oppose these voting restrictions. Pate is running for a third term, and the state has veered significantly to the right since his first election.

Kansas

The Big Lie split the Republican primary, with Secretary of State Scott Schwab pushing back against the former president’s conspiracies while his challenger embraced them. Schwab survived by 10 percentage points and now faces Democrat Jeanna Repass, who notes that Schwab has still supported restrictions on ballot access that she vows to fight. In this staunch red state, Democrats have not won an election for secretary of state since 1948.

Maine (via legislature) 

The Big Lie is in the air in Maine. Paul LePage, the former Republican governor who is running to regain his job back, has trumpeted unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and suggested that people were bused in from out of state to vote in Maine—conspiracist claims very similar to Trump’s. Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has pushed back, faulting him for wanting it to be harder for people to be “exercising their constitutional right to vote.” 

Whether Bellows keeps her job depends on the legislative races in November. A joint session of the legislature selects the secretary of state every two years. Although the GOP has not put a Republican in this office since it briefly seized both chambers in 2010, it has an outside shot at flipping the legislature and thus the secretary of state’s office this fall. 

Maryland (via the governor’s race)

Dan Cox, the Republican nominee for governor, is a staunch election denier who helped organize travel to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. If he wins the governorship, he would get to appoint a secretary of state. (Many election administration duties in Maryland are in the hands of a board of elections; but the secretary of state does sit on the board of canvassers, the body that is tasked with certifying election results.) That said, the state Senate must confirm a governor’s nominee in Maryland, and that chamber is highly likely to stay in Democratic hands. In addition, Democrat Wes Moore is heavily favored in polling and prognostications to beat Cox and to get to appoint a secretary of state himself.

Massachusetts

In his quest for a record eighth term, Secretary of State Bill Galvin has already completed the hardest step by prevailing in the contentious Democratic primary against a local NAACP leader who faulted him for not promoting ballot access proactively enough, as Bolts reported. In this blue state, the party’s nomination is typically tantamount to a general election win. 

Still, the profile of his Republican opponent keeps this on Bolts’s list of elections to watch. Rayla Campbell has closely aligned with Trump and has repeated his lies that the election was stolen. 

If Galvin prevails, keep an eye on how he shifts over his next term. After facing a progressive challenger in the 2018 primary and easily beating him, Galvin grew more supportive of pro-voter reforms such as same-day registration. 

Michigan

Republican nominee Kristina Karamo, an avowed election denier endorsed by Trump, would lead Michigan’s loose constellation of  more than 1,600 local election offices if she wins the secretary of state race. As Bolts reported, Michigan has one of the most decentralized voting systems in the country, but the secretary of state would still have the authority to issue directives and conduct audits of local offices—functions that Karamo could weaponize for her election denialist agenda if elected. Republicans have aggressively targeted election officials who resisted their effort to overturn the 2020 election in the state, and observers worry about how Karamo could further unwind the system. “It’s one thing to be feeling that heat from the outside,” David Levine, a fellow at the non-profit Alliance for Securing Democracy, told Bolts. “If the arsonist is inside the firehouse you’ve got a whole different problem.”

Karamo is trying to oust Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson, who oversaw the 2020 election and has defended the administration of that election—including an expansion of absentee voting—against critics. 

Minnesota

Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee, has mirrored Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. At a party convention, she aired a conspiracist video that used anti-Semitic tropes, which led to an apology by the state Republican Party’s chair. If she wins in November against Democratic incumbent Steve Simon, she would gain the power to oversee the state’s election system, which could affect the voting rights of Minnesota’s numerous immigrant communities. As the Sahan Journal previewed, Crockett has a history of making racist and anti-immigrant statements and wants to tighten voter ID restrictions, saying that non-English speaking immigrants have been “exploited for their votes.” Simon, meanwhile, wants to expand language access for voting materials.

Nebraska

Secretary of State Robert Evnen, a Republican, is running unopposed in the general election, but his primary was far more contentious. Evnen secured the GOP nomination in May with just 45 percent of the vote against two candidates who each suggested that elections have security issues and proposed restricting voting procedures; Evnen has rejected fraud allegations, and defended the state’s use of voting machines. But Evnen is also hoping that the state adopts new voter ID requirements, which Nebraskans will be voting on in a ballot measure in November. 

Nevada

Republican Jim Marchant is a lead organizer of the America First slate of secretaries of state candidates, the Trump-aligned coalition who are denying the results of the 2020 elections and laying the groundwork to intervene in 2024. Marchant is vocal about his false beliefs that the 2020 election results were illegitimate, claiming both that the presidency was stolen from Trump and that his own loss in a congressional race was due to fraud. Marchant supported the push for Nevada Republicans to send a slate of false electors to Congress in 2020, and he told The Guardian that he would be open to doing the same in 2024. “We haven’t in Nevada elected anybody since 2006,” Marchant said in January on a podcast. “They have been installed by the deep state cabal.” 

The Republican nominee also wants to end mail-in voting in the state, despite having repeatedly voted by mail in the past. 

Marchant will face Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who has portrayed himself as the sensible alternative to Marchant and his outlandish claims. Aguilar has promised to introduce policy to protect Nevada election workers against “constant harassment” they face at polling places.

New Hampshire (via legislature)

The New Hampshire legislature selects the secretary of state every two years. But despite constant flips in legislative control, lawmakers repeatedly sent Bill Gardner back to the office. Gardner, who served from 1976 until his retirement earlier this year, was a nominal Democrat who defended Republican restrictions in defiance of courts, sat on Trump’s commission to investigate voter fraud, and opposed innovations like online voter registration. His resignation in January elevated his Republican deputy, David Scanlan, to the job. Republicans are slight favorites to keep the legislature in November, though both chambers are in play.

New Mexico

Republican nominee Audrey Trujillo has built her campaign for secretary of state on the Big Lie. As a member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition alongside Nevada’s Marchant and Michigan’s Karamo, Trujillo has  also called for an end to absentee voting except for elderly, disabled, and military citizens. She has also pointed to voting machines as sources of fraud, calling on county election officials to refuse to certify the 2020 election unless a hand count was conducted, adding to the explosive context of ongoing confrontations over conservative efforts in New Mexico to block the certification of elections. 

Trujillo is running against Democratic incumbent Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who has been a vocal proponent of expanding ballot access in the state. In the current legislative session, as Bolts reported in February, Oliver rolled out a landmark package that would have expanded voter eligibility, made Election Day a holiday, and eased mail-in voting, but the package derailed in the legislature. 

New York (via the governor’s race)

This secretary of state is appointed by the governor, and does not oversee election administration. (The current office-holder is an appointee of Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is facing Republican Lee Zeldin, a member of the U.S. House who voted against approving the 2020 presidential result in Congress; the governor also appoints members of the State Board of Canvassers, who certify results, upon consultation with legislative leaders.)

North Dakota

The Republican primary was critical in this red-state open race, and it saw an easy victory by lawmaker Michael Howe over a candidate who was falsely saying the 2020 presidential result was uncertain. But Howe himself is suggesting that there are problems regarding election integrity in the state, while Democratic candidate Jeffrey Powell says the GOP’s talk of “election integrity” is “code word for voter suppression.” The office of the retiring secretary of state faced complaints and settled lawsuits over poor ballot access for Native residents.

Ohio

Former GOP lawmaker John Adams ran for secretary of state by touting the Big Lie, only to be soundly defeated by Republican incumbent Frank LaRose. But LaRose’s victory was hardly a last stand by moderate forces. He has long clashed with voting rights groups over restrictions to ballot access. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Bolts reported in March, LaRose sided with Trump’s crusade against mail-in voting and he successfully appealed to overturn a court ruling that would have made it easier for eligible Ohioans to vote from jail.

Since then, LaRose has ramped up talk of voter fraud, secured Trump’s endorsement in his re-election bid, and floated impeaching the state’s Republican chief justice for striking down his party’s gerrymanders.

LaRose now faces Democrat Chelsea Clark, a Forest Park city councilmember, in a state that has swung red over the past decade. Clark says she would push for reforms to expand participation like automatic voter registration and reverse the state’s aggressive purge policies.

Oklahoma (via the governor’s race)

This secretary of state’s office does not oversee election administration. (The winner of the governor’s race, which features Republican incumbent Kevin Stitt, Democratic challenger Joy Hofmeister, and two other candidates, will have the power to appoint a secretary of state, who will oversee clerical functions like corporation registrations. The current office-holder is a Stitt appointee.)

Pennsylvania (via the governor’s race)

Doug Mastriano, the Trump acolyte who participated in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, would have the power to appoint the next secretary of state if he wins the governor’s race in November over Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro. Mastriano has repeatedly signaled he would appoint a secretary of state who shares his mindset and, as Bolts reported in July, the secretary of state could unleash chaos into the state’s system, with election observers worried primarily about the process of certifying results. A secretary of state hand-picked by Mastriano could abuse their power in 2024 by trying to refuse election results from blue-leaning counties like Allegheny (Pittsburgh) or Philadelphia. “It would be uncertain and destabilizing,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law who specializes in election law, told Bolts.

Rhode Island

The incumbent secretary of state’s failed bid for governor opened up her office, and Democratic nominee Gregg Amore is favored to take her place in this blue-leaning state. He is a former state representative who advocated for expanding ballot access, including through sponsoring the Let Rhode Island Vote Act, which expanded mail voting and went into effect earlier this year. Amore now faces Republican Pat Cortellessa, who opposes the legislation, telling the Warwick Beacon that it endangers election security and goes too far in enabling people to vote by mail. Cortellessa also wants ballot drop boxes removed from street corners. 

South Carolina

This secretary of state’s office does not oversee election administration. (Republican incumbent Mark Hammond faces Democrat Rosemounda “Peggy” Butler.)

South Dakota

Monae Johnson’s conspiracist allegations that the state’s election system lacks integrity helped her oust Republican incumbent Steve Barnett at a party convention earlier this year. That alone makes her the favorite to become this red state’s next secretary of state. Still, Johnson has tried to erase some of her past rhetoric from her website since securing the party’s nomination, and Democratic nominee Tom Cool is attacking Republicans for threatening South Dakota’s voting systems. “They keep whining about election integrity, which we know are their code words for voter suppression,” Cool said in July. (Note that one of the roles of the secretary of state’s office in South Dakota is to oversee the ballot petition process, which has been targeted by state Republicans, as Bolts reported in June.) 

Texas (via the governor’s race)

Republican Governor Greg Abbott faces Democratic nominee and one-time U.S. Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke, and the winner of this governor’s contest will have the power to appoint a secretary of state. Last year, Abbott picked John Scott, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign on a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. As secretary of state, Scott has defended the security of Texas’ elections against local activists who oppose the use of voting machines. O’Rourke has made it a core campaign plank to fault Abbott for championing many voter restrictions, and has pledged to ease the voter registration process and limit voter purges, some of which is handled by the secretary of state’s office. A governor’s appointee is subject to confirmation by the state Senate, which is likely to stay in Republican hands.

Vermont

By U.S. standards, Vermont is pushing the boundaries of democratic participation. The state adopted universal vote-by-mail, and some towns are now looking to allow noncitizens and 16- and 17-year olds to vote in local elections. Vermont is only one of the few places in the country that allow anyone to vote from prison. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a state lawmaker and the Democratic nominee to take over the state’s open secretary of state office, supports these policies. She tells Bolts that, if elected, she would look for new ways to expand both ballot access and voter registration—including for incarcerated people.

Copeland Hanzas’s Republican opponent in this blue-leaning state is H. Brooke Paige, a perennial candidate who is part of the large network of GOP election deniers running for secretary of state as he echoes the former president’s lies about the 2020 election.

Washington State

Republicans have won every secretary of state election in Washington State since 1964—that’s 15 consecutive elections. But they won’t even have a candidate on the ballot this November, as the GOP was shut out of the Top 2 spots in the August all-candidate primary.

The two candidates who moved on to the runoff are Steve Hobbs, the Democratic incumbent appointed by Governor Jay Inslee in 2021 after Republican Kim Wyman resigned to take a job in the Biden administration, and Julie Anderson, the Pierce County clerk who is running as an independent. (A Republican lawmaker, Brad Klippert, is also mounting a write-in campaign.) Before becoming secretary of state, Hobbs was a moderate lawmaker who antagonized progressives in the legislature and fought some of Inslee’s priorities, a record that Inslee touted as a sign that Hobbs would be an antidote to “political polarization.” Still, Anderson is grounding her bid on the argument that a secretary of state should be nonpartisan; she also makes the case that she, unlike Hobbs, has worked in election administration for more than a decade.

Washington, D.C.

This secretary of state is appointed by the mayor, and is not involved in election administration. (Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser is running for re-election, and she is heavily favored.)

Wisconsin

This secretary of state’s office is not involved in election administration in Wisconsin, but GOP nominee Amy Loundenbeck wants it to regain oversight over elections from the State Elections Commissions, a bipartisan agency besieged by conservative attacks since 2020. The Associated Press reports she is remaining vague about the specifics, though some GOP lawmakers have already introduced legislation to this effect. (The party would need to flip the governorship for such a bill shift to stand a chance.) Loudenbeck has said she does not believe the 2020 election results should be overturned but has echoed conspiracies about election funding, and faces Democratic incumbent Doug LaFolette, who is seeking an eleventh term.

Wyoming

Chuck Gray is the only candidate running for secretary of state, making him the only election denier who is already virtually guaranteed to win in November

Boosted by Trump’s endorsement, Gray prevailed in a competitive GOP primary over fellow lawmaker Tara Nethercott in August, and no Democrat or independent filed to run against him in November. And while Wyoming may be the least populous state in the union, his primary opponent warns to not disregard the effects that Gray’s rhetoric may have. “What happens here is certainly an example to the rest of the nation for where the country is going, and how we get caught up in perceived fears that aren’t relevant to our own communities,” Nethercott told Bolts in August. “That kind of rhetoric just continues to serve to undermine the integrity of our elections, and therefore undermines democracy.”

What about the remaining states?

Three states have no secretary of state at all (Alaska, Hawaii, and Utah). Three will elect their secretary of state in 2023 (Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi). Five will elect their secretary of state in 2024 (Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, West Virginia). Two will elect governors or lawmakers in 2024 who will then select a secretary of state (Delaware and Tennessee, as well as Puerto Rico). And two will elect governors in 2025 who could then select a secretary of state (New Jersey and Virginia).

The post Your Guide to All 35 States Deciding Their Next Secretary of State appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Voting Rights Package Derails in New Mexico appeared first on Bolts.

Read our statewide primer on New Mexico’s DA elections.

New Mexico’s Fourth Judicial District, sparsely populated but larger in land size than New Jersey, is the sort of heavily rural area that has yet to play a starring role in the rise of progressive prosecutors. Although the 2019 cycle saw candidates win on reform platforms in some suburban and rural counties, urban centers like Philadelphia and San Francisco remain in the spotlight.

Brett Phelps, a public defender, is running for district attorney by making the case that reform and decarceration should reach counties like his. “The need for change extends beyond big cities, and the recognition by people of that need for change is not limited to big cities,” he told me this week. 

Incarceration has soared in rural counties around the nation, and in New Mexico as well, fueled in part by heightened pretrial detention, punitive responses to the opioid crisis, and constraints on access to care. “In my judicial district, there’s incredibly limited inpatient drug treatment,” Phelps said. “It’s really hard for people, even if they’re personally motivated to want to get help, if they have to travel 300 miles to go to an inpatient rehab center.” He added, “I would encourage anybody who is in a rural area to be vocal about these issues.”

I talked to Phelps this week on his platform, and on why he thinks he could make a difference in the state’s statewide politics as well. 

In recent years, New Mexico DAs unanimously fought to block legislative reforms to lessen the severity of drug charges, to reduce prison as a sanction for parole and probation violations, and to make it somewhat easier for people to be granted parole. Phelps, though, advocated for those bills as a member of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, and he says he will continue doing so if elected DA, potentially giving state reformers a rare prosecutorial ally.

In the course of our conversation, Phelps described his goal of growing diversion programs, not prosecuting marijuana possession and some petty larceny cases that are linked to economic need, and promoting restorative justice, which he thinks would be well-suited to smaller communities.

He also pointed to a recent estimate by New Mexico Counties that one third of the budget of county governments goes into incarceration. Some local officials have pushed lawmakers to remedy this by taking on a larger share of that spending. But Phelps called for reinvestments.

The “cost to warehouse somebody” is “money that’s not being spent on education, on treatment, and on things that really can make a positive difference in people’s lives,” he said. 

Phelps faces Thomas Clayton, a deputy DA who did not respond to a series of questions on his own policy views, in the Democratic primary on June 2. No Republican has filed for the seat.

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Your website talks of fighting a “broken system.” What aspects of the system do you consider to be broken, and what have you seen in your work as a defense attorney that gets to that?

Our current criminal legal system does not address the root causes of crime. If the goal of the criminal justice system is to keep people safe, incarcerating people for crimes related to poverty, addiction, mental health issues is not going to do that. Punishment for the sake of punishment doesn’t make our communities safer. In my experience as a defense attorney, I have clients going to prison when what they need is treatment and help; there are not enough resources available out there for the people who really need help. Then, if you look at employment and other life opportunities, these can really be harmed by felony convictions and the lack of help and reentry services for people who are incarcerated. They’re more likely to reoffend in a lot of cases, even if it’s only a short period of incarceration: It doesn’t take long for most people to lose their job, lose their house. And then, the disproportionate impact on people of color through our criminal legal system, I look at as an area for major improvement.

In my experience writing on DA elections, I have more frequently come across candidates defending a reform-minded platform in urban and sometimes suburban jurisdictions, and still more rarely in rural areas. What comes to mind as specific challenges to the criminal legal system and also to reforming it in a more rural area like your district?

That’s a great question. The biggest thing that jumps out at me is access to resources, treatment centers. In my judicial district, there’s incredibly limited inpatient drug treatment. It’s really hard for people, even if they’re personally motivated to want to get help, if they have to travel 300 miles to go to an inpatient rehab center. That’s going to be a major deterrent for a lot of people. 

Here we’re a very rural community. A lot of times, the victims know the offenders. They have some preexisting relationship. That causes extra challenges. I also think from a restorative justice perspective, that provides greater opportunities for healing.

And one of the things that I think is important for people to keep in mind: my main motivation for this is largely from a human rights perspective, but the reality is that the fiscal impact on rural counties is tremendous. In New Mexico, approximately one third of spending for counties is on incarceration. That’s money that’s not being spent on education, on treatment, and on things that really can make a positive difference in people’s lives. I think that’s something that resonates with a lot of people, understanding the fiscal reality: What’s your return on investment for paying the cost to warehouse somebody, rather than investing it in more forward-thinking programs? 

And in the course of your campaign, have you found that there are specific rewards or challenges to running on a reform platform in a rural area?

I think a lot of people would rush to the judgment that, “Oh, it’s out in a rural area. They’re not going to be interested in these kinds of reform ideas.” But that has not been the case for us. This idea that there’s issues with our criminal justice system that really need to be addressed is shared by people from all backgrounds, all jurisdictions. 

There’s an appetite for change that cuts across the rural/urban divide. And it can be done. That’s what I’d like to put out there: People aren’t going to talk about it if somebody doesn’t get out there and be the voice for that change. I would encourage anybody who’s in a rural area to be vocal about these issues, because for us it’s been a hugely positive response. Even if people don’t necessarily agree entirely on the platform, nobody’s denying that these problems exist.

So do you think, if you were to win with your platform, that is something that should be paid attention to beyond your district? Why should people across the state or country pay attention?

There are only 14 DAs for the entire state, and even though it’s a small population, it really is a significant voice in this discussion to be one of 14 elected DAs. That would amplify the message at a statewide level. 

What I would say beyond a statewide level is that a lot of times the focus on where changes are happening is in bigger areas. But reform is needed everywhere. It’s not just in cities where issues of drug addiction and treatment are important. They cut across all lines.

And inversely, are there prosecutors or campaigns elsewhere in the country that have inspired you?

Absolutely. I’d probably start with Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. He’s the first one that comes to mind of people who don’t come from a prosecutor’s background. Rachel Rollins in Boston, a handful were running in Virginia recently, Tiffany Cabán in Queens, and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. What works in some of those places I don’t think would necessarily be the right fit out here, and I don’t want to necessarily adopt all of their policies, but just in terms of a different approach to what a DA could be, those are just some of the ones that I’ve looked at.

For people in rural areas, when they see stories about the Larry Krasners and the Rachel Rollins in these big cities, it doesn’t have to be limited to that: The need for change extends beyond big cities, and the recognition by people of that need for change is not limited to big cities. 

Let’s delve into some of your policies, then. New Mexico as a whole has a high incarceration rate. How do you propose, as DA, lowering prison admissions in your district? 

I think that is a critical aspect of the campaign: How do we keep our communities safe in a way that isn’t just warehousing people? Coming from a community safety-perspective, recognizing that putting people in jail and in prison is really not a good long-term solution for community safety, and so looking at how we can reduce the rates of incarceration as a means to make our communities safer. That might be counterintuitive to some people, but we can look at how we address crime and address these public safety issues without just incarcerating. 

Some of the things that I would like to see is really increased use of pre-prosecution diversion programs. That is something that’s available right now, but is fairly selective in its availability, and fairly limited in the kind of resources that are provided through those diversion programs. The judicial district to the north of us, the district that includes Taos County, they’ve partnered with the University of New Mexico-Taos so anyone in the diversion program or their spouses can take classes free of charge. That’s the type of thing I would love to implement here: We have a great university (New Mexico Highlands University) and a great community college (Luna Community College) with a lot of technical programs and technical trade programs. Increasing our use of those diversion programs to redirect people who are arrested towards education and employment would get at some of the root causes of crimes. 

Drug addiction is a major community issue. What I would like to bring out here is the LEAD (law enforcement assistance diversion) programs they’ve been using in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where you’re redirecting people into services and treatment at the initial point of contact with with law enforcement, so even pre-arrest, and keeping people out of the system entirely. 

Another thing that I would like to see brought here is restorative justice programs that allow people who have been harmed by crime an opportunity to confront the people who have wronged them, who committed these crimes, in a way that’s going to help heal the community as a whole and help those individuals heal. A lot of times, the adversarial system in the courtroom is not the best way for victims of crime to come to terms with what happened with them and confront the perpetrator in a way that they walk away feeling like justice has been served. 

It’s easy for people to come to the conclusion that, if you’re not going to put people in jail then they’re just going to get to get away with all these things, but there are other ways to hold people accountable beyond incarceration. 

You earlier mentioned Rachel Rollins; she ran on the point that certain charges shouldn’t be up to criminal prosecution at all, and that she wouldn’t charge them. Is that a strategy you would emulate on some categories of cases?

Mmarijuana offenses for simple possession is not something that my DA’s office would be interested in pursuing. That’s the most obvious one. It’s hard to look at others from a categorical perspective the same way as marijuana possession, but petty larceny—if people are stealing for survival, food and diapers, there’s not going to be much appetite for prosecuting those types of cases. It’s not that I can say across the board we’re never going to prosecute these kinds of cases, but there’s not a huge need for the DA to use their limited resources to pursue them. 

Here we’re a very rural community. A lot of times in property crimes and those kinds of things, the victims personally know who the offender is; it’s somebody’s cousin, it’s somebody’s friends, someone that they’ve grown up with. And they don’t want to see that person necessarily end up in jail or prison over it. They do want something to be done. There are different ways that you can approach cases as a prosecutor without an end goal of incarceration. So I think listening to what the victim wants to see happen, and giving them a fair say in how the cases are resolved would really drive our approach to how we want to handle cases.

And would you support the state legalizing marijuana, as has been debated recently?

Yes, absolutely. That’s something that I’ve been advocating for at the legislature since I was in law school. That’s actually a big part of my story of how I got in this position: When I was 18, I was charged with possession of marijuana and that really shapes my views on things. At the time I thought this was going to ruin my life, and fortunately that was not the case, but I’ve seen how people who are in a less well-off position than myself how it has done that. I’ve had clients who have been incarcerated for marijuana crimes, for marijuana possession. I think there are technical issues with how they implement it, particularly with how they implement the market and are able to incorporate people that have been harmed by those laws in the past.

In 2019, state DAs opposed Senate Bill 408, a bill that would have reduced drug possession to the level of a misdemeanor. Did you, or would you, support that bill?

I was a supporter of that bill when it first was introduced, and would continue to support it if it was reintroduced. I’m a board member for our New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, and in that role we do a lot of advocacy up there at the legislature and I was actually there with the legislators that introduced it when they did a press conference introducing that legislation, and then advocated for it through the legislative session. If you’re talking about strictly personal possession, the collateral consequences of a felony conviction far outweigh the public safety goals that you’re trying to achieve that can be done with a misdemeanor charge as well. 

A bill that got even further last year was House Bill 564, which would have reduced the resort to incarceration when people violate conditions of parole and probation, and also required that the state justify denying parole to people in prison for at least 30 years. The governor vetoed the bill last year, and it came back in narrower form. Did you support or oppose the aspects of the reform in the 2019 legislation?

I support the reform. That was another one that we advocated for at the legislature. One of our highest drivers of incarceration is probation and parole violations. One of the things that I see far too often with my clients as a defense attorney is: They’ll take a plea and they’ll stay out of prison or jail initially, but they’ll have some long period of probation. If you’re on probation for several years and you’re supposed to be checking in regularly throughout that entire time, the fact that you could potentially be sentenced to prison for missing a check-in, for being late to a check-in with your probation officer, I think that there is room for improvement. So I did support that bill. 

New Mexico lawmakers pushed proposals to either end or restrict felony disenfranchisement last year; the current status-quo in the state is that people cannot vote until the end of their sentence, including incarceration, as well as parole and probation. What is your view of whether people should lose their voting rights, and when those should be restored?

I don’t think people should lose the right to vote. I think the more people that can vote and that exercise their right to vote makes for a healthier democracy.

You can’t just disenfranchise people at a massive scale through criminal convictions. The right to vote is something that people have fought really hard to expand and to guarantee that right to people, and so I think it’s a really important thing that holds people accountable: the people that are making these laws, if they’re able to just disenfranchise people through increased criminalization, then I don’t think there’s a good mechanism to hold them accountable. Particularly if you’re looking at a DA’s race, those are the people most directly impacted by that political position, and so I think it’s just good to hold our elected officials accountable.

The relative budgets and influence of prosecutors and public defenders have been at issue in recent years. What has been your experience on the equity between them, and the challenges you’ve encountered?

That’s definitely a real issue out here. In our office, it’s me and one other attorney, we’ve got over 300 active cases as the contract public defender. That is a pretty massive caseload. There’s issues of funding and equitability between the PDs and the DA’s office. At the legislature, they set the budget for the DA’s offices and the public defenders across the state, and they’ve been pretty eager to give money to the DA side of things, the law enforcement side of things, without necessarily asking for a lot in return and accountability, whereas for the PDs they’re not so easy or willing to give the equal money there to defend. If you’re not funding the defense side of things and the prosecution side of things equitably, then you’re never going to have a good working system.

The post “There’s an Appetite for Change” in Rural Counties, Says New Mexico D.A. Candidate appeared first on Bolts.

Progressives hoped that Democrats’ 2018 takeover of the New Mexico state government would overhaul its criminal legal system, but they quickly ran into the political juggernaut of state prosecutors.

One promising bill would have lowered drug possession charges to the level of misdemeanors, significantly reducing penalties. Five states have done this, including conservative Oklahoma. Days after Senate Bill 408 made it out of committee, though, the New Mexico District Attorney Association (NMDAA) released a statement against it approved by all of the state’s DAs; it died soon after.

When a bill restricting felony disenfranchisement made it out of committee that same week, DA Dianna Luce, who presides over the NMDAA, called voting a “privilege” rather than a “right” to reject the idea of enfranchising people while on probation and parole. Though three other newly Democratic states did just that last year, New Mexico’s version did not get a vote on the floor.

Reformers’ most stinging defeat came when Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham vetoed House Bill 564, an overhaul of probation and parole rules, shortly after all 14 DAs jointly lobbied her to kill it. It would have increased the state’s burden to justify denying parole to people in prison for decades and reduced the use of incarceration as a sanction when people violate probation or parole conditions.

“We passed [HB 564], and they torpedoed it,” Representative Antonio Maestas, the Democratic lawmaker who sponsored it, told me. “Because they’re so fixated on penalties and incarceration as a deterrent, their only policy initiative is to increase penalties and run bills to increase penalties.”

“The DA association here in New Mexico has been very disruptive when it comes to realizing meaningful reform,” said Barron Jones, senior policy strategist at the ACLU of New Mexico. “They are very powerful voices.”

The 2020 elections, which kick off in three weeks, on June 2, will not alter the politics of state DAs overall.

Although all 14 DA offices are up for grabs, the only candidates running in most of these races are the incumbents who lobbied against the 2019 bills, or else deputy DAs whose platforms mirror these DAs’ “tough on crime” positions. Some are even calling for harsher laws, though the state’s incarceration rate is far higher than the nation’s already sky-high numbers.

Still, the united front that DAs presented in 2019 may be breached.

Candidates are running in at least two races — the populous First Judicial District (which covers Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and Rio Arriba counties), and the smaller Fourth District (Guadalupe, Mora, and San Miguel counties) — on promises to bring some change. In interviews, they expressed support for some of the reforms that the state’s DAs fought against last year. 

These races may give the state’s reform advocates new allies for some of the ideas they have championed. 

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Last week, I contacted all non-incumbent contenders running in New Mexico to gauge their views on the bills that current DAs opposed, as well as on broader reform proposals. Many did not reply; others shared positions that were aligned with the state’s prosecutorial status quo. 

But three candidates broke with that status quo on at least some matters: Mary Carmack-Altwies and Scott Fuqua (First District), and Brett Phelps (Fourth District). 

In both districts, the incumbent DAs are not seeking re-election and their replacements will be decided in the June 2 Democratic primary. (No Republicans filed to run in either race.) Phelps faces Tom Clayton, a deputy DA who did not answer a request for comment. By contrast, in the First District, Carmack-Altwies and Fuqua are the only candidates running.

Phelps, a public defender, told me he was already active last year in advocating for the reforms that faltered, and that he had traveled to the capitol to do so as a member of the state’s Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. He would keep that up if he were elected DA, he said. Although he would represent one of the state’s least populous jurisdictions, he made the case that his win may change statewide dynamics by at least introducing one alternative perspective. “It really is a significant voice in this discussion to be one of 14 elected DAs,” Phelps said. “That would amplify the message at a statewide level.”

Fuqua echoed that point. “The opposition to reducing possession to misdemeanor offenses feels like a vestige of the war on drugs to me,” he said. “If [SB 408] came up again, and I’m in the DA’s office, it’ll be 13 to one, unless I can convince other people to come on board with it.” His opponent, Carmack-Altwies, agrees with him on this issue. “Those are easy questions for me,” she said, laughing, when I asked about her views on SB 408 and also on legalizing marijuana. 

All three candidates also indicated support for the 2019 proposal to expand voting rights to at least people who are not presently incarcerated.

Maestas, the lawmaker, agrees that even a lone DA could make a difference. He believes that the 14 DAs’ united front against his probation/parole bill (HB 564) proved decisive last year. (Phelps and Fuqua expressed support for that bill; Carmack-Altwies defended the DAs’ criticisms.)

“They weren’t persuasive, it was just the fact that all of them signed the letter,” said Maestas, who himself used to work as a staff prosecutor. “It was too much to overcome in terms of the public backlash they created. When all 14 DAs signed a letter saying veto the bill, it would have taken a lot of strength from the governor to not do that. They had the bully pulpit.” 

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Elsewhere in the state, away from its First and Fourth Districts, the prospect of new perspectives or for voices that are critical of the status quo are weaker. (Our New Mexico master list contains a database of who is running for DA in each of the state’s elections.)

Luce, the NMDAA president, and Andrea Reeb, its vice president, are unopposed in the Fifth and Ninth Districts. Both are Republicans. Many other DAs are also unopposed, including Raul Torrez, the Democratic DA in the state’s largest county (Bernalillo, home to Albuquerque), and Rick Tedrow, San Juan County’s Republican DA. Tedrow presided over the NMDAA in 2017, during an earlier push against a statewide change, when DAs voiced worries about bail reforms.

In the Third District (populous Doña Ana County), deputy DA Gerald Byers is sure to be the next DA since the incumbent retired and Byers, who declined to answer my questions, is the only candidate on the ballot. A 2019 lawsuit filed by former staffers in the DA’s office alleged that Byers contributed to sex discrimination, and that he ordered them to remove signs from their doors because the phrase on them—“No Mansplaining”—was “sexist against men.”

The incumbent is also retiring in the 13th District (Cibola, Sandoval, and Valencia counties), the state’s second most populous jurisdiction. Joshua Joe Jimenez, a former prosecutor running as a Republican, will face one of two Democratic deputy DAs, Barbara Romo and Mandana Shoushtari. On their campaign websites, Romo and Shoushtari both regret that it is too easy for some defendants to be released pretrial; they include no specific proposals that would promote decarceration. None of the three replied to a request for comment on their views.

The Sixth District (Hidalgo, Grant, and Luna counties) is yet another open race. On his website, deputy DA Norman Wheeler touts the fact that he greatly increased drug-related prosecutions as an achievement, a far cry from others’ aspirations to lessen “war on drugs” practices. Neither Wheeler nor his opponent, defense lawyer and former deputy DA Michael Renteria, replied.

In the Eighth and 11th Districts, finally, DAs Marcus Montoya and Paula Pakkala face challengers in the Democratic primary. Despite their stances on the 2019 bills, their opponents are not pressing them on criminal justice reform. (Here again, no Republican filed.) In email messages, Paul Sanchez (Eighth District) and Bernadine Martin (11th District) indicated views that were in line with the incumbents’ on those legislative proposals; both also expressed concern about the prospect of legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Another 11th District candidate, Conrad Friedly, did not reply to a request for comment.

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The First District, which includes Santa Fe, is the likeliest to elect a DA who espouses some affinity for criminal justice reform. Both contenders argue for shifting away from the war on drugs and minimizing prison sentences for drug possession. “We’ve been trying to incarcerate our way out of drug addiction for 40 years, and it hasn’t worked,” said Carmack-Altwies, who was a public defender for more than a decade before joining the DA’s office as a prosecutor.

Prison admissions over drug offenses have indeed grown significantly since 2012, an ACLU analysis shows. “Civil possession indicates a public health problem and not a criminal problem,” said Jones, of the ACLU. 

The Santa Fe candidates also agreed that people who are on probation and parole should be granted the right to vote, which is not presently the case.

They parted ways on some other issues, though. Carmack-Altwies argued that making it easier for people to be granted parole after 30 years of incarceration would make releases too frequent for people who committed the worst crimes. She also regrets that the state’s bail reform, which she noted she largely supports, may have swung too far in restricting prosecutors’ ability to obtain pretrial detention.

Fuqua, an attorney in the attorney general’s office, raised no concern when asked about the current bail rules, and he broadly defended the 2019 bill on parole grants.

Phelps, the public defender who is running in the smaller Fourth District, took bolder stances on these issues. Besides unequivocally defending HB 564 and SB 408, he argued for ending felony disenfranchisement altogether, describing voting as a mechanism of accountability for officials prone to overcriminalize.

Phelps called on reform advocates nationwide to pay attention to smaller, rural districts like his, even if they are less populated than reform hubs like Philadelphia or San Francisco. “The need for change extends beyond big cities. And the recognition by people of that need for change is not limited to big cities either,” he said. 

He added, “I would encourage anybody who’s in a rural area to be vocal about these issues, because for us it’s been a hugely positive response.”

Reform advocates have certainly had some positive responses in recent years. In 2019, New Mexico decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, and restricted the use of solitary confinement against pregnant women, children, and people with mental illness. But even those proposals were very considerably narrowed during legislative debates. Marijuana legalization did not make it through, and a stronger proposal to restrict solitary confinement for all prisoners was hollowed out. New Mexico uses solitary confinement very aggressively, The Appeal has reported.

Maestas was also one of the main sponsors of the bill that restricted solitary confinement. “We have a lot of challenges in New Mexico,” he told me. “Crime is very prevalent, and politicians are still a little leery because of the politics of crime. It’s easy to torpedo criminal justice reform efforts by painting it as soft on crime. It’s more difficult to articulate the truth and convince the voter that criminal justice reform actually lowers crime.”

He added, “But it’s only a matter of time before DAs start winning on criminal justice reform campaigns.”

The post New Mexico D.A.s United to Torpedo Reforms. The 2020 Elections Could Breach That Unanimity. appeared first on Bolts.

Read our statewide primer on New Mexico’s DA elections.

Mary Carmack-Altwies and Scott Fuqua, who are facing one another in a Democratic primary for district attorney on June 2, agree that New Mexico’s drug policies are too harsh. People with substance use issues should not be saddled with criminal convictions or incarceration, they say.

Prison admissions over drug-related offenses have surged in the state this decade, according to an analysis by the ACLU of New Mexico; addiction problems have as well. Rio Arriba County, one of three counties in the First Judicial District alongside Santa Fe and Los Alamos counties, has had one of the nation’s highest overdose rates. “We’ve been trying to incarcerate our way out of drug addiction for 40 years, and it hasn’t worked,” Carmack-Altwies told me. Both candidates also say they would not prosecute marijuana possession, and support its legalization.

Here Carmack-Altwies and Fuqua sound like the man they hope to replace: Marco Serna won in 2016 on a reform message that centered on not treating addiction as criminal behavior. Once in office, Serna, who is not seeking re-election as DA this year to run for Congress, helped implement Santa Fe’s LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) program to arrest fewer people for drug offenses. 

But Serna objected last year when the opportunity arose to overhaul the state’s drug laws and no longer leave it to prosecutorial discretion and success in diversion programs whether people avoid felony convictions. When lawmakers took up a bill to defelonize drug possession, and so to greatly reduce penalties, the New Mexico District Attorney Association (NMDAA) asked them to not pass it. The head of the NMDAA told me all 14 DAs approve such releases; Serna was one of the group’s leaders. His campaign did not reply to a request for comment on his objections.

Carmack-Altwies and Fuqua both unequivocally said they support defelonizing drug possession, by contrast. One of them is sure to be the next DA—no one else filed to run, so the June primary will decide the election—and that could shift the statewide politics on at least this topic.

“This district includes a lot of citizens who struggle with drug addiction,” Fuqua told me. “Giving them a felony conviction, because they happen to have on them a substance that is a symbol of that struggle, is backwards.” 

I talked to Carmack-Altwies and Fuqua this week about their views on a range of policy issues and their approach to criminal justice reform. These conversations are transcribed below and, in a Political Report first, side-by-side: I emailed each of them a list of initial questions, and then asked follow-ups in separate phone interviews. 

Carmack-Altwies and Fuqua both expressed support for another bill that stalled last year, and that would have expanded voting rights by enabling people who are on parole and probation to vote. Neither backs altogether ending felony disenfranchisement, however.

Carmack-Altwies was more direct in stating a desire to shrink the incarceration rate, and also to lessen the volume of criminal convictions though pretrial diversion. “Reducing mass incarceration,” she said, must go hand-in-hand with “actually reducing conviction rates for people that are coming into the criminal justice system.”

On several other issues, Fuqua embraced a bolder version of reform. Regarding the state’s hottest recent criminal justice debate — a 2019 bill vetoed by the governor that would have likely increased parole grants for people with very lengthy sentences — Fuqua said the DAs’ concerns about public safety were “overstated,” whereas Carmack-Altwies laid out a position akin to the DAs who fought the legislation. And when asked about the state of New Mexico’s bond system since the 2017 bail reform, only Carmack-Altwies voiced some regret that it may have made it too hard in some cases for prosecutors to obtain pretrial detention, though she said she backed the changes overall.

The interviews have been condensed and lighty edited.

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Do you see a desire to significantly reduce the district’s incarceration rate as an important tenet of your campaign? If so, what policies would you support and implement that would make the biggest impact in reducing incarceration?

On your website, you say that we should move away from treating substance use disorders as a criminal issue. As a DA, how exactly would you reform the current approaches to drug-related offenses to counter that? What role should criminal prosecution still play, and where should it get out of the way?

Last year, the legislature considered a bill (SB 408) to reduce drug possession penalties to the level of a misdemeanor; state DAs wrote a letter opposing the proposal. Would you support or oppose such a proposal?

A final question relating to drug policy: Marijuana legalization has been debated in the state in recent years. Would you support or oppose it?

The legislature adopted House Bill 564 in 2019; it was meant to reduce incarceration over probation/parole violations, and make it potentially easier for some people to access parole after 30 years in prison by shifting the burden of justifying denial with specificied reasons on the parole board. State DAs successfully urged the governor to veto the bill. What is your view of this 2019 bill?

New Mexico’s bail reform has been a major topic this decade, and some DAs or DA candidates have said it should be easier to keep people detained pretrial. What is your view on that position, or on whether the status quo is appropriate?

People with felony convictions currently cannot vote in New Mexico until they have completed their sentence, including terms of parole or probation. The legislature debated proposals last year to restrict felony disenfranchisement. One would have gotten rid of it altogether; an amended version would have enabled anyone who is not incarcerated to vote, including if they are on parole and probation. What is your view on this issue, and on how long — if at all — you would support people’s voting rights being stripped?

On some of the issues I asked about, the current DAs acted together to oppose legislative reforms. Do you want to be a new sort of DA in the state, one that takes an overall different approach to criminal justice reform, or do you see yourself more as a continuity?

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