“It’s not just people questioning you at work. It’s at the grocery store, or at your niece’s birthday party,” she said. Her county covers an area almost as big as New Jersey but has a population of just over 6,700 people.

“I pretty much know everyone,” added Donaldson, a Democrat starting her fourth term in a county then-President Donald Trump won by 51 points in 2020. “They don’t trust us. We’re letting them watch the process, but you can’t really argue with those people that have believed misinformation. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve known you. They’ll say, we know you’re doing it the right way, but the county next door isn’t. Well, that doesn’t make you feel any better about your job.”

This relatively new stressor is part of the long tail of election denialism that was kicked off by Trump during the 2020 presidential election. It remains as an animating belief among some on the right that entire electoral systems—and the people who run them—are irredeemably untrustworthy.  

The constant harassment has been enough to force many in Donaldson’s field out of the profession. A 2021 Brennan Center national survey of election workers found that a third had been made to feel unsafe because of their work, while about one in six said they’d been outright threatened during the past election cycle.

In Nevada, it’s been felt acutely. The clerk of Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, stepped down last year amid threats to herself and her office. The clerk of rural, deep-red Nye County also stepped down, because commissioners there voted to conduct ballot-counting by hand, and was replaced by a new clerk who has promoted election conspiracies. Clerks in tiny Lander and Mineral counties both resigned in late 2021.

Amid that turmoil last year, Nevada became a focal point for far-right efforts to overtake election administration. Jim Marchant, a Trump-endorsed election denier who echoed Nye County officials’ conspiracies against voting machines, ran for secretary of state in Nevada, while also taking a lead in coordinating a national slate of election deniers to run for the position in critical battleground states. Most lost in November, including Marchant. 

Despite Marchant’s loss, these pressures have still left election administration in Nevada in a challenging position. Now, about 40 percent of county clerks in the state are either brand new to their offices or, having taken over mid-term for a departed clerk, are serving their first complete terms. Some have never worked in elections before. 

The man who beat Marchant, Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, has also never worked in elections. In an interview with Bolts last week, he indicated that he was getting up to speed on important questions about voting access for Native communities; engagement of eligible voters newly released from prison; and potential improvements to the state’s automatic voter registration system.

“The biggest challenge” Nevada faces, Aguilar said, is building and preserving a robust, institutionally knowledgeable elections workforce. 

“Making sure we have people wanting to work in election departments, people wanting to work at the polls,” he said. “If we don’t take care of the human component, these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Nevada, like other states, has three major elections—presidential primary, general election primary and general election—in 2024.

“If people don’t feel safe going to work, they’re not going to work in these departments or on the polling sites,” Aguilar added.

Nonpartisan national elections experts generally rate Nevada’s voting systems above those of other states. It has in recent years distinguished itself from most of the rest of the country by offering universal, automatic mail voting; by implementing a modernized version of automatic voter registration; and by allowing same-day registration—among other policies.  

But workforce problems this state faces present a different type of challenge to election integrity that can’t be solved with voting procedure innovations alone. 

Aguilar is working to implement—ideally in time for 2024 elections, he said—a program that will take substantial administrative burden off of local election officials by centralizing the state’s voter registration information in a single database his office would maintain. At present, county offices must maintain their own databases and report up to the state, an arrangement which Donaldson, president of the Nevada Association of County Clerks and Election Officials said “we all have issues with.” Aguilar asked the legislature for $30 million to do this. So far the new governor, Republican Joe Lombardo, has supported the ask, Aguilar says.

The new secretary of state is also backing at least two new proposed laws this legislative session meant to protect election workers. One, Assembly Bill 59, would allow state election officials to shield their home addresses from public records; the other, expected but not yet filed, would make it a felony to threaten, harass or intimidate election workers. 

These proposals roughly mirror policies to discourage and punish harassment of election workers in other states, including Washington, Maine, and Colorado. These new laws have passed with bipartisan support, though advocates against mass criminalization have cautioned against the suggestion that new or harsher criminal penalties are appropriate solutions.

States Newsroom reported last year that in Washington, for example, the ACLU opposed a new law calling for up to five years of prison time in some cases, on the grounds that the state’s criminal code already allows for punishment of harassment—regardless of whether a victim is an election worker. And in Maine, criminal defense attorneys pointed to the fact that existing criminal penalties often do not actually deter criminal behavior.

Kerry Durmick, Nevada state director for the nonprofit voting rights group All Voting is Local, said they are skeptical of the proposal to increase criminal penalties.

“I’m not going to come out on this particular bill until we see the language,” Durmick said. “We don’t want it to go too far and have the effect of intimidating voters, or have a negative effect on criminal justice by creating a new felony. But we do want to protect election workers.”

Aguilar is convinced his policies are on target because, he said, similar ones in Colorado and other states are working. Matt Crane, who directs Colorado’s association of county clerks, said it’s not yet clear whether that is true. His state’s law only went into effect in June.

“I think it gives people some comfort knowing they’re protected. I think it’s too early to say how much,” he told Bolts. He added that the pressures on election officials that inspired the Colorado and Nevada legislation have died down a bit lately, but “there’s no question, with [Arizona’s losing gubernatorial candidate] Kari Lake running around with her absurdity, with Trump running for president, this stuff isn’t going to go away.”

Donaldson said she and other clerks in the state are on board with Aguilar’s agenda, and especially the new statewide registration database, but that she’s not sure legislation alone can cure what ails her profession. After all, she noted, no statehouse bill would extinguish misinformation, or seek to regulate the freedom of her constituents to bark at her in the grocery store.

“I don’t have that answer,” Donaldson added. “It’s hard because we try, with the help from the secretary of state’s office, to put out the correct information, but how do you make people believe it? I don’t know how we could do better at those kinds of things.”

She worries this trend will be especially taxing in rural communities, where misinformation and harassment are less often abstract or faceless because they come straight from neighbors. Her county, Pershing, is the type where multiple generations have been taught by the same local school teachers.

“It’s easier to ignore when you don’t know them,” Donaldson said. “But it’s every day now. It becomes a lot.”

The post “They Don’t Trust Us”: Nevada Election Workers Still Face Pressure and Harassment appeared first on Bolts.

Her decision was the largest gubernatorial act of commuting people’s death sentences since 2003. Seventeen people who began the week under a sentence of death no longer face the prospect of the state killing them. 

“It’s certainly unacceptable to me that I would leave office without taking one final action to ensure that none of these individuals will be executed by the state,” Brown told NPR. Brown had, even before this step, established a legacy for her “historic use” of her clemency powers.

Over the years since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the use of capital punishment in 1976 after a brief moratorium, only a handful of governors have taken similarly sweeping steps—most notably, Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican who in 2003 commuted the sentences of the 167 people on death row there. 

Brown’s mass clemency comes at a time where new death sentences and executions are at low levels nationwide. As the Death Penalty Information Center wrote in its year-end report, released this week, 2022 was the “[e]ighth consecutive year with fewer than 30 executions and 50 new death sentences.” There are 2,400 people on the nation’s death rows today, however, with blue California and red Florida leading the way.

But her actions also highlighted the stark partisan divide on the death penalty today, with two Americas drifting apart in their leaders’ willingness to carry out or block executions.

On the day Brown granted her clemency, Mississippi was preparing for the final execution in the United States this year. The state executed Thomas Loden Jr. on Wednesday, despite ongoing litigation against its lethal injection protocol. In all, 18 people were executed in the country this year, with Texas and Oklahoma carrying out five executions each. Arizona carried out three executions, Missouri and Alabama two each, and the final one in Mississippi. 

All six states that carried out executions this year are currently led by Republican governors.

Democratic executives have largely blocked executions. No sitting Democratic governor has overseen one; the last to do so was Virginia’s then-Governor Terry McAuliffe, who oversaw what became the state’s final execution, of William Morva, in 2017. McAuliffe later announced his opposition to the death penalty, and Democrats abolished it in 2021 shortly after taking control of the state government. In 2020, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of the three people on Colorado’s death row while signing a bill abolishing the death penalty.

With Brown’s latest act of clemency, there are now 24 states that have no one on death row. 

That number came close to inching up to 25 on Tuesday. At the urging of Nevada’s Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak, the state’s Board of Pardons was set to consider a motion at its quarterly meeting to commute the death sentences of everyone on Nevada’s death row.

But Carson City Judge Jim Wilson on Monday blocked that item from the meeting’s agenda, ruling that the state had not given enough notice to victims’ families. Sisolak is set to be replaced in January by Republican Joe Lombardo, a sheriff who pledged to “reverse Sisolak’s soft-on-crime policies.”  

Sisolak acknowledged during Tuesday’s board meeting that there would be no vote on his proposal. “Placing this matter on the agenda was done as an act of grace, and with the understanding that the death penalty is fundamentally broken,” he said. “The administration of the death penalty is not fair and not equitable and cannot be corrected.”

District attorneys had rushed to ask courts to stop the commutations after Sisolak’s proposal. Wilson, the judge, is himself a former DA in Elko County. Nevada prosecutors have a lot of clout: Last year, state Democrats failed to repeal the death penalty despite running the legislature after a bill derailed in the state Senate, where multiple Democratic leaders have day jobs as prosecutors in Clark County, where the DA’s office is prone to seeking death sentences. Sisolak’s comments at the time also helped stall the bill. 

“The fact that prosecutors in Nevada once again took steps to ensure the government is able to execute people is of little surprise since they continue to use the threat of execution as a means of coercion in criminal prosecutions,” Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, told Bolts.

“I am glad the governor made this most recent push for commutations, but the last four years provided Nevada leaders, including the vaunted Democratic trifecta, multiple opportunities to address this issue and we walk away on this issue four years later in the same predicament we were in four years ago,” Haseebullahhe added. 

The partisan divide is similarly complex in other states.

Some Republican governors have been far more aggressive than others in carrying out executions. And Democratic Party leaders have also been split on how much they should do to bring capital punishment to an end. And major tests loom in 2023 for Democratic officials—in Arizona, as well as in the White House.

Brown’s announcement in Oregon could put more pressure on her Democratic peers, starting with President Joe Biden.

Biden campaigned on a promise to “eliminate the death penalty” and Attorney General Merrick Garland put a moratorium on executions in 2021. But Garland’s Justice Department is continuing to support ongoing capital cases and his administration on Dec. 15 cast a vote against a United Nations resolution calling for a global death penalty moratorium. In a memorandum explaining its vote, the United States Mission to the United Nations stated, in part, that “the U.S. does not understand the lawful use of this form of punishment as contravening respect for human rights.” 

Of particular importance on the federal level is the fate of the more than 40 people on federal death row now. Former president Donald Trump launched an execution spree after more than 15 years of no federal executions, ultimately resulting in 13 federal executions under his watch. Since Biden took office, many opponents of the death penalty have urged him to use his clemency power to commute sentences and prevent a later president from carrying out a similar spree. Thus far, Biden has taken no action. 

The failure of the Nevada Board of Pardons to commute death sentences before the end of Sisolak’s term leaves the door open to executions since Nevada has 57 people on death row. Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006, but prosecutors this year tried to secure an execution date before a supply of lethal drugs expired.

Apart from the federal government and Nevada, the other jurisdictions with people on death row and Democratic executives at this time are California, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. None have held an execution in over a decade, many much longer.

In California and Pennsylvania, Democratic governors have imposed moratoriums but have not pushed for mass clemency. Governor Gavin Newsom retained his office last month in California; in Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Wolf, who set up the moratorium in 2015, will soon be replaced by Governor-Elect Josh Shapiro, the outgoing attorney general. Shapiro, who had a mixed record with criminal justice progressives as attorney general, said this year that he agreed with Wolf’s approach and that he would not sign a death warrant while governor. 

But an incoming Democratic governor will soon be under scrutiny in Arizona, a state that carried out multiple executions last year, and test the party’s consistency in blocking executions.

In November, Katie Hobbs became the first Democrat since 2006 to win the gubernatorial race and she already faces decisions—including her appointment to a vacancy on the state’s Board of Executive Clemency, a body that must recommend clemency to the governor—that will shape Arizona’s criminal justice future.

A Hobbs spokesperson did not respond to questions about her plans for addressing the death penalty and executions in her state. 

Arizona’s outlook is complicated by the fact that it is not yet clear whether Hobbs will be working with a Democrat or Republican attorney general come January. The November race was so close—Democrat Kris Mayes led by 510 votes in the initial tally—that an automatic recount is underway. Outgoing Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, fought in court to restart executions in Arizona after a several-years halt following the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014. The state executed three people in 2022, and Brnovich has asked the Arizona Supreme Court to set an execution date for Aaron Gunches.

Oklahoma stands out among the states led by Republicans. Recently re-elected Governor Kevin Stitt is on a killing spree, the state set 25 executions over a two and a half year period, through the end of 2024, although two of the planned executions (Richard Glossip and John Hanson) have already not gone ahead. 

Earlier this year, Stitt pressured the chair of Oklahoma’s pardon board to resign due to his support for clemency petitions. The board had repeatedly urged Stitt to commute the death sentence of Julius Jones, a man who had maintained that he was innocent for decades; Stitt did eventually agree, breaking with Attorney General John O’Connor, a Stitt appointee who has supported his execution spree and clashed with the board in pushing for Jones’s execution. 

O’Connor, however, lost his re-election bid in the Republican primary this year to Gentner Drummond, who ran as what The Oklahoman described “an attorney general who would be independent of the governor’s office,” and the approach that Drummond will strike on capital punishment-related issues is a big question heading into 2023.

Texas, like Oklahoma, continued apace with five executions, lower than it has in past years (except for 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic even led Texas to halt executions for some time), but still the most in the nation this year. The state largely re-elected its leaders last month.

For all his bluster in fighting prosecutors who oppose the death penalty, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, with the second largest death row in the country behind California, has not carried out an execution since his first year in office, when he oversaw two executions. But the supreme court that he reshaped has made it considerably harder to challenge death sentences. 

Botched executions and ongoing litigation over the availability of lethal drugs stalled the death penalty in a number of GOP-led states. DPIC dubbed 2022 “The Year of the Botched Execution,” finding seven of the 20 execution attempts were visibly problematic as a result of executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves. 

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is going to finish his first term in office having not carried out a single execution despite more than 100 people facing death sentences in Ohio. The governor has issued multiple reprieves as pharmaceutical companies continue to refuse to sell lethal drugs. In Tennessee, similarly, after questions arose about the state’s preparation of execution drugs for a scheduled execution in April, Governor Bill Lee issued a reprieve to stop that day’s scheduled execution. Soon thereafter, he went further and orderied a review of the state’s execution process and a halt to executions for the year. 

In Alabama, however, Governor Kay Ivey chose to stay with the more aggressive group of governors — until there was, effectively, no other option than a pause. After one horribly botched, three-hour ordeal in executing Joe Nathan James Jr., the state proceeded to attempt two other executions that were both halted before lethal drugs were administered. Only then, on Nov. 21, did Ivey order a “top-to-bottom review” of the state’s clearly failing execution process and request that no execution dates be set during the review. 

The news out of Oregon didn’t change the state’s day-to-day reality: Oregon had not carried out an execution in 25 years. Still, opponents of capital punishment celebrated Brown’s commutations as a critical move, stressing that a future governor who supports the death penalty could have lifted the moratorium on executions currently in effect in the state.

“Our state still has the death penalty. Two out of three candidates for governor in last month’s election were committed to resuming executions,” Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, told Bolts. “While the winner, Tina Kotek, said she would continue the moratorium, it’s a reminder there’s no guarantee that Oregon will be free of executions while we have people under death sentences.”

Despite Brown’s clemency, the state retains the death penalty on the books. State Democrats passed a law in 2019 that very significantly restricted its use, but repealing it altogether would demand a constitutional amendment and referendum. (Oregonians last voted on the death penalty, inscribing it in the state constitution, in 1984.)

“Voters would have to overturn it at the ballot,” Singh said, “but we shouldn’t underestimate how influential Brown’s leadership will be in moving us toward abolition.”

The post Landmark Push for Clemency in Oregon and Nevada Show Split Paths on Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

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.

In Michigan and Connecticut, they made it easier for people to vote early in future elections. In at least six localities, voters adopted ranked-choice voting. Oakland, California, adopted a new experiment in leveling the playing field in campaign spending. And other measures will try out new approaches to increasing participation locally. 

“It’s great to see voters embracing pro-democracy reforms to make the voting process easier and more inclusive,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor who specializes in election law and was watching a wide array of ballot measures on Tuesday, told Bolts. “When we make it easy to vote, and when turnout improves as a result, then democracy wins.”

The biggest expansion of ballot access on Tuesday comes with the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure that amends the state constitution to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. 

The proposal, backed by a coalition of Michigan organizations that support expanding voting rights, will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. It passed handily with 60 percent of the vote.

“It’s the role of our government to make sure people have the ability to vote and aren’t bogged down by constructed barriers,” Branden Snyder, co-executive director of a Detroit group backing the measure, told Bolts in October. 

Yvonne White, president of NAACP Michigan, another member of the coalition, celebrated the result this week, stating in a press release that, “Proposal 2 helps to ensure that every eligible voter in Michigan will have their vote counted without intimidation, harassment or interference.”

Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, which has some of the nation’s strictest rules for people who hope to vote before an Election Day; voters there adopted a constitutional amendment that authorizes the legislature to set up early voting. (It does not mandate this, unlike Michigan’s.)

At the local level, voters adopted a variety of innovations in campaign and voting procedures, with an eye to revitalizing democracy. Oakland, California passed a measure to revamp campaign finance and implement a democracy vouchers program in future local elections. It leads with 69 percent of the vote as of publication.

The program would provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to the candidate of their choice for upcoming city and school board elections, Bolts reported in July. Proponents of Measure W, modeled after a similar one that passed in Seattle in 2017, hope to draw more residents into the electoral process as small donors and candidates, while also increasing transparency in campaign finance. Since Seattle implemented its program, it has seen a 350 percent increase in the number of donors per race, and the pool of candidates in local races has diversified.

Other provisions in Measure W would lower the cap on campaign contributions for city races to $600, and require campaign ads to list their top three contributors. Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, which supported the measure, says democratizing campaign funding is a means of democratizing the governing process.

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” Stein told Bolts. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

Oakland also appeared poised to adopt a separate initiative to enable noncitizen residents who have children in city schools to vote in school board races. Noncitizen voting, which has long existed in some localities around the country, has spread over the past year, including to some municipalities in Vermont. But voters in Oregon’s Multnomah County turned down a measure on the issue on Tuesday, and Ohio voters adopted a constitutional amendment to ban noncitizen voting in local and state elections. 

In San Francisco, California, and Boulder, Colorado, voters approved proposals to move city elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years so that they coincide with federal and statewide elections, which will boost turnout.

And at least six jurisdictions nationwide voted to institute new ranked-choice voting systems. Proponents of the procedure, which asks people to rank candidates by order of preference rather than just opt for one, say it helps better reflect voters’ preferences.

Ranked-choice measures appear to have passed in Ojaj, California; Fort Collins, Colorado; Evanston, Illinois; Portland, Maine; Portland, Oregon; and Multnomah County, Oregon (which includes Portland). In Washington State, Clark and San Juan counties rejected ranked-choice voting, and the fate of a similar measure in Seattle was inconclusive as of publication.

But all eyes were in Nevada, a critical swing state voting on whether to adopt ranked-choice voting for state and congressional races; Alaska and Maine are the only states that already do this. Ballot Question 3 leads by 3 percentage points as of publication, with remaining ballots likely to lean in its favor. (Update: The Nevada Independent called the referendum in favor of Question 3 on Nov. 11.)

Before ranked-choice voting comes to Nevada, though, voters would need to approve it a second time in 2024 due to the state’s multi-year process for adopting constitutional amendments.

As Bolts reported in September, establishment politicians from both parties criticized the measure as too complicated and confusing for voters. But proponents of Question 3, which would also get rid of the state’s closed primaries, saw it as shifting power away from big-party politics and back to voters in a state where the largest plurality of voters are either nonpartisan or members of a minority party. 

According to FairVote, a national organization that supports ranked-choice voting, Tuesday’s results mean that there are now 61 jurisdictions that will use ranked-choice voting in their elections. Critical elections, including a U.S. Senate race in Alaska, a U.S. House race in Maine, and the DA race in San Francisco, are set to be resoled by ranked-choice voting in coming weeks.

The energy around these democracy measures come at the same time that voting rights have come under attack. 

Michigan’s ballot proposal was written to include defensive measures against the attacks on election systems that emerged from the Trumpian lie that the 2020 election results in Michigan were invalid. Conspiracies about widespread fraud resulted in at least one county canvasser board resisting certifying election results, outside groups calling for an independent audit of statewide results, and Republican legislators introducing a slate of bills that hemmed in people’s ability to access the ballot. 

The drafters of Proposal 2 countered each of these attempts with a specific reform. A 2021 petition to conduct an independently-funded “forensic audit” of 2020 election results, for example, was met with a provision in the ballot measure establishing that only election officials can conduct audits.  

Also on Tuesday, Michigan Democrats gained control of the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years by flipping the state legislature, and they also maintained control of the governorship and state Supreme Court, which may aid the measure’s implementation given Democrats’ broader support for these reforms.

And a candidate who was running to take over election administration in Michigan on a platform of similar conspiracies handily lost on Tuesday in the secretary of state race. (Many other election deniers fared very poorly around the country.)

The fate of some ballot measures remained uncertain as of Thursday. In Arizona, measures to tighten voter ID requirements or make it harder to pass future initiatives were unresolved as of publication, with hundreds of thousands of ballots left to process.

The article has been updated on Nov. 11 with more information about elections in Nevada and San Francisco.

The post The Ballot Measures That Revamped Voting on Tuesday 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.

Palin’s reaction mirrors the worry, shared by both parties’ establishments, that ranked choice voting is making election outcomes more unpredictable at a time when high-profile races are more foreseeable than ever based on partisanship.

Now ranked choice voting is up for voter approval in Nevada, one of the nation’s most competitive states.

Question 3, which would amend the Nevada Constitution to implement a system similar to Alaska’s ranked choice voting, faces a bipartisan chorus of high-profile critics in the state, from the GOP chair to the state’s Democratic governor and both Democratic U.S. senators. 

Like in Alaska, the amendment would set up a two-round system. First, it would make all candidates for congressional, gubernatorial, state executive and legislative contests run in a single primary open to all voters. The top five vote getters would then advance to the general election, where a second change would take effect: ranked choice voting, where voters can rank all five candidates on the ballot. 

Despite attempts by critics to disqualify the initiative, the Nevada Supreme Court in June ruled 4-3 to let the proposed changes, known collectively as Final-Five Voting, onto the November ballot. The issue will now go before the one group that appears most excited about the reform: the public. A poll from August showed that Nevada voters support Question 3 by a 15-point margin (though nearly a third of voters say they neither support nor oppose the idea). Because the measure requires an amendment to the state constitution, it must pass this November and then again in 2024. If it passes both elections, Final-Five Voting would take effect in the 2026 election cycle.

Even small changes could tilt the balance of power in Nevada, a Democratic-controlled battleground state that was led by a Republican governor, legislature, and U.S. Senator as recently as 2016. However, neither the political dynamics nor the arguments against ranked choice voting are unique to Nevada. 

Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, the political establishment often fights RCV, and they tend to offer the same justifications: it’s confusing, potentially discriminatory, and, especially after Alaska’s recent experience with ranked choice voting, unfair. 

These criticisms are especially pressing as RCV grows. In 2010, only eight major cities used ranked choice. As of July 2022, it’s used in two states, one county, and 53 cities, which are home to over 11 million voters, according to FairVote, a nonprofit advocating for RCV nationwide.  

This November, nine other jurisdictions have an RCV initiative on the ballot. Nevada is the only one that includes open primaries as well, but two others—Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine—would implement RCV on top of proportional representation, which is a “silver bullet toward gerrymandering,” says Deb Otis, director of research at FairVote, which advocates for ranked choice voting. 

Proponents of Final-Five Voting in Nevada argue that open primaries and RCV are particularly well suited for the state’s political landscape. About 37 percent of voters are registered with a minor party or as nonpartisan, which is greater than both registered Democrats (33 percent) and Republicans (30 percent). Meanwhile, the state has been so gerrymandered that about half  of state legislative primaries were uncontested this year.

And where there have been competitive races, the winner often earns less than the majority. Steve Sisolak won the governorship in 2018 with 49.4 percent of the vote, and Catherine Cortez Masto won her U.S. Senate seat in 2016 with 47.1 percent.

Ranked choice voting would ensure that the winner has majority support. If no candidate earns more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the bottom vote getter is eliminated, and their second-choice votes are redistributed to the other candidates. That process continues until someone takes the majority. 

“RCV rewards both deep support as evidenced by a high number of first rankings, and broad support, as evidenced by many backup rankings,” writes Steven Hill, co-founder of FairVote.

Critics like Sisolak argue that the ranking process is confusing for voters, especially voters of color, although at least one study suggests little difference in how racial and ethnic groups understand the process. Otis argues that RCV can prevent the kind of vote dilution that can obstruct candidates of color. She points to the recent Democratic congressional primary in Detroit, which is 80 percent Black. There were nine candidates running, and after voters split their votes between multiple Black contenders, a non-Black candidate won with around 28 percent of the vote. Now, Detroit will likely not have Black representation in Congress for the first time since the early 1950s.

“Once they get to know the candidate field, people tend to know, ‘Oh, I like these three,’ ‘I’d be ok with these three,’ and ‘I really don’t want these three,’” she says. “But we’re locked into a ballot style where we cannot express that.” 

In terms of difficulty, voters also reported few problems in the most recent high-profile ranked choice voting election, the Alaska special election triggered by the death of U.S. Representative Don Young. Ninety-five percent of voters surveyed by Alaskans for Better Elections said that they’d received instructions on how to rank their choices before filling out their ballots. Only 6 percent said that the system was “very difficult” to use. Eighty-five percent said it was “somewhat” or “very” simple. 

After nearly 50 candidates ran in the election’s first stage in June, four moved to the August runoff to be decided by ranked choice voting. One dropped out, leaving in Peltola the Democrat and two Republicans: Palin and Nick Begich. 

In the first round of the ranked choice voting, Peltola received about 40 percent of the vote; the two Republicans combined for about 60 percent, with Palin coming in second. When Begich’s voters were transferred to other candidates, though, Peltola clinched a win over Palin, 51 to 49 percent.

To Palin, this was evidence that something went awry: The victory of a Democrat, Palin says, has “disenfranchised” the 60 percent of first-round voters who opted for a Republican. 

But voters select candidates, not parties. Just half of Begich voters chose Palin as their second choice, and nearly 30 percent flipped and went to Peltola.

When unpopular candidates with a ceiling to their support like Palin prevail in a primary, they often lose a lot of voters their party would otherwise expect to win in a general election, which leads to upsets. The Begich voters who voted for Peltola may fall in that familiar category. 

But the remaining 21 percent didn’t rank anyone else, meaning their ballot was “exhausted” in the final round of the election between Palin and Peltola, and played no role. Critics of ranked-choice voting generally fault the system for producing too many of these “exhausted” ballots, leaving some unable to influence the decisive round. 

David O’Brien, policy counsel for RepresentUs, says choosing how many people to rank is part of what people get to decide. “We shouldn’t assume people don’t rank every candidate because they’re confused or don’t understand the process,” he says. “If voters don’t choose to rank every candidate, that’s their choice.”

Still, about eight percent of all voters who participated in Alaska’s August primaries did not have a preference registered in the final round that settled the House winner. That’s an unusually high rate for a high-profile election. In the past two cycles in November 2018, and 2020, no more than 2.5 percent of Alaskans who went to the polls skipped voting in the U.S. House general election. Now, Peltola, Begich, and Palin are all running again in a regularly-scheduled election in November, and Republicans think they can do better with fewer “exhausted” ballots. They are urging voters to “rank the red” to ensure that either Palin or Begich wins.

If Nevada switches to a similar system, it may shuffle the partisan calculations of the state’s usually-tight general elections. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Katherine Gehl, who founded The Institute for Political Innovation, which has led the campaign for Final-Five Voting in Nevada this year. 

She argues that, because the status quo guarantees the dominance of both major political parties, especially in gerrymandered districts without competitive primaries, politicians have little incentive to deliver results for voters. In that sense, Final Five is as much about changing the behavior or lawmakers as it about voters. “The threat of new competition in any industry, that really drives progress,” she says.  

The post Nevada Voters Consider Bringing Ranked Choice Elections to a Swing State appeared first on Bolts.

This year, Wolfson faces a primary challenger who vows to help end capital punishment in the state. Ozzie Fumo, a criminal defense attorney and former Nevada State Assembly member who introduced legislation to abolish the death penalty in 2019, is Wolfson’s only challenger so far in the June Democratic primary for DA in Clark County. 

Fumo told Bolts he would never seek death sentences if elected. He also said he will continue to push for lawmakers to abolish capital punishment in Nevada, citing its disproportionate use against people of color and high fiscal impact. 

“In my experience, the darker your skin, the more likely a person is to receive the death penalty,” Fumo said. “I would not seek the death penalty as district attorney of Clark County.”

This is the first time Fumo has taken this stance on how he would use his discretion as DA. In the past, candidates who say they personally oppose the death penalty have often stopped short of saying they would rule out its use within their office so long as capital punishment remains legal.

If Clark County were to shut the door to the death penalty, it would mark a major shift in the scope of capital punishment in the United States. According to data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center, only three counties elsewhere in the nation have sentenced more people to death over the last decade.

The Clark County DA race is a window into the tensions at the heart of the modern death penalty in the United States. Executions and new death sentences continued a years-long downward trend in 2021, as even some conservative law enforcement officials, such as Utah County Attorney David Leavitt, turned away from its use. Yet at the same time, the practice has become more extreme and entrenched where it remains in use. 

In 2021, Arizona refurbished its out-of-use gas chamber for potential use in future executions, while South Carolina authorized use of the electric chair as an execution method. Oklahoma has vowed to continue lethal injections even after last October’s execution of John Marion Grant led to him vomiting and convulsing while strapped to the gurney. Grant’s lethal injection was Oklahoma’s first since 2015, when other botched executions triggered a years-long pause. 

Nevada almost swung in the other direction, in part due to legislation that Fumo pushed to abolish the death penalty while he was in the legislature. But those legislative efforts fell short, and Wolfson was key to preserving the death penalty in Nevada statutes. With Clark County comprising over 70 percent of Nevada’s population, he is one of the state’s most influential voices on criminal justice policy, repeatedly using his bully pulpit to oppose repeal. Last year, Wolfson testified against a death-penalty abolition bill, while two staff prosecutors who work for his office and also serve as state Senators—Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro and Senator Melanie Scheible—helped block the bill from inside the legislature. Having employees of the DA’s office in legislative leadership dims the prospects of criminal justice reform legislation beyond the death penalty, said criminal defense attorney Lisa Rasmussen.

“Nicole Cannizzaro has told me, ‘I am a prosecutor; I’m not going to vote for that,’” Rasmussen said of reform bills she has lobbied for at the legislature, including the bill to end the death penalty. “It feels like the criminal justice reform bills that she doesn’t want to have a hearing on don’t get a hearing.” Wolfson, Scheible and Cannizzaro did not respond to requests for comment.

Usual conventions of how prosecutors approach the death penalty may be changing, though. In 2018, when Wolfson was last up for election, he received a primary challenge from criminal defense attorney Robert Langford, who also sought to make an issue of the incumbent’s use of the death penalty. But Langford only said he would scale back its use, rather than ending it entirely. Since that time, it has become more common for prosecutorial candidates to say they would outright rule out seeking death sentences, as Fumo is now doing.

But Fumo did not lay out a plan to prevent staff prosecutors in his office from tanking the prospects of repeal in the legislature. The lawyers of a man currently on death row in Nevada are alleging in a lawsuit that Cannizzaro and Scheible violated conflict-of-interest rules during the debate over abolition last year because their role as lawmakers clashed with their jobs as deputy DAs. “If the Supreme Court says they can, I’m not going to prevent anybody from doing something they want to do,” Fumo said in response. He also said he would be willing to return to the state capitol to testify in favor of a bill abolishing the death penalty. 

Nevada’s application of the death penalty is particularly prone to error. Between 2014 and 2017, for instance, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed three death penalty convictions and ordered new trials after finding racial discrimination in the jury selection process.

There are also racial disparities in how prosecutors apply the death penalty. According to numbers compiled by public defender Scott Coffee, defendants were Black in over 50 percent of cases where Wolfson signaled his intent to seek death sentences. Clark County’s population, by comparison, is 13 percent Black. 

Nevada’s death penalty is also expensive to pursue relative even to life imprisonment, as is the case in other states where the question has been studied. A 2014 study commissioned by the Nevada legislature found that death penalty cases can cost up to $500,000 more than an identical case where a death sentence is not pursued. These costs mainly come from the stringent requirements surrounding capital cases, which obligate the defense to pursue extensive background investigation, mitigation efforts, and appeals. 

Most defendants facing the death penalty are represented by public defenders, meaning the costs are borne by Clark County’s taxpayers. For a county that seeks multiple death sentences a year, these costs add up. “The county will see in the first four years how much money we will save based on my decision not to file the death penalty,” Fumo said.

Fumo says he would still pursue harsh punishments and that he would seek sentences up to and including life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. But taking the death penalty off the table could still change the balance of power between the prosecution and the defense. Even the threat of a death sentence is often enough to make defendants plead guilty in exchange for the DA not seeking capital punishment, according to Coffee, who noted that 83 of the roughly 120 death penalty cases resolved during Wolfson’s time in office resulted in pleas without going to trial.

“It’s a crowbar to drive negotiations,” Coffee added.

While Wolfson defeated Langford with 56 percent of the vote in the 2018 primary, the political ground in Clark County may have shifted in favor of criminal justice reform since then. In 2020, seven public defenders, all of them women, won elections to judgeships in Clark County, despite significant fundraising disadvantages, even as Fumo lost a statewide bid for a Supreme Court seat. (In the wake of the public defenders’ wins, Wolfson called for Nevada to replace judicial elections with an appointment system.)

Though Clark County hands down a large number of death sentences, executions in Nevada haven’t occurred since 2006. That could soon change, however, with Wolfson seeking to proceed with the execution of Zane Floyd, who in 2000 was convicted on four counts of murder, as well as sexual assault and other charges, and sentenced to death. The state’s supply of drugs that it plans to use in a lethal injection will expire at the end of February and may be difficult to replace—many pharmaceutical companies block prisons from purchasing drugs for use in executions. 

Floyd’s lawyers have continued to appeal his death sentence, which Wolfson’s deputies have fought to uphold. Fumo said he believes that Floyd “deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole,” but would not seek to execute him. 

“They can’t even get the medicine they need to do it correctly. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are against it and refuse to sell those drugs to the state of Nevada,” Fumo said. “Look at all the wasted time and energy of the deputy district attorneys. They could be spending that time and effort into expanding programs or trying cases.”

It is unknown when Floyd’s execution would be scheduled if his appeals fail, and whether it would occur before a new DA came into office, and advocates say they are looking at many avenues. “We hope that the board of pardons, and the governor, and the attorney general, will hear Zane Floyd’s plea for clemency,” said Mark Bettencourt, project director of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

The post DA Candidate Vows to End Death Sentences In Las Vegas, a Capital Punishment Stronghold appeared first on Bolts.

Nevada, a state where district attorneys are fond of death sentences, is close to repealing capital punishment. When the Assembly passed a bill to abolish the death penalty in April, the chamber’s Democrats, who hold the majority, all voted in its favor, sending it to the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But a pair of Democratic senators, both of whom work as prosecutors when the legislature is not in session, may derail the effort. Nicole Cannizzaro is the Senate majority leader and has not committed to bringing forward the legislation, Assembly Bill 395. Melanie Scheible leads the Judiciary Committee, which has yet to hold a hearing or vote on the bill. The clock is ticking; the bill would need to pass the committee by next week, and the entire legislative session is winding down at the end of May.

Cannizzaro and Scheible are deputy district attorneys in the office of Clark County (Las Vegas) DA Steve Wolfson. Wolfson is a staunch foe of death penalty abolition who has sought death sentences in dozens of cases over his tenure, testified against AB 395, and is trying to schedule an execution just as this debate is coming to a head in the state Capitol.

“There’s an apparent conflict of interest, where the people that are making laws are enforcing laws,” Scott Coffee, a longtime public defender in Clark County who has worked on many capital cases, told The Appeal: Political Report. “Walking into that office after repealing the death penalty would be kind of like walking into the Red Sox dugout after trading Babe Ruth.” Neither Cannizzaro nor Scheible responded to requests for comment for this article.

The Nevada Association of District Attorneys, the state’s prosecutorial lobby, has been urging lawmakers to reject AB 395. Its president, Elko County DA Tyler Ingram, testified against abolishing the death penalty in the Assembly. “Throughout Nevada, prosecutors make the decision to seek the death penalty sparingly and judiciously,” Ingram told the Assembly. “It is reserved for the worst of the worst.”

But Nevada prosecutors have pursued the death penalty so frequently that they have helped make their state an outlier even by national standards.

Nevada has about 70 people on death row. Relative to the state’s population, that is the second-highest number in the country, behind Alabama. The numbers are “completely out of whack with the rest of the country and the rest of the free world, to be quite honest,” said Coffee, who blames a “culture” where DAs seek death sentences “in volume because it’s always been sought in volume.”

And state prosecutors have filed notices seeking death sentences in dozens of additional cases—but have either failed to secure them or else dropped their quest. Critics say prosecutors use these notices to gain leverage in plea negotiations.

The Nevada District Attorneys Association, contacted through its president and through two registered lobbyists, did not respond to requests for comment.

For Assemblymember Steve Yeager a Democrat who is a chief sponsor of AB 395, the death penalty gives prosecutors an alarming degree of discretion over someone’s life. 

Yeager worked as a public defender in Clark County for eight years, going up against the county’s prosecutors. He says he already opposed the death penalty before that experience, but his resolve hardened when he witnessed the “unjustifiable differences” in how prosecutors handled similar cases. A disproportionate share of the people on Nevada’s death row are Black, and Yeager says last summer’s protests for racial justice have helped push this bill further than similar measures have gone in the past. 

AB 395, as currently drafted, would commute the sentences of people on Nevada’s death row to life without the possibility of parole—in addition to barring future death sentences.

Nevada has not executed anyone since 2006, in part due to its difficulties obtaining execution drugs from manufacturers. But abolition advocates point to the resurgence of federal executions under President Donald Trump to warn that a pause could end at any moment. 

Wolfson, the Clark County DA, is looking to break Nevada’s stretch by trying to schedule an execution for Zane Michael Floyd, who was sentenced to death in 2000 for the murders of four people. There is a hearing scheduled in state court for next week, shortly before the deadline by which the Judiciary Committee must act on AB 395, though a federal judge said on Thursday that he may intervene to block the proceedings.

Holly Welborn, policy director at the ACLU of Nevada and a member of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty, says the DAs’ involvement in the death penalty debate this year mirrors how they’ve torpedoed past criminal justice reform proposals. She regrets that lawmakers let them have such sway in legislative proceedings.

“It’s almost like they have a veto, that everything has to be signed off by the DAs, by some law enforcement entity,” Welborn said. Referencing a 2019 omnibus reform bill that several DAs opposed that was weakened before its final passage, she added, “It seems that every change in a bill is at the request of law enforcement, who then still show up and oppose these measures.”

This dynamic has played out before, in ways strikingly similar to the current debate on the death penalty.

In 2019, the Assembly overwhelmingly passed legislation to limit civil asset forfeiture. Advocates who supported the bill called on Cannizzaro to allow a Senate vote on the bill, much like they are doing now with AB 395. But the bill never received a vote in the Senate. 

The Nevada District Attorneys Association testified against that asset forfeiture bill in the Senate’s Judiciary Committee. This year, when lawmakers introduced a watered down version that also has yet to get a vote, the association testified against it again.  The group has also been resisting a bill that would toughen use-of-force standards for police. 

Throughout the country, DAs and their statewide associations play a similar role of adamantly fighting reform, but they are facing a reckoning in some states. Reform advocates in Nevada hope their state can follow suit. “This is something that we’re not tolerating anymore,” Wellborn said, describing renewed efforts by criminal justice reform advocates to expand whose voices are heard at the state Capitol.

Leslie Turner, an organizer with Mass Liberation, credits AB 395’s progress to community organizing. “We really focused on getting into impacted communities and empowering our own community members, reducing the stigma and shame about having been impacted by the criminal justice system,” she said. “And I think that that has created a lot of momentum around criminal justice reform in general.”

“There is a difference between the emotional satisfaction that comes from revenge, versus actual justice,” Turner added about the death penalty. “Justice to me is making sure that this doesn’t happen in the future. We’re having three or four mass shootings a week, because we never actually got to the root cause of why this was happening. … We just react over and over again. I think there’s just a mass refusal in the community to accept this anymore.”

Local elections have also added to the influence of public defenders, sparking new fault lines even within the Democratic Party. In addition to former public defender Yeager, the chief sponsor of AB 395 in the Senate—Democrat James Ohrenschall—works as a public defender in Clark County when the legislature is not in session. 

Public defenders also secured a string of victories in judicial races in Clark County last year after running on promises to bring a decarceral outlook to the bench. In response, Wolfson called on the state to move away from electing its judges. Wolfson himself is up for re-election as DA in 2022.

The Nevada Democratic Party has faced broader turmoil this year. A slate aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the state party. And Judith Whitmer, the incoming state party chairperson, supports abolishing the death penalty. 

Even if the Senate were to pass AB 395, though, Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak has tentatively indicated he may block the legislation. He said he would have a “hard time” supporting a bill that fully abolishes the death penalty. 

Death penalty opponents remain hopeful that the state’s broad political transformations, combined with the reckoning brought about by protests and the nationwide tide against executions, can outweigh Nevada’s propensity for capital punishment.

Welborn invoked the anti-death penalty movement’s recent triumph in Virginia, another state that long embraced executions. “We know that the death penalty system is too broken to fix in the state of Nevada, and anywhere else in this country,” she said. “Virginia at one time had the highest rate of executions in the country. If they can do it, we certainly can do it here in Nevada.”

The post Nevada Prosecutors Are Standing in the Way of Abolishing the Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

When Christy Craig started working at the public defender’s office in Clark County, Nevada, in 1998, she didn’t plan to ever run for judge. “I knew that was my gig,” Craig said. “I couldn’t have been happier to be there.” Since then, Craig has represented thousands of defendants and scored landmark wins in suits against the State on issues of correctional mental health and cash bail. 

But soon Craig will be leaving the public defender’s office to become a judge on the Eighth Judicial District Court, the criminal and civil court of Clark County, which includes the Las Vegas metro area. 

It was a colleague who gave her the idea to seek election last January. “I was sitting in my office and I was complaining about the bench,” Craig said. Suddenly Belinda Harris, a public defender who had already announced her candidacy for a judgeship, shouted from her office: “Well, shut up and run!” 

So Craig entered the race and won on Nov. 3—alongside Harris and five other public defenders.

These seven public defenders, all women, many women of color, are now set to become judges in January. Harris is heading to the North Las Vegas Justice Court; the others were elected to the Eighth Judicial District Court, despite many being significantly outraised by their opponents. 

The results will alter Clark County’s political landscape, strengthening the hand of those who want to change practices that fuel mass incarceration. Several of the public defenders described their candidacies as an effort to “balance” the courts, as judgeships in Clark County have historically been dominated by former prosecutors, as is often the case nationwide. 

Organizers interested in criminal justice reform pushed similar efforts to “flip the bench” this year in other parts of the country, including New Orleans and Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Ohio, where public defenders and others with experience representing marginalized people successfully sought judicial seats.

“I hope that it means that we are able to make the system more fair,” said public defender and judge-elect Erika Ballou, who was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders. “I understand that a lot of times people who are in the system have done something wrong, but that shouldn’t ruin their life. It shouldn’t define everything.”

Judges have immense power over defendants’ lives and over the direction of the criminal legal system as a whole. From setting bail amounts to meting out sentences, judges make the choices that either maintain the status quo or chart alternatives to locking people up.

But judges depend on collaboration with prosecutors, and the public defenders are already facing backlash before even taking the bench. Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson, who in the past has resisted reform proposals to end cash bail and the death penalty, called for Nevada to move to replace judicial elections with appointments in late November. Wolfson raised the issue in direct response to the public defenders winning judicial elections. 

Still, local advocates hope that the elections will be part of a growing momentum for criminal justice reform that has been building in Nevada.

—

Over the last two years, Nevada has seen numerous changes to its criminal legal system. In 2019, the state legislature passed laws shortening sentences for many nonviolent offenses, increasing access to diversion programs, re-enfranchising formerly incarcerated individuals, providing monetary compensation for the wrongly incarcerated, and banning private prisons. In September 2019, Craig was part of a team that brought Valdez-Jimenez v. Eighth Judicial District Court before the Nevada Supreme Court. The court’s decision in April of this year flipped cash bail on its head, placing the burden on prosecutors to prove that a defendant should be held on bail, rather than asking defendants to prove that they should be released. 

The Valdez-Jimenez ruling “basically says that the standard way of doing cash bail in Nevada for decades is blatantly unconstitutional,” said Alec Karakatsanis, executive director of Civil Rights Corps, which worked with the public defender’s office on the case. “If the state wants to jail someone prior to trial because it believes that the person poses some kind of a danger, they actually have to put on evidence in a rigorous legal proceeding.”

Yet the discretion of individual judges remains extremely important. “Even under those standards, judges can just say, ‘I’m looking at the evidence and I find that the person is a danger to the community,’ and they can just repeat those words without genuinely exercising real thought,” Karakatsanis added.

Newly elected judge Belinda Harris said she plans to treat the Valdez-Jimenez standards seriously, though she added she would set bail if she deemed it absolutely necessary. “I don’t think that people’s freedoms should be tied to whether they can make bail or not,” Harris said. 

Harris was elected judge of the Justice Court of North Las Vegas, where the initial stages of a criminal proceeding take place, including the decision on whether to set bail in the vast majority of criminal cases. That decision will be fully within Harris’s discretion.

Harris was also the first Black judge elected without first being appointed in North Las Vegas, which has a large Black population compared to the rest of Clark County. “I think there’s something to be said that most of the clients that are being serviced look like me,” Harris said. “We’re diversifying the bench.” Most of the public defenders recently elected as judges—Harris, Ballou, Monica Trujillo, Jasmin Lilly-Spells, and Dee Butler—are women of color, a historically underrepresented group on the Nevada bench.

Ballou said that she hopes the newly elected judges will be able to move the Clark County justice system toward a rehabilitative model of criminal justice. That could entail finding alternatives to incarceration.

“Maybe we’ll be able to get people the help they need rather than sending them to prison, which just warehouses them, and doesn’t help them in any way to come out and not do this again,” she said. “Do they need drug help? Is it unresolved trauma? Can we give people some mental health counseling? Can we do something so that this cycle does not continue? That’s what I hope.”

Scott Coffee, a public defender, emphasized that beyond specific policy changes, the new judges’ experience as public defenders could translate into more compassion in court proceedings. “Because a lot of these new candidates have dealt with people accused of crimes one on one, they know they’re human beings,” he said. 

“They understand the difficulties,” Coffee added. “It’s easy for me to get to the courthouse, but if you’re homeless, living eight miles from the courthouse, making an 8 o’clock court appearance isn’t always the easiest thing to do.” 

“The biggest change that you’ll see come to the bench is that there’s going to be more empathy for the struggles that people face, particularly when they’re poor,” Coffee said.

—

Without big fundraising hauls, the candidates relied on grassroots organizing to educate and turn out voters. Organizations working in communities affected by poverty and the criminal legal system played a significant role in pushing the public defenders to victory. 

Most of the candidates were outraised by their opponents several times over. Special Public Defender Monica Trujillo was victorious despite raising only $77,000 to her opponent’s more than $400,000, including $75,000 of his own money, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Craig was outraised by more than a factor of 25, raising only $14,000 to her opponent’s $360,000. Ballou raised no money at all. One of the candidates did receive significant outside help; Carli Kierny was supported by radio ads paid for by a PAC largely funded by megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, which mostly supported conservative-leaning candidates.

The candidates attributed their victories in the face of such fundraising gaps to their longtime presence in the communities they serve. “I’ve been doing things in the community for the 17 years that I’ve lived here,” Ballou said, noting her work with organizations including community theaters and Planned Parenthood. “I know a lot of people, people know who I am.”

Harris also said that her roots and longtime presence in North Las Vegas were helpful. “It was really a grassroots, community effort,” she said of her campaign. “I’m down on the ground, you know? I’m at the cookout, I’m at the neighborhood barbecue.”

Harris said she received support from her clients at the public defender’s office. “There would be times that I would meet a new client, and they’d say ‘You’re running for judge, my whole family is gonna vote for you!’” 

The candidates also benefited from the work of local grassroots organizations such as Mi Familia Vota Nevada and the anti-incarceration network Mass Liberation Nevada. MLN mobilized dozens of volunteers for phone banks and canvasses that reached thousands of voters, held video forums to educate voters and introduce them to the judicial candidates, and organized with incarcerated individuals to get them to encourage family members to vote. 

Leslie Turner, an MLN organizer and formerly incarcerated person, said the group’s efforts were particularly important because of the effect that the criminal legal system has on the group’s core constituency. 

“We have a higher chance of actually being in court in front of some of these judges, so it’s important that we’re putting people on the bench that understand our perspective, understand why we’re saying Black Lives Matter … and all of the factors that come into play when somebody might end up in the courtroom,” Turner said.

Much of MLN’s organizing centered on reaching out to formerly incarcerated people. In 2019, Nevada adopted a law restoring the voting rights of tens of thousands of people with felony convictions; all citizens who are not in prison can now vote. 

“That garnered a whole new base of voters,” said Jagada Chambers, an organizing fellow with MLN who is formerly incarcerated.

Many formerly incarcerated people were initially unaware that they had become able to vote, making grassroots outreach—some of which stalled under the COVID-19 pandemic—essential. 

“I literally had to pull out the bill, the paperwork, and go over it, and be like ‘You actually can vote, for real,’” Turner said. “It was really empowering.”

The fact that many of the candidates were participants or legal observers at Black Lives Matter protests over the summer was helpful in mobilizing volunteers. A frequent recruitment pitch was that “these are the same lawyers that are out in the streets supporting us and this movement, so we need to support them,” Turner said. 

—

Since the Nov. 3 elections, DA Wolfson has taken issue with the incoming wave of judges.

“In past elections, there was a greater correlation between how much effort a candidate put into the campaign and the result—a more direct relationship between efforts and results of fundraising and who won,” Wolfson said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He also raised doubts about some of the winning candidates’ qualifications.

Some public defenders criticized Wolfson’s comments. “That guy lives in a totally different world than 90 percent of our community,” said public defender John Piro. “It’s a crowd that’s not taking time to recognize that there’s systemic issues here with both poverty and racism that have affected our system.”

Wolfson’s office did not respond to multiple requests for further comment.

Fifteen political organizations also signed on to a statement from Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice (NACJ) denouncing Wolfson’s comments, including the Clark County Democratic Party, the Las Vegas NAACP, Mi Familia Vota Nevada, and the Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America. The letter claimed that Wolfson’s commentary “ignores the greater value in a democracy of earned community reputations over access to finances,” and also, “denies the extensive professional qualifications of our newly elected judges.”

NACJ president Sarah Hawkins told The Appeal: Political Report that Wolfson’s remarks on fundraising “devalue members of historically marginalized communities, who cannot contribute financially to campaigns, who only have their votes.” 

“He didn’t complain [about electing judges] when prosecutors with law enforcement endorsements repeatedly ascended the bench over the past decade,” Hawkins added.

But Harris was unperturbed by Wolfson’s comments. “I just don’t pay him any mind, because as a judge, I’m just gonna look at what’s before me, and not his thoughts or opinions,” Harris said. “I ran my race. I had some DA colleagues … tell me I was gonna lose, but here I am.”

The post How Public Defenders Rocked Las Vegas Judge Elections appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then the pandemic hit and the events were canceled.

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post COVID-19 Stalls Efforts to Help People with Felony Convictions Register to Vote appeared first on Bolts.