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

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

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

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

Kentucky | Secretary of state

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

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

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

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

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

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

Maine | Question 8

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

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

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

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

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

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

Mississippi | Secretary of state

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

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

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

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

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

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

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

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

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

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

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

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

Virginia | Legislative control

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

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

Washington | King County director of elections

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

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

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

This fall, Maine voters will again decide whether to scrub that exclusion from their state’s constitution, echoing the court ruling. Question 8, one of several constitutional amendments on the state’s Nov. 7 ballot, asks voters if they want to “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.”  

Maine is already closer to universal suffrage than most states. It’s one of two states, plus Washington D.C., that is approaching universal suffrage. Maine allows people to vote from prison and state law affirms the voting rights of people with intellectual disabilities, autism, and brain injuries. That makes this clause stand out—it treats mentally ill people under guardianship as second-class citizens, which is precisely why the court ruled it unconstitutional. 

“We are creating a subset of mentally ill people under guardians who can’t vote,” Democratic State Senator Craig Hickman, who spearheaded the effort to put the matter to the vote, told Bolts. Hickman, a voting rights advocate, has also been involved in other measures to remove outdated language from Maine’s constitution. “I think it’s important to ratify this amendment. [We need to] make it clear that in this state we have no reason to disenfranchise.” 

“Voting is…a fundamental right,” says Lewis Bossing, an attorney at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an organization that advocates for adults and children with mental disabilities. “We would like to see a world in which there is no competency standard for voting, because we don’t subject people generally to proving somehow that they can make a choice.”

While it may seem symbolic, the amendment in Maine highlights the patchwork and shifting landscape of voting rights for people under guardianship across the country. And it may have a material impact. The constitutional amendment, if passed, could encourage other states to examine and strike or reform their language—and Bossing notes that the American Bar Association has a recommended standard, starting with due process, for determining when someone under guardianship may lose their voting rights. Some states, such as California, have already adopted versions of this language in their code. 

While the number of people living under guardianships in the United States is unknown because there’s no formal tracking, one study this year guessed at 1.5 million, with guardians supervising some $50 billion in assets. The specifics of these legal arrangements can vary by state and by person, but typically require going to court to petition a judge for a guardianship on the grounds that someone cannot make independent decisions. Considerations for guardianships can include severe mental illness, some developmental or intellectual disabilities, and illnesses related to aging such as Alzheimer’s. 

Many states, including Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming, have clauses in legislation or their constitutions that explicitly prohibit some people judged “incompetent” from voting, though the specifics can vary by state. Many, like Maine, have conflicting constitutional and legislative positions around voting rights for people under guardianship. Kentucky’s constitution, for example, uses outdated language to describe who shall not have the right to vote (“idiots and insane persons”), though the state’s civil code is actually protective of voting rights for those under guardianship. According to a congressional report published in 2018, nearly 10,000 people across the country lost the right to vote due to “mental incompetence”, which Bossing warns can be an overly broad category.  Though advocates say that the true number is likely much higher because reporting is not reliable. 

Maine barred people under guardianships for mental health conditions from voting until the Disability Rights Center of Maine sued on behalf of three women under guardianships who wanted to vote in the 2000 presidential election. One of them was allowed to vote in that election after successfully petitioning the local judge overseeing her guardianship. Another woman tried but was unable to vote that year after her judge denied the petition to amend her guardianship, citing the prohibition in the state constitution. The third plaintiff was unable to seek a modification to her guardianship ahead of the 2000 election because she had been hospitalized at the time.    

The federal court in Maine ruled in 2001 that it was in fact unconstitutional to deny ballot access for people under guardianships for mental illness, a violation of both the due process and equal protection clauses in the federal 14th Amendment. The state chose not to appeal the decision and legislators struck the relevant sections of the elections code. Today, the voting information page maintained by Maine’s Secretary of State affirms voting rights for people under guardianship, in alignment with the court decision and legislative changes. 

But the outdated voting restrictions have remained in Maine’s constitution since then. Scrubbing the language requires a two-thirds majority in both the state House and Senate to place an amendment on the ballot, followed by a simple majority vote in a referendum. 

“I want to excise anything that is unconstitutional,” Hickman, who led the amendment process in the legislature this year, told Bolts. “We have already removed any disenfranchisement of mentally ill people under the courts and law.” Only a handful of people testified in this year’s legislative hearing over the amendment, including Maine’s secretary of state, who noted that it would finally bring the state’s foundational legal document in line with established case law.

Bossing and other advocates for people under guardianships also argue that people who express a desire to vote should be allowed to vote, and should be provided with any accessibility accommodations they need, such as an electronic voting machine equipped for use by blind voters, plain language material for people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities, or a communication board for a developmentally disabled voter. 

But that help isn’t always available. Despite numerous federal laws protecting the right to vote privately and securely for disabled people, disabled voters report systemic access problems in every election. A 2017 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that 83 percent of voting places surveyed had one or more accessibility barriers. Disabled voters are also harmed by restrictions on mail and early voting, poor mail ballot design, limits on who can collect and drop off ballots, and calls for hand-marked paper ballots. In a bitter twist, leveraging the Americans with Disabilities Act to close or move polling places has become a voter suppression tactic.

The conversation about voting rights for people under guardianship also connects with a larger discussion about guardianships: Some disability activists and organizations, including Bazelon, question whether they should exist at all, when alternatives that offer more autonomy are available. The supported decision-making movement, for example, presents an option where a disabled person can talk to friends, family, service providers, or others about a decision, weighing those conversations but ultimately making an independent choice. Individual disabled people decide which kinds of decisions they want help with on the basis of their own needs, and they can revisit the topic as their lives change. 

While reformers work on a state-by-state basis, there have been attempts to address the issue federally. The Accessible Voting Act of 2020 filed by U.S. Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, would have barred voting restrictions on the basis of guardianships. Under the bill, which failed that session, in order to terminate voting rights, guardians or the state must produce “a court order finding by clear and convincing evidence that the individual cannot communicate, with or without accommodations, a desire to participate in the voting process.”

In Maine, there is currently no coordinated campaign against Question 8 this year, but its proponents are concerned that voters may not understand the context of the ballot measure. “People are confused,” notes Hickman, who hopes clarifying the fact that the amendment is simply cleaning up the constitution to remove language that violates the law will help voters. In the state’s voters’ guide, Disability Rights Maine Executive Director, Kim Moody, explains the story behind the amendment, saying “that outdated provision remains part of the Maine Constitution today and should be removed.”

“People assume folks can’t make their own decisions, people must be making them for them. They think people are going to be taken advantage of,” Hickman says, describing concerns about Question 8. But, like Bossing, he believes in the capacity of disabled voters to make their own decisions, telling Bolts “you can’t disenfranchise based on a feeling.”

The post Maine Referendum Spotlights Voting Rights for People Under Guardianship  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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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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.

Champions of decriminalization got Maine closer than any other state to emulating Oregon. The state House adopted a bill last year to decriminalize low-level possession, but the legislation died in the Senate, hindered in part by the resistance of Maine’s district attorneys. With reform delayed, attention has shifted to those DA offices, which are in charge of prosecuting drug offenses—and are all on the ballot this year. 

Running in Cumberland County, home to the city of Portland, Jackie Sartoris has claimed the mantle of reform as she promises to keep more people from being locked up over substance use.

She is the only Democrat challenging an incumbent DA anywhere in Maine, and she faces DA Jonathan Sahrbeck in the June 14 primary. 

“We are too often sending people with addiction-related conduct to prison rather than treatment,” Sartoris told Bolts. 

But she also says she would not eliminate criminal consequences for substance use in Cumberland County. She has expressed some support for legislation that would reduce the role of the criminal legal system, but says she wants to use criminal prosecution as a tool to push more people into treatment, the stick to the carrot of having charges dropped. 

“My approach is to use interactions with the criminal legal system as opportunities to solve an underlying problem and help people in need of assistance to obtain help,” she told Bolts.

The boundaries of prosecutorial reform have shifted recently as some DAs have drawn a starker line against low-level drugs prosecutions. In Maine, many advocates are no longer satisfied with making the criminal legal system less severe. They want prosecutors to entirely butt out of substance use, and have pushed the state to shift resources toward social services and treatment programs that operate outside of the criminal legal system. 

Tina Heather Nadeau, the executive director of the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers who talked to Bolts in her personal capacity, is skeptical of prosecutors who claim to want to use treatment for the benefit of the defendant. All too often such mandates are used as a “bludgeon,” she said, setting people up to fail.

In this moment of crisis, Nadeau says she is mainly interested in how candidates propose to reduce the havoc of encountering the criminal legal system. Even a brief jail stint after an arrest can have grave consequences for someone’s life, and overdose risks are high upon release. “I want to know how they’re going to help people who come in contact with the criminal justice system—either minimize their contact or get them to a better place,” she said. 

Marshall Mercer, a formerly incarcerated advocate for drug reform, made the case during last year’s legislative debates that the looming threat of criminalization gets in the way of people’s recovery. “Every time I would look for help, there’d always be someone looking down on me,” he said at a public event. “We’re not going to go looking for help if people are arresting us and throwing us in jail.”

A report released by the ACLU of Maine in March concurs and calls on the state to take a more holistic approach.The report assails Maine for doubling down on spending on incarceration: One year in a state prison is more than double what it would cost for housing assistance, counseling, and treatment at MaineCare. “Incarceration does the opposite of what people need, which is support and connection,” lead author Winifred Tate, a Colby College anthropology professor, told her university. People also end up with burdensome criminal convictions.

Maine seemed to be on its way to an overhaul last June when the House passed LD 967, a bill that would have made drug possession a civil violation rather than a criminal offense. But the bill was eventually downed by the opposition of the Maine Prosecutors’ Association and the likely veto of Democratic Governor Janet Mills, a former prosecutor.

Sahrbeck, Cumberland County’s current DA, is skeptical of decriminalization because he thinks it would make dangerous drugs flow into the region. He’s waiting to see how Oregon’s reform goes. “Unfortunately, opioids and fentanyl, methamphetamines—they are so powerful, and people are suffering so much, that oftentimes the criminal justice system is that thing that triggers someone getting into recovery,” Sahrbeck told the Maine Beacon last year.

Sahrbeck became DA in 2018 after unexpectedly winning as an independent when both the Democratic and Republican candidates dropped out in the campaign’s final stages. He filed as a Democrat this time. He told Bolts that running as a Democrat makes sense ideologically. 

But for Sartoris, his challenger, Sahrbeck is mainly invested in “superficial change” in rhetoric, and the diversion and restorative justice programs he has pursued are not sufficient. Sartoris, who lives in Cumberland County but works as a prosecutor in nearby Kennebec County, told Bolts that she would pursue alternatives to incarceration at a much greater rate. She also said she would charge more cases at a lower, misdemeanor level rather than the felony level to ensure that they qualify for a diversionary approach. 

Sahrbeck disputes that interpretation of his office’s work. He shared data with Bolts showing a decline in the total number of cases his office filed with the court in 2020 and 2021. “Our diversionary measures in charging like our restorative justice diversion program, compliance diversion, and higher scrutiny on which cases to prosecute show a significant decrease in criminal filings,” Sahrbeck says. 

But this reduction in the raw number of cases filed, which coincided with the onset of the pandemic, matches the decline in the number of overall cases that entered the DA’s office for review in the first place; the start of the pandemic led to a big drop in police arrests nationwide. The rate of how the DA’s office processed cases changed little: In 2018, the last year before Sahrbeck became DA, the number of cases filed with the court was 63.3 percent of the number of cases that entered the DA’s office. Last year, that rate was 63.6 percent.

The DA also pointed to a reduction in the number of people held at the county jail, crediting it to “policy changes surrounding cash bail and motions to revoke bail in which we now look for supervision in the community wherever possible over incarceration.” That number dropped when the pandemic began, Sahrbeck stressed that “the numbers never returned to pre-covid levels.” Over the past year, though, the local jail has been marred by repeat COVID outbreaks and coverage of dismal conditions like solitary confinement, with advocates demanding reductions in detention.

Sahrbeck and Sartoris do agree on a key policy question. Both candidates told Bolts that they opposed the creation of a do-not-prosecute policy, like some progressive officials have adopted elsewhere in the country for low-level drug cases and some other charges, and thereby rule out bringing drug possession charges.

Sahrbeck said each case should be taken on a “case-by-case basis.” “I kind of get wary when it comes to do-not-prosecute lists, even though I know I do have discretion, because the legislature is the one who makes the laws,” he added. 

Similarly, Sartoris said she doesn’t back creating a declination list, including for drug offenses, “where the legislature has enacted laws that apply.” 

Sartoris tweeted earlier this year that she would never prosecute cases related to abortion. When Nadeau, the local defense attorney, asked whether there were other types of charges that she would pledge not to prosecute, Sartoris replied: “Running to be DA, not DF! (Dismissal Fairy).” 

Nadeau retorted that the comment was “glib” and asked, “What about the ethical obligation of a prosecutor not to pursue charges they know they can’t prove? Or if a dismissal is in the interest of justice?” She said Sartoris blocked her after the exchange.

In an interview with Bolts, Sartoris also expressed wariness about changing state law to decriminalize drug possession. 

What she wants instead is to provide more people “access to secure treatment” in lieu of incarceration, but also in lieu of ever ending up with a conviction. 

She told Bolts she would pursue a policy of providing people arrested for drug offenses with the information for treatment for addiction services, and require them to follow up and actually enter treatment. When her office receives confirmation, she said, they would dismiss the charges—enabling the defendant to leave the system without having been convicted.

“This enables the first touch for most people with the criminal legal system to possibly be their last, without a conviction or fine resulting,” Sartoris said. 

Under this approach, people would continue facing the threat of criminal conviction if they fail to follow-up the various steps of the process laid out by the DA’s office. Proponents of decriminalization say forcing people into treatment is often unproductive, costly, and ultimately ineffective. 

Nadeau notes such decisions are not outside of prosecutorial control.

“There is nothing that requires a prosecutor to push a possession charge,” Nadeau said. “There is nothing that pushes the prosecutor to go forward with even a trafficking charge if the stop was based on racist garbage. Nothing. They can always do the right thing.”

Matt Gunn, co-chair of the Drug Policy working group of Maine DSA, agrees. “I can see from a prosecutor’s perspective how that looks very appealing,” Gunn said. “But whether someone supports mandated treatment options or not, having the mentality that we need to seek out cases and prosecute them and be arresting people and taking them off the streets and away from their jobs and their lives and their families so that they can stop using drugs is not a healthy approach.”

Gunn regrets that the state is not fully committing to approaching drug policy as a public health issue because politicians are most concerned with the perception that they’re looking after “public order.” 

“Whether they are upholding public order is up for debate,” he said, “but they have to make their constituents feel as though they are maintaining a safe environment.”

The post Maine Prosecutor Election Unfolds Under the Shadow of State’s War on Drugs appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While presidential candidates and some state legislatures debate whether people should vote from prison, that is already a reality in two states. Neither Maine nor Vermont disenfranchise people based on a criminal conviction. “I think in Vermont, honestly, it is a non-issue,” Senator Bernie Sanders, who represents the state, told me. “I suspect the same is true in Maine.”

I talked to Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who runs Maine’s elections, about how prison voting works there.

While incarcerated, voting-age U.S. citizens can register at the last address at which they resided (if that address is in Maine) and then they can vote with absentee absentee. Dunlap, who is a Democrat, explained how Maine ensures that prisoners have access to voting, and he also answered questions on whether it could do more, for instance by providing postage. During the interview, Dunlap described suffrage as a way to keep incarcerated people “connected to the real world,” and to remember that “they’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens.” He called such connections a “sliver of light.”

The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Do you support the fact that Maine has no criminal disenfranchisement system, and if so what do you think is the value of this?

I do support not having a disenfranchisement system. I fundamentally believe that we have constitutional rights, and either you have rights or you do not. And one of those rights is the right to vote.

It’s easier for me because Maine has never had a disenfranchisement system for inmates or felons.

They vote by absentee: They don’t vote in the prison, they vote in their hometowns. They would have to have established residency in Maine prior to their incarceration in order to participate, so it’s for Maine residents only, which is a little bit of a wrinkle but that’s how the law is constructed.

There have been national debates this month on whether losing the right to vote should be part of punishment or the criminal legal system. How do you think about this issue?

It does come up every few years where someone puts a bill in that a certain class of felons would be stripped of their right to vote. A recent one was, if people convicted of killing children would lose their right to vote. Frankly, I think that that’s just trying to find a way to open the door to keep all felons from voting. Then it becomes a pragmatic issue: If you’re the warden of a prison, who gets to vote and who doesn’t get to vote, which class of inmates retain the franchise and which ones do not? After a while, it becomes easiest to do one or the other, either allow them to all vote, or allow none of them to vote. I think people who push disenfranchisement often go for the latter. They don’t want any of them to be voting, for whatever reason – it’s largely a philosophical reason or a political reason. But I keep going right back to where you start.

You have unimpeachable rights a citizen. There’s nothing that I read in either our state constitution or the federal constitution that makes your constitutional rights somehow conditional. It always boils down to, do you have a right, or don’t you? I think Maine has handled it pretty steadfastly, that people retain their rights regardless of their legal condition.

How does Maine implement its policy of allowing people in prison to vote?

In most circumstances, you have folks who are very engaged in election volunteer work, the NAACP is a prime example, they make an effort to reach out to the prisons and make sure that people know they have the right to vote and that they are executing the process.

Typically, what I will do with my deputy Secretary of State for elections is that we’ll go to the Maine State Prison, the biggest facility, once a year, and we’ll update voter registrations because the populations change, people get transferred from facility to facility, and you have the newer inmates.

We update their voter registrations, we give them the forms to fill out to request an absentee ballot, and we help them get it all prepared to send to the town clerks of the towns where they previously resided. What happens there is that the clerk will send them an absentee ballot, and they can vote, put it in a return envelope, and send it back.

So people are registered to vote at their address prior to their incarceration, rather than at the place where they’re incarcerated. Why do you think this is important for Maine to do?

What it prevents is having an unnatural bubble of population emerge at the site where the correctional facility is. You can’t really lobby the prison vote, if you will, if you’re a candidate because they will be voting in their own hometowns. That’s important for a couple of different reasons. When we are doing redistricting, the people in the prison are counted as a part of the population of their hometown, not the population of where the jail is located. If you, say, lived in the town of Bangor and were never registered to vote, we have a process for getting you registered. If that was your last known bona fide address, we will register you to vote.

It’s actually a little sad. Somebody may not have participated in elections in quite a while, and they decide they want to participate. You pull them up in the system, and it’ll say something like 425 Wagon Wheel Lane, and they’ll say they lived at 675, and I say I don’t have that, this is what I have in the system, and they shrug and say I’ve been here so long I don’t remember where I used to live. It could very well be that nobody in the family is still there, the house itself may be gone, but that was their last address and they still use it.

If you think about that, what was your childhood telephone number? Some of those people are in here for decades upon decades, and they forget the little details about their street address and things like that. We can look it up, we can get their registration updated or start a new registration if they’re Maine residents, and we can get them involved in the process.

When you talk about getting the registration process started, how much of that is an automatic process? I ask because Maine has a proposal on the table to implement automatic voter registration. Do you support automatic voter registration, and would you support applying it to the prison system as well?

The way we’re envisioning automatic voter registration working is using the motor vehicle databases primarily, sort of an automation of motor voter. It still hinges on people going to a motor vehicle office to renew, or obtain a new credential for the first time and have their name entered into the rolls. That’s trickier with people who are incarcerated because for most of them their driver’s licenses have long expired.

We do get requests from time to time from inmates to allow them to renew their credentials. Some of that is psychological. Remember, those are people. Some of them have done some really bad bad things, some of them have made some stupid decisions that get them in deep trouble, and often times they find themselves incarcerated for the rest of their lives, certainly for most of their lives. When I talked with one of the social workers at the prison about the driver’s license, they said that it’s like that sliver of light that comes in through the ceiling. For some of them, it’s their last connection to the outside world, having a driver’s license.

There’s a little bit of humanity involved here as well. Much of the way we handle corrections is very vengeful, you lock somebody away forever. I’m not judging whether or not that’s appropriate, but you cannot deny that you are still working with human beings, people who have a psychological structure that is greatly impacted by their incarceration. I was talking with one of the social workers, and this guy was going to get out, he had moved from the main prison to a minimum security correctional facility. Psychologically, he could barely handle the fact that his door was unlocked for a good part of the day, and that he could look out the window and see cars go up and down the road. He had been in there for 30 years. We have to bear this sort of thing in mind when we are looking at how we treat people. I’m not excusing the actions of anyone who winds up in prison. But they’re still people, they’re still human beings, they’re still American citizens, and I think this is a process that should belong to every American citizen. And in no small way it helps keep them connected to the real world.

Are you talking about voting as well there, or driver’s licenses? Do you think that voting is also the “sliver of light” that you were just describing?

Absolutely. It keeps them engaged in the world, as if they have some importance to them. I go to the prisons. These are some pretty tough people who’ve done some very violent things, and when I talk to them and am updating their paperwork I find nothing but humility. They are glad that anybody cares about them at all, enough to take an afternoon and drive down to the prison with a laptop and some paperwork and voter registration cards and get taken care of them so they can continue to participate in society even at that very remote level.

To return to the issue of automatic voter registration, why not have an automatic registration process for people who are in prison or who interact with the correctional system? Could you have a similar process as you have the motor vehicle interactions?

We could, depending on what type of contact they’ve had previously with us. If you have somebody who’s never had a driver’s license, that would be hard to do automatically because you have nothing on them, so you’re doing everything fresh from scratch. If they were already in our motor vehicle database or our election database, that would be relatively easy to move through electronically, if you have the right information from the voter. So yes you can do it, but it’s the same situation you face with anybody who’s not in prison if they have never participated in any of these bureaucratic processes. Automatic voter registration would work for anybody regardless of their legal situation if we had information on them, from them.

U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign said that she is opposed to people having the right to vote while in prison or on parole because they may be “unduly influenced” by law enforcement authorities. What do you think of this objection based on your experience in Maine?

I haven’t seen anything that would back that up. I have not seen or heard any case where a prison official would try to influence how somebody would vote. We have a secret ballot provision, and the prison officials I’ve worked with are pretty assiduous about staying out of that part of the process. These guys have their ballots, they go in their recreation room or their cells, and they mark their ballots and they seal the envelopes. I have not seen or heard anything to indicate that somebody who is an inmate has been forced to vote some way they didn’t agree with. Also they have to pay for the postage, so they don’t have to mail it, they don’t have to send the ballot back in if they feel like they are not getting their votes fairly represented. So I don’t see that as an issue, and we have not seen that as an issue in our experience.

Have there been discussions about providing people postage for voting? Some states have made absentee ballots postage-free. Is that something that you would support?

We haven’t discussed it. We do absorb the cost of absentee ballots for some groups of people, like victims of domestic violence who are in the address confidentiality program for instance. It has not been discussed in this context. I would certainly welcome the analysis. 

This is one of the things. We try to be careful about felon voting. When I went down to the prisons a couple of years back, one of the folks from the NAACP was wondering out loud why we hadn’t done a press release and why we didn’t have the media there. I said you don’t want that because this gets on the news, there’ll be six legislators putting in bills to prohibit felon voting. We don’t necessarily try to draw a lot of attention to it, because really it’s not an exception. We’re not doing anything exceptional here. These are American citizens exercising their right to vote. This is a bureaucratic process, we go down there to make sure that it’s done right, more than anything. I do support the right to vote, and I try to live that expression of patriotism as best as I can, without making a lot of extra work for myself.

Does the state have estimates of the turnout rate or participation level in prisons?

We don’t have any numerical way to track the number of absentee ballots that are requested via the prisons and returned because that’s all done at the town level. Even the towns don’t track specifically where they come from and where they are returned to. I will tell you that when we go down there, there’s usually a pretty big line of inmates looking to participate. I wouldn’t say we get a huge percentage of them, maybe a third, but it’s still a pretty significant number. And frankly, if one American wants to vote that’s significant enough for me.

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