When the Massachusetts supreme court banned sentences of life without the possibility of parole against children in late 2013, the state was ahead of the curve—just five states had taken that step as of the start of that year. 

Today there are 28. In an unusually rapid sea change over the last decade, red and blue states alike have rushed to bar that punishment, which denies someone any possibility of ever leaving prison, for anyone under age 18. That includes GOP-run Ohio in 2021, and Democratic-run Minnesota and New Mexico last year. 

Will a similar surge now shield even more youths from being incarcerated for life with no hope of release?

Once again, Massachusetts is ahead of the curve: The state supreme court issued landmark rulings on Jan. 11 that expanded its earlier holding, and raised the minimum age for a life without parole sentence from 18 to 21. 

In a 4-3 vote, the majority ruled that youth aged 18 to 20 are never beyond redemption, and that they should receive the same consideration as minors due to their continuing mental development. “A sentence of life in prison without parole eligibility review for those up to age twenty-one—individuals with diminished culpability and a heightened capacity for change—is no less cruel or unusual than it is for those up to age eighteen,” Justice Scott Kafker wrote in a concurrence that drew a direct line between the court’s decision in 2013 and its new ruling. 

The decision doesn’t guarantee actual release to anyone. Rather, it grants people opportunities to appear in front of a parole board to showcase their growth—and only once they’ve spent 15 to 30 years in prison, depending on the case. State officials estimate that the ruling made roughly 200 people newly eligible for a parole hearing.

“Emerging adults… must be granted a ‘meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation,’” Chief Justice Kimberly Budd wrote for the majority, quoting from a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that applied to children. The court was considering the cases of two people, Sheldon Mattis and Jason Robinson, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole as 18- and 19-year olds. (All seven justices who took part in the decision were nominated to the court by Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican.)

Massachusetts is just the second jurisdiction to ensure that everyone incarcerated over a crime committed before age 21 has some opportunity for release. 

In 2021, Washington, D.C., adopted a “second look” reform that’s functionally equivalent: People convicted as young adults can ask for a review after serving 15 years in prison. (D.C. does not call this review “parole,” so people in this group can technically still be sentenced to life without parole, but they have a mechanism to petition for release.) 

In fact, D.C. applies that reform all the way to age 25, rather than 21, a narrower definition of who is a full adult in the eyes of the law.

The Massachusetts ruling also builds on other very recent gains for reformers pushing for a higher cutoff age than 18. 

Just over the last twelve months, Connecticut and Illinois both adopted laws to restrict LWOP up to age 21. In Michigan and Washington state, judges banned sentencing rules that mandate life without parole for people under 19 and 21, respectively. Each has important carve-outs: Illinois’ law does not apply to people convicted of predatory sexual offenses, nor does it apply retroactively; Connecticut’s law applies only to people convicted before 2005; in Michigan and Washington, judges still have discretion to impose the sentence as long as it’s not automatic. But each concretizes the same principle as Massachusetts’ ruling: that 18 is not the proper place to set a limit for who gets to be considered a young person deserving of special protections. 

“People who committed crimes at a very young age have the capacity to turn their lives around and become productive citizens,” said Alex Taubes, a Connecticut lawyer who represents people on parole and supports his state’s 2023 reform. 

Preston Shipp, who advocates for such reforms nationwide as policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, says his advocacy work gets easier when he can tell lawmakers that more and more states have acted against juvenile life without parole. “When one domino falls, it causes the next domino to fall,” Shipp said. “These are very important steps that we’re continuing to take on our journey to make sure that people who don’t have fully formed brains are not thrown away and told there’s no hope.”

Reform proponents in other states are already lining up to be next. California’s supreme court heard a similar case in early December; it could prohibit life without parole up to age 26. 

In Washington state, legislation that would end life without parole up to age 25 received its first hearing on Jan. 15, just days after the Massachusetts ruling. Chelsea Moore, an advocate with the ACLU of Washington, and co-founder of Look2Justice, an organization centered on the rights of incarcerated Washingtonians, is championing that bill. “It’s wonderful that we see this acknowledgement spreading across the U.S.,” she said. “It’s very helpful for us to be able to interact with folks in those states, and to point to those states.”

This momentum reflects the extraordinary changes since the “superpredators” panic of the 1990s, which fueled more life sentences for children. The notion that a young person who commits a crime is particularly dangerous and unredeemable has been debunked, replaced with a consensus that youth is redeeming, a sign that one really could change. But to translate that idea into law would seem to demand drawing a bright line—a legal age that separates youth and adulthood, at least for the purpose of deciding what counts as too young to be sentenced to die in prison. And with different visions of change competing, that task itself is making reformers confront the nuances of age and development, and ponder how to best restrict a sentence that many refer to as “death by incarceration” without leaving too many people behind. 

This sense of an emerging momentum is not just a political boost for reformers like Moore. In the Massachusetts ruling, it actually served as legal evidence.

To justify raising the age from 18 to 21, the state supreme court appealed to the “evolving standards of decency,” an approach to constitutional law that connects people’s rights to contemporary norms, and that’s long been used to expand protections on juvenile defendants. The majority talked about recent laws and rulings in other states—as well as reforms in other nations—to conclude that these standards are shifting. 

Among the reforms the court cites: D.C.’s 2021 law, and Illinois’ 2023 law. 

Bolts asked Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Illinois-based organization Restore Justice, for her reaction about the Massachusetts court drawing on a law she championed hundreds of miles away. “I think it’s incredible to see this momentum continue to build,” she said. In turn, she hopes that this out-of-state ruling can help her persuade Illinois lawmakers to revisit last year’s law and make it retroactive. 

“It is so encouraging for legislators to know that other states are reaching that same decision that young people are different,” she explained.

Besides these “evolving standards,” the Massachusetts court grounded its ruling on research in neuroscience and psychology that shows that people’s brains continue to develop into their mid-20s. “Advancements in scientific research have confirmed what many know well through experience: the brains of emerging adults are not fully mature,” the majority wrote.

Stephanie Tabashneck, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Harvard Medical School, offers an example: Young adults “can’t regulate their emotions” as well as older adults because their frontal lobes are not fully developed. Tabashneck is not surprised that such findings resonated with the court. She often gives presentations to judges and attorneys, showing them brain scans highlighting the marked differences between younger and older adults; just seeing those images has a powerful effect on her interlocutors, she said. 

Some public officials echoed the science in praising the Massachusetts ruling. “The practice of putting a person behind bars forever, without paying attention to decision-making ability based on age and the science of brain development, should end,” Kevin Hayden, the district attorney of Suffolk County (Boston), said in a statement. Hayden succeeded Rachael Rollins, a reform-minded DA who’d also backed the litigation against life without parole, as well as efforts to raise the age of youth justice from 18 to 21 in other contexts.

But here’s a rub: Much of this research has found that people’s brains continue developing for years beyond age 21, leaving a gap with where the Massachusetts justices landed. The majority recognizes this, writing that “we acknowledge that the scientific record in this case suggests that the unique attributes of youth may persist in young adults older than twenty-one.” 

And here, too, the majority invoked examples from other states to explain how it reached its decision—except this time, it did that to justify not going up higher, say to 25, rather than to support going beyond 18: “The contemporary standards of decency that govern our decision today do not suggest a societal consensus that those aged twenty-one and above should be treated differently from older adults.”

On this point, the dissenting justices harshly criticized the majority for having it both ways. “[E]ven if it could, science does not definitively place the line of brain maturation at twenty-one, but rather suggests that it extends into the mid-twenties,” wrote Justice David Lowy. He accused his colleagues of “manufactur[ing] a new category of individuals entitled to distinct constitutional treatment,” and usurping the prerogative of lawmakers by deciding what he argues ought to be a political question—what is youth for the purposes of punishment. 

“Perhaps nothing speaks louder to the flaws in the court’s holding,” Lowy wrote, “than the court having crafted a line that ends at age twenty-one, thereby engaging in legislative line-drawing inconsistent with the science upon which it relies.” 

If there’s no switch that flips in a person’s brain the day they turn 18, neither is there one the day they turn 21. For Lowy, the seeming arbitrariness of setting a line at one’s 21st birthday was a reason to not raise the age at all. But for some reformers, it’s a reason to think even bigger.

Moore, the Washington advocate, feels a twinge of concern that if politicians and judges settle on 21 as the new age for juvenile justice, it may make it trickier to push bills with a higher age cutoff—like her state’s proposed legislation, which goes to 25, closer to what scientific studies envisage. “Just like the age of 18 was socially constructed, I think the age of 21 is also socially constructed,” she said. “We’re hopeful that we will continue to move past these social constructions of what we see as mature, into what we really know in science.”

Still, Moore is confident that, no matter how a particular reform defines who counts as young enough, it’ll pave the way for still more change down the line. Since Washington state abolished life without parole for teenagers under 18 in 2018, “We have people running nonprofits, we have people doing anti-violence work,” she said. “It’s so impressive what folks have done.” She points to a study conducted last year by two University of Washington scholars that showed low recidivism among the incarcerated people whose petitions were granted. 

“We just know that that model can be replicated if we bump the age up to 25 for those folks serving life and long sentences,” she added. “Those folks can come home safely and our parole board can determine when it is safe to return to their homes: They’re already doing it, and so they would be able to do it for this other group of folks.”

James Zeigler, who leads the Second Look Project, a D.C.-based group that championed D.C.’s reform and has helped implement them, questions if an age cutoff is needed at all. “If you have to draw a line somewhere, identify when someone becomes a full blown adult for culpability purposes, [25] probably makes the most sense, and it makes more sense than 18 or 21, which are both ages after which people continue to grow and develop quite a bit,” Zeigler said.

But “developmental maturation process doesn’t end at 25 for anybody,” he pointed out. “While it may slow down as a kind of general rule, everybody continues to kind of grow, change, and mature… I have seen it in my work that plenty of people who commit crimes and make serious mistakes well into adulthood, past the age of 25, past the age of 30, can still grow and change in the way that we are talking about, that you hope for in people.”

Katy Naples-Mitchell, a special litigation advisor at Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, also wonders how to draw a rigid line as to when one enters adulthood, when the characteristics that make humans capable of change don’t just disappear as one ages.

As the Massachusetts supreme court considered the Mattis and Robinson cases, Naples-Mitchell co-authored an amicus brief in support of ending life without parole for young adults in Massachusetts. The brief focused on the huge racial disparities in who’s serving life without parole in Massachusetts, finding that Black youth between ages 18 and 20 are sixteen times more likely to have received that sentence than white youth.

“People of color are facing more extreme charges for less serious conduct,” Naples-Mitchell told Bolts, explaining that Black people in particular are more likely to face a charge that triggers life without parole. Research by the American Psychological Association has found that people perceive Black youth as older than they are, making judges more prone to treating Black defendants as full adults than they are with white defendants.

Those disparities also apply across age groups, though. According to research conducted by the Sentencing Project, an organization that researches criminal justice, the majority of people serving life without parole in Massachusetts as of 2020 were Black and Latinx; those groups make up less than one-fourth of the state’s overall population. Studies nationwide show prosecutors and judges use harsher charges and sentences for people of color.

For Naples-Mitchell, the debate over young adults should be a gateway for a broader reckoning with how we dole out punishments. “This is an opportunity to reshape norms about life sentences more broadly, beyond the categorical approach in the brain science,” she said. She described the neuroscientific research as critically important to understanding the need for reform but also says “the brain science is a window for the public to access new empathy.”

“There are lots of ways to build on that,” she added, “whether it’s to build to another later-in-life bright line, or to think more holistically about sentences of life without parole, and whether that is something that public policy should promote.”

D.C. underwent just the trajectory that Naples-Mitchell envisions. It first provided an opportunity for release to anyone convicted as a minor. Then, in 2021, it extended that approach to offenses committed up to age 25. And then, the local government chose to expand its reform yet again by guaranteeing any incarcerated person a judicial review after a lengthy term in prison—no matter their age at the time of the offense. That ordinance was part of the omnibus package that was blocked by Congress and President Biden last year. 

State Senator Liz Miranda, a progressive politician from Boston, wants Massachusetts to take the same route. She is sponsoring legislation that would repeal life without parole sentences regardless of the age at which someone commits a crime. Under the bill, anyone incarcerated in Massachusetts would receive a parole hearing after 25 years of incarceration.  

At a hearing for her bill, Miranda talked about her brother, who was murdered in Boston, explaining why she opposes life without parole as a punishment for his alleged killer. “I believe life without parole is death by another name, and I do not believe in death sentences,” Miranda said.

The post A Wave of States Reduce “Death by Incarceration” for Young Adults  appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

Kentucky | Secretary of state

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

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

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

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

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

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

Maine | Question 8

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

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

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

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

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

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

Mississippi | Secretary of state

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

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

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

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

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

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

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

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

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

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

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

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

Virginia | Legislative control

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

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

Washington | King County director of elections

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

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

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

In January 2020, just weeks after he was sworn in as sheriff of Snohomish County, in Washington State, Adam Fortney rehired a deputy the previous sheriff had just recently fired for an unjustified killing. 

Ty Trenary, the sheriff whom Fortney defeated in November 2019, had only a month earlier terminated a sheriff’s deputy named Art Wallin for a 2018 shooting that killed Nickolas Peters, a 24-year-old who had fled from police in his truck. Trenary had determined that an investigation by a county task force showed Peters wasn’t enough of a threat to warrant being shot, and that Wallin violated department policies on chases and deadly force. The department also reprimanded Fortney, a sergeant in the department and Wallin’s supervisor at the time of the shooting, for not calling off the chase that ended with deputies cornering Peters and barking orders at him to turn off his truck and raise his hands. According to the county’s investigation, Wallin claimed his “Spidey sense” made him believe Peters had a gun before he fired twice into the truck and killed him; no witnesses saw Peters with a firearm, and detectives only found a pistol inside a green zipper case under the center console of his truck after the killing. 

Fortney’s rehiring of Wallin came just weeks after the county settled a wrongful death lawsuit by Peters’ family for $1 million. Just a week after he brought Wallin back into the fold, Fortney also reinstated two more deputies who had been fired by the previous sheriff for violating department policy after an internal investigation showed them trying to cover up an illegal search. Fortney defended the reinstatements, telling local reporters soon after he took over as sheriff, “I’m the new sheriff, I get to weigh in on my guys’ discipline, bottom line.” 

Those rehirings, as well as Fortney’s defiance of Washington State’s stay-at-home orders in the earliest days of the pandemic sparked multiple petitions to remove him from office by the summer of 2020, just months into his term, but those efforts failed to gather enough signatures to trigger a recall vote. 

This fall, Fortney faces a heated battle to keep his post as sheriff. His challenger in the Nov. 7 election, Susanna Johnson, is a longtime veteran of the Snohomish sheriff’s office who left it in 2020 shortly after Fortney took over. She has gained support from many in local law enforcement, including five former Snohomish sheriffs who penned an open letter to the Everett Herald in October urging voters to pick her. 

“Snohomish County needs a sheriff who is willing to tackle difficult problems, not with partisan rallies, self-serving videos and inflammatory social media posts, but with action,” the sheriffs wrote in their letter. “We need a greater focus on professionalism and common-sense safety solutions.” 

The election is nonpartisan but Fortney is endorsed by local Republicans, and Johnson has drawn Democratic support.

In an interview with Bolts, Johnson said she decided to leave the sheriff’s office, where she had become a bureau chief, in 2020 and began to consider running to replace Fortney after he reinstated the deputies who’d been fired for lying and covering up a warrantless search. One of the deputies, Matthew Boice, was also president of the Snohomish County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, which endorsed Fortney in his 2019 race; Fortney, himself the union’s former president, was replaced by Boice when he stepped down to run for sheriff.

“It was not only an embarrassment to this agency where I grew up, but just to all law enforcement,” Johnson told Bolts. “There’s real and perceived bias issues within the agency,” she said. She worried that rehiring deputies with known histories of misconduct leads to communities being “terrified of the cops.”

Fortney, who didn’t respond to an interview request or emailed questions for this story, has said he brought a different approach to the sheriff’s office, where he’s worked for nearly 30 years, much of it on patrol. “I ran as a graveyard patrol sergeant back in 2019 against a 6 year incumbent sheriff,” he said last month during a campaign forum held by the local League of Women Voters. “I ended up getting into politics when I was still a street cop, still a patrol sergeant running a crew, so I bring that perspective.”

In addition to bringing back deputies the previous administration had fired, other controversies clouded Fortney’s first several months in office. In March 2020, he wrote a Facebook post calling the actions of a deputy who chased and tackled a Black woman accused of jaywalking “reasonable”; the woman, who sued and accused the sheriff’s office of racial discrimination, recently received $75,000 from the county to settle the case. As COVID swept Washington State, Fortney again turned to Facebook to accuse Governor Jay Inslee of mishandling the crisis and vowed to refuse to enforce the governor’s emergency orders for nonessential business to close, to limit large gatherings and require masking indoors. As the pandemic continued, Fortney wrote an even longer post calling the governor’s orders unconstitutional and reiterating that he wouldn’t enforce them. 

“As your elected Sheriff I will always put your constitutional rights above politics or popular opinion,” Fortney wrote. “We have the right to peaceably assemble. We have the right to keep and bear arms. We have the right to attend church service of any denomination.” 

Fortney’s statements had consequences. At the height of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, a Snohomish barber said he was inspired by Fortney’s announcement to reopen his shop—no masks, no social distancing—to the chagrin of others in the community. Inslee’s chief of staff pushed back on Fortney’s refusal to enforce emergency restrictions, saying, “People should not be looking to the sheriff’s Facebook page either for constitutional analysis or health advice.” As Snohomish County health officials urged residents to follow COVID mitigation measures, the Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers said at the time, “This isn’t about the opinions of any single elected official…It’s about the health and safety of all the people we serve.”

After Fortney’s actions during the early days of the pandemic sparked efforts to remove him, the sheriff asked the county to help defend him and cover his legal costs to challenge the recall petitions. Adam Cornell, who was then the Snohomish County Prosecutor, refused, telling the sheriff in a letter that his statements were “fairly construed to support behavior that puts all citizens at greater risk of harm and death. Put simply, your words were akin to yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” 

Cornell, who did not run for reelection in 2022, said that Fortney made it hard for people to trust law enforcement, including the prosecutor’s office, by rehiring deputies who had committed misconduct. “He forgot that he holds the public trust, and critical to holding the public trust is having to sometimes hold your own people accountable, however unpleasant that may be,” Cornell told Bolts. Cornell is now supporting Fortney’s opponent, Johnson, saying he believes she “doesn’t want to hold the office for her ego.”

A judge eventually found that the petitions to remove Fortney met the state statute requiring “malfeasance,” “misfeasance,” or “a violation of the oath of office” for recalling elected officials. But the group supporting the recall never got enough signatures to trigger a recall election, with organizers at the time stymied by the pandemic and ensuing lack of large gatherings like festivals and street fairs. The Washington State Supreme Court would later say that Fortney leveraged his position as sheriff to effectively nullify state law. “Fortney does not have the authority as Snohomish County sheriff to determine the constitutionality of laws,” Justice Mary Yu wrote in an opinion. “That is the role of the courts.”

Fortney has continued to court controversy as sheriff. In April of 2021, he hired a deputy accused of having ties to the Proud Boys who had been part of a crew of armed vigilantes who purported to protect downtown Snohomish from non-existent leftist agitators during rallies in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s murder. After local residents identified the deputy in a photo posted to the department’s Facebook page, Fortney initially defended him, writing in a December 2021 letter, “the evidence does not support any inference that you have engaged in discriminatory behavior, endorsed discriminatory behavior, or actively associated with any groups that endorse discriminatory behavior.” A month later, Fortney then changed his mind and fired the deputy, acknowledging in his termination letter that he had just recently opted to retain and not discipline him. “After further consideration, I believe I have misjudged the impacts this decision would have to public trust,” Fortney wrote. 

This past summer, Fortney held a campaign event with Mark Lamb, the far-right sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona who is now running for U.S. Senate. Like Fortney, Lamb outspokenly defied the state’s COVID health orders in 2020 and has advocated for deregulation of firearms. The Everett Herald reported that Fortney grew angry and kicked a reporter out of his office for asking whether he agreed with Lamb’s politics. 

Juan Peralez, president of the local community group UNIDOS, told Bolts that he was concerned about Fortney’s connection to far right politics and his role in growing the so-called constitutional sheriffs movement in the state. While Peralez has worked with other advocates for legislative changes to increase police accountability at the state level, he thinks that, ultimately, the sheriff’s office needs to change from within, which is why he supports Johnson. “Things are not going to change unless we have people inside the department who are going to do it,” he said. 

In her campaign to unseat Fortney, Johnson has accused the sheriff of poor policing and policy-making, including management of the county jail. Fortney lifted booking restrictions early in the pandemic and encouraged officers to make more arrests after the population dropped at his jail, which has long struggled with understaffing and deadly conditions. In May, seven people incarcerated in the jail were admitted to the hospital as suspected fentanyl overdoses; it is not clear how the drugs got into the jail. Two people died in jail custody in September 2023.

The Snohomish County Corrections Guild has endorsed Johnson for sheriff, a switch from the 2019 election when the group backed Fortney. Derek Henry, the guild’s president, told the Everett Herald that the group flipped to Fortney’s opponent this year because he’s proven to be inept as sheriff. “In the 28 years that I worked in the correction bureau, it’s the worst that I have ever experienced when it came to nepotism and favoritism,” Henry told the paper.

If Johnson wins, she would be Snohomish County’s first female sheriff and one of very few female sheriffs in the country. She hasn’t focused on that aspect, however. “The only reason I’m running is because who’s sitting in that chair right now. And he needs to not be sheriff anymore,” Johnson said. “I’m only involved because, honestly, everybody’s intimidated by this guy.”

The post Controversial Sheriff with Right-Wing Ties Faces Voters in Washington State appeared first on Bolts.

Robert Sutherland and Doug Basler have a lot in common.

The two Republicans have spent the better part of the past three years sowing doubt about Washington state’s election system, filing frivolous lawsuits that questioned the mail ballot system, and running (and losing) races for office.

And now, they’re both running against avowedly nonpartisan, experienced election administrators in an attempt to take control of two of their state’s largest county election offices.

Next month Sutherland is taking on Auditor Garth Fell in Snohomish County, which stretches from Seattle’s northern suburbs along the Puget Sound into more rural territory in the Cascade Mountains and is the state’s third most populous county; their showdown may extend into the fall’s general election. And in November, Basler is running against King County Director of Elections Julie Wise in the state’s most populous county that includes Seattle. Both are the only two contested races for election administrators in the state this year. 

The pair are long shots to actually win in their races. King County is heavily Democratic, and President Biden carried blue-leaning Snohomish County by 20 points in 2020. But their campaigns are elevating false claims about the election system—and as threats to election workers continue to grow around the nation, that could increase the chance that local election workers face harassment just for doing their jobs while undercutting voters’ trust that their elections are free and fair.

“I am deeply concerned,” Republican former Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed told Bolts. “I think that it would be a big, big mistake for the people Snohomish County to elect somebody who frankly doesn’t believe in the election system, has no trust and confidence in the election administrators that make it work, or trust and confidence in the laws and regulations that have been implemented over the years.”

Wise predicted that she would easily defeat Basler—there’s not much appetite locally for election denialism in a county that President Biden won by a 3-to-1 margin. But she warned that the ongoing candidacies from candidates like Basler contributes to the “hostile environment for public servants” that election workers face nationwide.

“Of course I worry that he would be able to sow distrust into other folks by these unfounded claims,” Wise told Bolts.

She said that one Republican election observer in last year’s race “was loud, disruptive, and was carrying a gun on her hip”; other local incidents included people driving trucks in an intimidating fashion around ballot drop boxes, and posting signs falsely claiming the drop boxes were under surveillance and that people we’re allowed to return others’ ballots (which is legal in Washington).

“It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise said.

Wise and Fell both backed a new law passed by the Washington legislature that bans firearms at vote-tabulation sites.

“I am certainly concerned about misinformation, disinformation and the impact that can have on the safety and security of voters and our elections workers,” Fell told Bolts.

Basler has promised that if he wins he’ll bring in “citizen oversight and balanced audits” of the county’s elections and wants the county to use “paper ballots hand counted at the precinct level on election day,” even though hand-counting ballots is incredibly slow and has repeatedly been shown to be less accurate than machine counts. 

Sutherland has said he wants to make voters’ ballots, ballot copies and “cast vote records” available for public analysis, even though the secretary of state’s office has advised against it because it could risk publicly exposing who people voted for. 

“Not allowing citizens to see for themselves the ballot copies and compare them to the CVR’s is adding to a greater distrust among voters and for this trend to be reversed new leadership is needed,” Sutherland said in an email to Bolts.

Their campaigns are part of an ongoing crusade to question the state election system’s integrity.

After the 2020 elections, Basler and Sutherland joined Washington Election Integrity Coalition United, an umbrella group for election-denying efforts, in a flurry of lawsuits that sought access to ballots, information, and so-called “forensic audits” along the lines of Arizona’s sham election audit.

Every single one of the lawsuits has now been tossed out of court. The final one, in which Basler and the group demanded Wise’s office supply them with access to all of King County’s ballots, was rejected in mid-June by a judge who ruled they failed to “set forth specific facts showing that there is genuine issue for trial.” 

Sutherland ran for and lost races for Congress in 2014 and 2016 before winning a seat in the statehouse from a conservative rural district split between Snohomish and Skagit Counties in 2018. 

He quickly made a name for himself as a hardliner and conspiracy theorist, attending an armed militia protest in Snohomish that was based on false claims that Antifa was coming to town, and leading a number of protests against COVID-19 restrictions—including a rally where he packed a pistol and said that if Democratic Governor Jay Inslee sent “men with guns after us for going fishing, we’ll see what a revolution looks like.”

He won reelection with 60 percent of the vote in 2020—and immediately amped up his rhetoric, declaring right after Election Day that “It looks like the Democrats are cheating” in the count.

He was even more incendiary in a series of Facebook posts, outright refusing the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Sutherland posted on Facebook that it would be “righteous” if Trump used the military to hold onto his presidency by force. “Prepare for war,” he later wrote in December 2020, according to the Seattle Times. “Joe Biden is not now, nor will ever be my President.”

He used taxpayer funds to attend MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s voting fraud conspiracy symposium in South Dakota in 2021, visited Arizona’s chaotic sham audit that same year, demanded that Washington hold a similar audit for its election and sponsored legislation to end the state’s longtime mail voting system. He also encouraged residents to sue Snohomish County with unproven allegations of voter fraud.

Sutherland was formally reprimanded by the House in early 2022 and eventually fined $2,500 for swearing and screaming at a state capitol director of security who, following the requirements then in place for all lawmakers, refused him entry into the state capitol in Olympia because he wouldn’t take COVID test.

In 2022, a moderate Republican ran against Sutherland and beat him in the all-party general election by a 16-point margin.

But that didn’t deter Sutherland. He kicked off his campaign for Snohomish County auditor in late April with a fundraiser headlined by Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who has turned himself into a leading figure in the election-denying movement with a poorly reasoned analysis that claims to show Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have won the number of votes that he did in 2020.

Basler has also been a vocal, though even less successful, candidate for office.

He ran against Democratic U.S. Representative Adam Smith in a staunchly blue Seattle-area congressional district in 2022.

“I have questions about the integrity of our voting system, particularly in King County, Washington,” Basler declared during his one debate with Smith in 2022. “Mail-in voting is a disaster.”

After his loss to Smith, Basler requested a hand recount of votes in two precincts—even though he’d won just 28 percent of the districtwide vote in the election.

Basler and Sutherland were among the many election-denying candidates who lost election in Washington last year. Sutherland was one of four incumbent GOP state representatives who went down to defeat after attacking against the election system. And in one of the state’s most high-profile races, MAGA champion Joe Kent lost the general election in a GOP-leaning House seat after defeating moderate GOP Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach President Donald Trump, in the primary. But a few did win, including an election-questioning candidate who defeated an incumbent for Mason County Auditor.

Basler didn’t respond to interview requests for this story. Sutherland declined an interview, but emailed along a written Q&A in which he said the 2020 election was “a prime example of how to lose the confidence and trust of voters” and attacked Fell for not allowing him access to the actual voter ballots.

“I traveled the country learning about elections and some potential vulnerabilities with mail-in ballots and tabulation machines and as a result I will bring new ideas to the auditor’s office in order to help improve the accuracy of our elections and to help regain the trust of the voters. And I alone will be committed to creating greater transparency regarding our elections,” he said.

On his website, Basler declares that “It’s no secret that a large cross section of the voting public does have questions regarding the overall election process,” and accuses Wise of eroding public trust by “decreasing transparency and branding anyone who has questions as a conspiracy theorist.”

Basler is the only candidate who’s filed to run against Wise, and in Washington State’s open primary system, the top two candidates move on to the general election, so the two are sure to face off in November. 

Sutherland is facing off with Fell and a third candidate, Democratic-affiliated candidate Cindy Gobel, in the Aug. 1 nonpartisan primary. The two candidates who gather the most votes will move on to a November general election. 

None of the candidates will have any party affiliation on the ballot, which means Sutherland won’t be identified as a Republican.

Fell, who won a close race against Gobel in 2019, called the primary a “competitive race” and said he wasn’t confident in which two candidates would emerge to the general election this time around.

Gobel, a longtime election worker and former colleague of Fell’s, said the election conspiracy theories pushed by people like Sutherland had “really hurt the election community—in 2020, we as election workers, we took a huge mental health hit.”

She said she would likely not vote for either of her opponents in the general election if she didn’t make the runoff, but predicted that her fellow Democrats would go with “the lesser of the two evils” and back Fell.

Christian Sinderman, a Washington-based Democratic campaign consultant who has worked for both Fell and Wise in the past, said that he saw zero chance that Basler could win. 

He predicted that Sutherland’s name recognition and support from “the hardened MAGA base” would be enough to propel him through the multicandidate primary on Aug. 1 to make the ballot in November—but thought Sutherland’s chances in that race were vanishingly small.

“It would take some extreme event between now and November for him to be viable,” he said.

And while the election conspiracists aren’t going away anytime soon, Wise said she hopes that further electoral setbacks will continue to erode election-deniers’ claims in Washington.

“I do think this is sort of the last gasp for election deniers to run in these races,” she said.

The post A Pair of Election Deniers Are Running To Take Over Election Offices In Washington appeared first on Bolts.

Yet only five of Washington State’s 39 counties applied for that money, according to the Washington secretary of state’s office. And some local officials who blocked their counties from participating have been open that they don’t want to help people in jail participate in elections even though they remain eligible to vote. 

Last September, Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton went to the county board of commissioners with her plan to increase voter registration and participation for people incarcerated in the county’s two detention centers. Dalton, the chief local elections official and the only Democrat elected to countywide office in Spokane, said she’d been working with detention staff to improve ballot access in the jails. But Dalton needed the all-Republican board to apply for the newly created state grant to help her office cover the cost of training more jail staff on election procedures, making informational videos to show behind bars, and printing voter guides explaining how to register and ask for ballots while in lockup. (While auditors are their counties’ chief election officials, county commissioners still hold the purse strings and determine budgets.) 

The county’s commissioners, wary of more people voting behind bars, rejected her proposal. “So, if you’re a candidate that’s campaigning on a position of being tough on crime, obviously you’re not going to get a lot of votes out of the jail, and the inverse of that also could apply,” Commissioner Al French said during the meeting. 

Dalton responded, “We don’t speculate how people vote, we just need to make sure that they have the opportunity to register to receive a ballot and return that ballot.” 

In an interview with Bolts, French reiterated his opposition to measures that would make it easier for eligible voters to cast ballots from jail, arguing it “stacks the deck.” 

“We want to have a fair and open election, and to try and get voters who have a predisposition, it’s not in my mind consistent with free and open elections,” French said. 

The opposition from Spokane officials is in stark contrast to larger trends in the state to reduce the disenfranchisement of people entangled in the criminal legal system. In 2021, Governor Jay Inslee signed a bill, which was sponsored by Tarra Simmons, a formerly incarcerated lawmaker, restoring the right to vote for Washingtonians convicted of felonies automatically upon their release from prison—giving an estimated 20,000 people back their right to vote. Last year, Inslee proposed a state budget that allocated $628,000 to improve voter awareness, registration and turnout in county jails; the final budget that lawmakers passed quadrupled the amount available to counties. 

The program left it up to Washington State counties to apply for the funds, though. Other states have adopted stronger approaches to strengthening voting access; Massachusetts adopted a law last year that imposes new requirements on sheriffs and county officials to provide information and ballots to people in jail. 

The handful of Washington counties that participated only tapped about $250,000 of the $2.5 million that the state allocated as of this month , according to the secretary of state’s office, with the bulk going to King and Pierce counties, the most populous in the state (each received about $100,000). Counties that have participated—which so far also include Thurston, Benton and Kitsap counties—must submit a report to the state by February detailing how the funds were used and how turnout was impacted, but there are already signs of improvement. 

Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall told Bolts that ballots cast from the jail spiked from just three in previous elections to 40 this past November after her office used the $42,000 to hire more staff to help train detention officials and distribute voter guides inside the jail. “It was fantastic,” Hall told Bolts. “We partnered with our jails and they were cooperative despite a covid outbreak and being short staffed, and we ended up hiring some off duty sheriffs to help us make this effort.” 

The Washington State legislature could pass yet more measures this year to increase ballot access in county jails. Last week, Simmons filed House Bill 1174, which would require jails to provide incarcerated people information on voter registration and requesting a ballot at least 18 days before an election. The bill would also require each county auditor’s office to create a jail voting plan in coordination with the secretary of state’s office, which could encourage more counties to apply for the funding lawmakers have already earmarked for that purpose. 

“All too often those with mental health issues find themselves housed in our county jails. Our cash bail system also means that lower-income people are more likely to spend a significant amount of time in jail. We should not be writing these Americans off,” Simmons said in her statement. “My bill will require that county auditors make an effort to ensure that everyone in their county legally able to vote has that opportunity. Innocent until proven guilty is the basis of our criminal legal system. This bill simply asks that we live those values and protect the right to vote.”

Megan Pirie, co-founder of the Eastern Washington chapter of All of Us of None of Us, an organization that advocates for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, said being in jail presents numerous barriers to voting, including the limited availability of outside information like the elections calendar and details about candidates. Even if people know they’re eligible to vote, they might not know how to register or ask for a ballot behind bars (currently, people in Spokane County jails must request forms through the commissary). 

Pirie said Spokane activists asked but haven’t been allowed inside to help jail staff register and distribute forms ahead of elections. “We were willing to come in after hours, after people were done with court and register people to vote and were flat out told no,” she told Bolts. 

Asked about activists’ complaints, Dalton said allowing people from the outside to enter the jail to help facilitate ballot access would be a “bottleneck for providing voter services directly to the inmates.”

Activists also point to research showing that Black, Native American and Hispanic people are jailed at higher rates and for longer periods than white people in the local jails. “The ability to vote and engage in society that you did not necessarily feel that you belonged just carries 10,000 miles of value,” says Kurtis Robinson, vice president of the Spokane branch of the NAACP. “It is a real core underlying issue surrounding the issue of justice involvement. You cannot understand the importance of it and what it means when it’s not supported.” 

During the meeting last September, Dalton told the Spokane commissioners that beyond creating more voter education materials for the jail and working more closely with detention staff, she hoped to survey the jails to see how many of the roughly 700 people locked inside at any given time are eligible to vote. Many likely are: studies in recent years have shown 70 percent of people in Spokane County jails are pretrial detainees who haven’t been convicted. 

Dalton urged the commissioners to help her establish new processes around jail voting before the legislature ultimately forces them onto counties. Michael Sparber, the director of the county’s detention facilities, even assured commissioners the new efforts wouldn’t strain his department, saying, “I don’t anticipate it will cause a lot of manpower issues or even a dramatic amount of overtime at the jail.” 

But the commissioners weren’t swayed. “Haven’t you come to us and said you’re short on employees? Is this a good use of existing employees and time to go and sort of try to shave votes from the jail?” commissioner Josh Kerns asked Dalton. “I have concerns with this,” Kerns said after he finished questioning her. “I’m not sold on it. I don’t like it.”

Dalton said she would keep working within her existing budget to expand ballot access in the county’s jails and hopes the recent dramatic shakeup of the Spokane County commission could lead to more support for the kind of voter outreach program in the jail that she wanted to launch last year; a change in state law grew the commission from three to five seats last year, and in November voters elected two new Democratic commissioners. 

“It’s disappointing but it’s just a small setback,” Dalton said of the county’s refusal to apply for the state grant. “My office and the jail staff will continue to work together to do whatever we can to support incarcerated folks with their right to vote. It may not be as extensive as other counties but we will do what we can.”  

The post Efforts to Expand Ballot Access in Washington State Jails Face Local Pushback appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

1. Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor

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

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

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

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

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

3. California | Los Angeles County sheriff 

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

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

4. California | San Francisco prosecutor

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

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

5. California | San Diego County sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

7. Indiana | Marion County (Indianapolis) prosecutor

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

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

8. Iowa | Polk County (Des Moines) prosecutor

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

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

9. Maryland | Frederick County sheriff

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

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

10. Massachusetts | Barnstable County (Cape Cod) sheriff 

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

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

11. Massachusetts | Bristol County sheriff

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

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

12. Massachusetts | Plymouth County prosecutor

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

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

13. Minnesota | Hennepin County (Minneapolis) prosecutor

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

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

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

14. Nebraska | Douglas County (Omaha) prosecutor

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

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

15. New Mexico | Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

17. North Carolina | Alamance County sheriff

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

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

18. North Carolina | Columbus County sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

20. North Carolina | Pasquotank County sheriff

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

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

21. North Carolina | Wake County (Raleigh) sheriff

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

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

22. Oklahoma | Oklahoma County (Oklahoma City) prosecutor

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

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

23. Texas | Bexar County (San Antonio) prosecutor

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

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

24. Texas | Dallas County prosecutor

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

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

25. Texas | Hays County prosecutor

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

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

26. Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) prosecutor

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

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

27. Washington | Clark County (Vancouver) sheriff

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

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

28. Washington | King County (Seattle) prosecutor

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

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

29. Washington | Klickitat County sheriff

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

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

30. Washington | Spokane County prosecutor

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

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

And some honorable mentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Left-leaning lawyers confront a daunting future in America’s new Gilded Age. Federal courts are firmly under conservative control, allowing the right to entrench existing racial, gender, and economic hierarchies. No left-wing judicial recruiting system exists that can match the reach of the right’s Federalist Society. And the left lacks a succinct progressive legal philosophy that can challenge the dominance of the conservatives’ textualism and originalism. 

America faced these problems more than a century ago, too, when legal power was in the hands of reactionary federal courts that proudly championed plutocracy, segregation, and gender discrimination. During this period, known as the Lochner Era after one infamous decision, the Supreme Court invalidated child-labor bans, minimum wage laws, sixty-hour work week caps, and union protections.

Faced with this forbidding reality, legal reformers turned to state courts to fight back. Many of the era’s most prominent reformers—the white, male, upper-middle-class ones—largely ignored segregation and gender discrimination. But by working through state courts, particularly in Washington state, some of these reformers articulated a popular, widely-understood legal philosophy that rejected the dominant conservative philosophy of the day. Reformers then used this philosophy—legal realism—to champion workers’ rights, challenge the pro-corporate bias of federal courts, create a strong progressive legal bench, and lay the legal foundation for the New Deal. 

Today, there are hints that some progressives are turning toward state courts, particularly as the end of Roe v. Wade elevates state constitutions and courts to the forefront of the struggle for abortion access. But even at the state court level, left-leaning lawyers have made few attempts to lay the foundation for a popular alternative to conservative legal philosophy. 

During the first Gilded Age, legal reformers developed their big idea to counter the technical, abstract approach used by their conservative contemporaries, the formalists. The two sides had different ideas about the kinds of information judges should consider: Formalists, much like today’s originalists and textualists, claimed that judges should base their decisions on neutral legal principles and on America’s history—or at least a fictional vision of that history. And much like today’s originalists, the Lochner Court repeatedly found that ostensibly neutral principles and traditions—particularly the freedom to contract—prohibited a wide variety of popular legislation intended to protect workers.

Legal realists pushed back. They were led by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Benjamin Cardozo, both of whom sat on state courts before eventually joining the U.S. Supreme Court. As chief justices of the Massachusetts and New York high courts, respectively, Holmes and Cardozo argued that the law was not a set of timeless, neutral principles, but a product of economic, social, and political realities. Joined by like-minded realists, they made the case that American judges needed to adjust to new problems created by staggering change: railroads, urbanization, mass production, mass media, and so on. They wanted  courts to permit elected legislators to use broad police powers to mitigate crises created by rapid economic change, from grisly workplace accidents to violent labor conflicts.

Cardozo, in particular, was that rare combination of state court judge and enthusiastic ideological evangelist. While serving on New York’s highest appellate court, he wrote an influential book, The Nature of the Judicial Process, in which he drew on Holmes’s opinions to argue that judges did not—and should not—decide cases by consulting “pre-established truths of universal and inflexible validity.” Doing so, he argued, would cause courts to make serious mistakes “not from misunderstanding of the law, but from misunderstanding of the facts.” 

As an example of these mistakes, Cardozo pointed to a formalist opinion—People v. Williams—issued by New York’s highest court while Cardozo was still serving as a state appeals court judge. In that case, the court had invalidated a statute banning night work by women. According to Cardozo, the court’s mistake was ignoring the obvious social realities that made the law necessary: Judges, he argued, had to decide cases by testing “working hypotheses” and generalizing from hard-won experience. Cardozo later put his philosophy into practice, reversing People v. Williams on the grounds that “fuller knowledge of the investigations of social workers” had illustrated the need to protect women in the workplace. 

Cardozo and other East Coast legal realists enjoyed a few victories, but reformers were most successful in Washington state. On its Supreme Court, a rotating cast of elected justices, many of whom had immigrated from more conservative eastern jurisdictions or more cautiously progressive midwestern ones, went on a reform spree. Between 1900 and 1937, the court, which President Theodore Roosevelt once described as the “most progressive court in the United States,” upheld a broad spectrum of state laws that were disfavored under the federal Supreme Court’s Lochner-esque precedents. These included laws reducing hours for women workers, creating an eight-hour day for public works employees, implementing a worker’s compensation program, creating a state commission to regulate railroads, and establishing minimum wages for public-sector employees, women, and children. 

The court’s reformist streak began with court packing. In 1901, the legislature expanded the number of justices from five to seven for a two-year period, allowing Washington’s populist governor to nominate a pair of reform-minded judges who formed the backbone of an energetic progressive majority. The next year, in Green v. Western American Company, the court recognized that a miner maimed by his employer needed compensation, not empty platitudes about precedent. And in State v. Buchanan, it unanimously upheld a law limiting women’s workdays to 10 hours. 

In Buchanan, Justice Ralph Dunbar explicitly rejected formalist legal principles like the absolute freedom to contract. Instead, he argued that courts had the “duty” in light of society’s “changing conditions” to uphold laws that protected the public from powerful corporations. The logic behind Buchanan proved so powerful that even the conservative U.S. Supreme Court, citing Buchanan, unanimously upheld a similar Oregon law seven years later. 

The Buchanan decision and others building on it were so popular that Washington state reformers were able to outlast backlashes from both local conservatives and the federal judiciary. A newly-elected conservative governor’s 1905 attempt to re-pack the court with two pro-corporate judges failed. Conservative federal courts also failed to rein in Washington’s reformers. In a characteristic display of realist stubbornness, state Supreme Court Justice “War Horse Bill” White, responding to a federal judge’s criticism of a 1905 pro-union ruling, admitted that the ruling was probably incorrect under formalist precedents before declaring that Washington state would “stay wrong.” 

Federal courts found themselves surprisingly powerless to respond: Limited caseloads ensured that that federal judges could only review a tiny fraction of relevant cases, enabling reformers to overcome the occasional reversal. Even a 1916 U.S. Supreme Court decision reversing a Washington Supreme Court opinion outlawing predatory employment agencies did little to deter Washington state reformers, who ultimately had the last laugh: The Lochner Era ended in 1937 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a minimum wage law adopted by Washington’s state legislature. Cardozo, the evangelist of legal realism, was in the majority. 

Today, the Washington Supreme Court is again among the more progressive state high courts, buoyed by a far more diverse set of judicial appointments than is common even in blue states. In a pair of landmark rulings in 2020, it issued new protections from extreme sentences and struck down state statutes criminalizing drug possession. (Democratic lawmakers partly walked back the second ruling.) 

However, the court has yet to articulate an overarching legal philosophy underpinning these rulings, even though its opinions continually prioritize social, economic, and political realities over abstract legal principles. The justices also often ground their opinions in Washington’s own constitution. This shields these rulings from hostile federal judges; it also sidesteps criticism of federal jurisprudence and inhibits the development of a clear alternative philosophy.

Such caution is understandable. Washington state’s justices may worry that Cardozo-style evangelism would further politicize the legal system and that, as they did in the early 20th century, conservative federal judges may retaliate against any nascent left-wing legal reform movement. Already, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case next term that will test the independent state legislature doctrine, which would kneecap the authority of state courts over key matters of election law. 

Washington’s Lochner Era experience may still provide today’s reformers with a way forward, one in which state courts can expose the public to new legal philosophies that allow judges to take the world as it is. In an era when the U.S. Supreme Court’s “correct” jurisprudence denies basic rights to millions of people, War Horse Bill’s immortal advice for state courts remains largely unheard: “Stay wrong.” 

The post “Stay Wrong”: When State Supreme Courts Fought Back appeared first on Bolts.

Tarra Simmons became the first formerly incarcerated lawmaker in Washington State’s recent history after she won a seat in the state House in November. Five months later, she is celebrating her first win as a legislator: A bill she sponsored was signed into law yesterday by Governor Jay Inslee, who credited her advocacy. It enables all formerly incarcerated Washingtonians to vote.

“This bill helps bring more people into the fold of influencing policy,” Simmons said in a Zoom interview about the new law. “Hopefully that leads to more people participating in a bigger way by coming to Olympia and sharing their voice and their experiences, to continue to stand up for the things that matter most to them and their community.”

Until now, Washington State barred residents convicted of a felony conviction from voting as long as they were in prison, on parole, or on probation. The new law restores the voting rights of people who are on parole or probation; it effectively enfranchises anyone who is not presently incarcerated. Had this law been in effect during last year’s elections, it would have benefited roughly 24,000 people who were barred from voting, according to estimates by the Sentencing Project.

Washington is the 20th state to adopt statutes that enable everyone who is not incarcerated to vote—and it is the fifth state to get there since 2019, after California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Jersey. (Also, New York and Virginia’s governors have issued executive orders that approximate this policy.) Two of those states, plus Washington, D.C., also enable people with felony convictions to vote from prison.

Before she joined the legislature, Simmons worked as an advocate for loosening the barriers faced by people with criminal records. Her own experience after being released from prison over drug offenses, she recounts, involved struggling to find jobs. She battled up to the state Supreme Court to secure her right to take the state’s bar exam. She attributes her efforts to champion voting rights to these struggles. 

“It made me feel like I wasn’t a part of my community,” Simmons says of her reaction when she lost the franchise. “I feel that way still when I can’t rent an apartment or I can’t go on a field trip with my kids, those things that other people take for granted but that convicted people don’t get to enjoy.” Such restrictions, she said, harm public safety by destroying economic and housing security, making it harder “to provide safety for my kids,” and provoking cycles of instability.

Now Simmons wants Washington State to go further and enable people to vote from prison as well. 

“Maintaining ties, believing and having hope that you are still part of something larger, is really important,” she said.

The following interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

—

You’ve often talked about the obstacles you faced after your arrests and incarceration. What did losing the right to vote specifically mean to you?

It made me feel like I wasn’t a part of my community, like I didn’t have basic rights other people enjoy. I feel that way still when I can’t rent an apartment or I can’t go on a field trip with my kids, those things that other people take for granted but that convicted people don’t get to enjoy. 

This bill helps bring more people into the fold of influencing policy. And it will make our policy stronger if we have directly impacted people involved in making and influencing the policy. 

I want them to continue to go on a positive path, get engaged in their communities, and find a way to use their voice to influence change. I think we get that initial connection with voting, learning about candidates and issues and then weighing in, but hopefully that leads to more people participating in a bigger way by coming to Olympia and sharing their voice and their experiences, to continue to stand up for the things that matter most to them and their community.

That’s something that reform advocates talk about elsewhere in the country, that their work is made harder because legislative hearings typically don’t make room for the voices of people who are impacted and people who are incarcerated.

Absolutely. If you’re not a voter, an elected official will not necessarily see you as an influential voice or feel accountable to you. I started doing advocacy here in Washington five or six years ago, and I created a nonprofit to get more directly impacted people involved in policy-making on issues that impact our lives. If not, you have a lopsided policy argument of policy debate that doesn’t center the people that are directly impacted.

Did this advocacy help push the new voting rights law across the finish line this year?

A large coalition of directly impacted people have spent so much time for the last year educating the public, building support, and educating my colleagues. Several victim organizations also signed onto letters of support for this bill, saying that this had nothing to do with public safety. If anything, it has a net gain for public safety by not making people live underground when they come out of prison. 

Could you say more about that? How do difficulties upon leaving prison, which you have often talked about, interact with safety? 

Safety, to me, is economic and housing security, to where I’m not vulnerable to greedy people, have stable employment and enough money to support my family. And the criminal record is a huge barrier to that. It continues to pop up at every opportunity for meaningful gainful employment where I make enough to provide safety for my kids. 

This is why generational cycles happen—generational trauma, generational poverty—because it’s so hard to get out with the criminal record. It’s not okay to discriminate based on race or gender or sexual orientation, but convicted people don’t have those same civil rights protections, and this is why we’re seeing the cycles of poverty, trauma, and incarceration play out in families. 

One thing this bill doesn’t touch is the voting rights of people who are still incarcerated, which is a right in Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., and is now under debate in Oregon. Do you want to see Washington State take that step?

Absolutely. I think that felony disenfranchisement is rooted in Jim Crow-era laws and that we need to undo that as well. If people that are currently incarcerated were seen as a constituency, lawmakers would be paying more attention to what’s going on inside of our prison system, which is filled with inequities and dehumanizing conditions. 

Every little thing we can do that helps people maintain some form of humanity and feel like they’re connected to something outside the prison walls is a good thing that will help set them up for success upon reentry. And that’s what we’re hoping to do: Our prison system is not supposed to be purely punishment, it’s also supposed to be rehabilitative. Maintaining ties, believing, and having hope that you are still part of something larger is really important. 

And so I absolutely support following the lead of Maine, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., and getting rid of disenfranchisement altogether.

According to the Sentencing Project’s estimates nearly 4 percent of Black adults are stripped of the right to vote in Washington State, compared to less than 1 percent of the entire population. That reflects huge disparities in who is being convicted of a felony in the first place. How should Washington State fight these racial inequalities?

Almost all of our sentencing laws have racial disparities. And it goes back to policing and bias in policing, it goes to inequities in education and school, the use of school resource officers—I mean, how far back do you want to go? Do you want to go back to postpartum inequities and how Black mothers are dying at higher rates? The racial disparities throughout all of our systems are leading up to the inequities in the criminal legal system. But we’re not getting upstream enough. That’s why I ran for office, to get out of just cleaning up the inequities on the back end with collateral consequences and into upstream investments.

Washington State’s Supreme Court struck down statutes criminalizing drug offenses in February. This has vacated thousands of felony convictions. It’s also created a debate about what the legislature should do next, including some lawmakers who argue drug possession should be a felony again, and others who want to at least decriminalize drugs, as Oregon did in a 2020 referendum. What do you think should be next on this issue?

I would like to see more robust behavioral health responses to treating this public health crisis and less reliance on the criminal legal system, which is a very traumatic and dehumanizing process for people that are already suffering. I am absolutely in favor of at a minimum going as far as Oregon did. The [quantity] limits in the Oregon legislation are very arbitrary in my professional opinion and personal experience. I was no less a person suffering from substance use disorder when I purchased my drugs on day one or when I was running out on day three. 

We’re negotiating a lot of different options right now, and I have to be there as the lone voice, reminding them that I have a felony drug possession and how it’s impacted my life. 

Let me return to voting rights. We’re having this conversation at a time many states such as Georgia are passing bills that restrict the right to vote. Washington State’s new rights restoration law goes in the other direction; it expands the electorate. What do you make of this contrast?

I’ve been thinking about the differences between what’s happening in Georgia and in Washington. In my opinion, it’s all based on race. Throughout history, there’s always been a group that has been trying to expand democracy and a group that’s trying to restrict it, and in my opinion it is all about white supremacy. Who wants to stand on the side of equity and justice and who wants to maintain power of and uphold white supremacy? 

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Find out about other recent rights restoration reforms.

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Washington State is now presenting a blueprint for how progressives can shield themselves and even amp up civil rights protections beyond what federal courts are willing to extend.

Its state Supreme Court last week issued a landmark ruling that bars mandatory sentences of life without parole for anyone under the age of 21. This decision is a judicial milestone in moving past the cutoff age of 18 that the U.S. Supreme Court established in its federal rulings. 

That decision came on the heels of another sweeping ruling, issued two weeks earlier, that struck down the state’s statutes criminalizing drug possession. The wide scope of the drug possession decision stunned even reform advocates who hoped for a favorable ruling. It has made drug possession effectively legal in the state, retroactively; the ruling is now forcing state and local officials to cease arrests, drop ongoing cases, and vacate old convictions.

For people who are wary of the federal judiciary’s rightward turn, these decisions may signal a path forward.

The Washington Supreme Court grounded its two new rulings in part on the state constitution’s due process clause and on its ban on “cruel punishments.” Federal courts tend to not review such interpretations, showing off what advocates have to gain by pursuing claims in state courts and strategizing on how to win there. 

The decisions also crystalize the stakes of who sits on state benches, even if the scrutiny around the selection of these judges pales in comparison to federal battles.

“It is hard to miss what I call the Trumpification of federal courts,” said Daniel Greenfield, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center. “Increasingly, there’s a feeling among civil rights litigators and other lawyers and organizations interested in challenging the criminal legal system that the focus has been on federal courts for too long, and that there’s another potent tool that ought to at least be tried. That doesn’t mean that important gains can’t be made in federal courts, … but there are these 50 other court systems, all of which have a duty to vindicate the rights of their citizens.” 

Some of these courts have “untapped potential” for civil rights litigation, he added. These judges shape the landscape on voting rights, criminal justice, labor rights, and more.

On Washington’s highest court, at least, a progressive bloc may now be consolidating. This shifting balance of power is clarifying that this is not just a matter of which party has more judges. On this liberal-leaning court, distinctions are emerging based on how broadly judges are interpreting rights and how willing they are to rock the boat when faced with violations.

Both decisions came in narrow 5-4 rulings that broke along the same lines. In each case, the controlling side was made up of the five most recent justices to join the court. Two of them were appointed just last year by Governor Jay Inslee—appointments that at the time raised the possibility that the court may swing toward bolder outcomes on criminal justice cases. They then won elections in November and clinched the majorities in these two 2021 rulings.

“This last year has been pretty extraordinary, and it’s heartening,” said Mary Kay High, a public defender who is chief deputy in Pierce County’s Department of Assigned Counsel. “Those are elected judges, and I applaud the courage of putting their names on a decision that may be controversial,” she added, pointing to law enforcement’s mobilization against the rulings.

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The Washington Supreme Court is not new to the business of overturning sentencing statutes. In the fall of 2018, it struck down the death penalty and barred all life without parole sentences for youth under 18. But with those rulings, the court was playing catch-up to standards set in other states. It made Washington the 20th state to abolish capital punishment and the 21st to end juvenile life without parole.

The rulings issued over the last month, by contrast, showed off a newfound willingness to forge ahead and set benchmarks for the rest of the country. 

The court’s evolution, fueled by the arrival of the two new justices, is evident compared to what happened almost exactly one year ago. In January 2020, a justice who had dissented in the 2018 case ending juvenile life without parole retired and was replaced with Raquel Montoya-Lewis. Even with that switch, the votes were still not there for those justices looking for a bolder path. In March, as the pandemic was spreading, all nine justices agreed that law enforcement should reduce unnecessary arrests to shield people from COVID-19 in jails, but they split 5-4 on how much to restrict arrests. The majority, which included judges who were part of the 2018 rulings, took a narrower approach. But now they faced a minority—made-up of Montoya-Lewis, Steven González, Sheryl Gordon McLoud, and Mary Yu—that was urging them to go even further.

Within weeks, the court’s membership changed again. Charles Wiggins, one of the five justices in the majority in that COVID-19 ruling, retired. Inslee replaced him with Helen Whitener, whose arrival flipped the balance between the two camps exposed by that pandemic decision. 

In both of the court’s new rulings on life without parole and drugs, the majority consisted of Whitener plus the four justices who argued that last year’s COVID-19 ruling was too timid. 

First, on Feb. 25, this five-member majority struck down the statute that criminalized drug possession. “Our state constitution’s due process clause provides even greater protection of individual rights [than the federal clause] in certain circumstances,” the court wrote.

State lawmakers are now considering whether, and how, to replace the overturned statute. Some have proposed criminalizing drug possession again, but reform advocates want the state to reckon instead with the failures of the war on drugs. Just four months ago, a ballot initiative made neighboring Oregon the first state to decriminalize drug possession. 

This decision was made on narrow grounds in that the court did not take issue with the broad aim of punishing drug possession. It took issue instead with a rare feature of state law: Washington convicted people without having to prove that they were aware they had drugs. 

But the problem’s specificity only underscores the boldness of the court’s choice to issue a sweeping remedy and overturn the statute in its entirety, which voided thousands of convictions. Courts, much like lawmakers, are often sensitive to arguments that it is just not practical to repair rights violations and that bringing finality to cases justifies ignoring the past, so they refuse to make changes retroactive. But not this time.

Reform advocates are delighted that the majority was undaunted by concerns that it would be too much of a burden to ask the state’s legal system to fix the unjust harm it has caused. 

“While it may strike some lawmakers and law enforcement as burdensome, it is only the beginning of what is required to deliver true justice to our communities,” said Kendrick Washington II, the youth policy counsel at the ACLU of Washington 

High echoed this assessment. “Do we really think that workload should outweigh a constitutional protection?” she asked.

The life without parole ruling, issued on March 11, will similarly force the state to confront the past and review existing sentences. 

Up to 26 people who are now incarcerated will be eligible for resentencing hearings, according to the Associated Press. Under the ruling, judges can still sentence people ages 18 to 21 to life without parole, but they need to consider factors specific to the individual, and they will have the option to offer another sentence in murder cases where that option did not previously exist. 

Advocates nationwide have been making the case for broadening youth justice by pointing to studies that show people undergo major cognitive development well into their 20s. 

“Washington State’s decision is important in that it ensures that there is consideration of youth,” said Heather Renwick, legal director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. It recognizes that “nobody on their 18th birthday miraculously wakes up an adult” and “that all young people are capable of positive growth and change.” But, she added, “because it still leaves life without parole as an available sentencing option, there is room for the Washington legislature to take the next step and say that no young person should be sentenced to life without parole.” 

According to Renwick, the March 11 ruling is the first state court decision to extend the federal Supreme Court’s ban on mandatory life without parole for minors to youth beyond the age of 18. That said, some legislatures like in California and Washington, D.C. are increasingly taking even stronger steps in this arena. Just last month, a bill that would have barred life without parole for anyone under 25 passed in South Dakota’s  GOP-controlled Senate, though it eventually died. 

“I suspect that this decision reflects what is to come,” said Renwick, “and I think that it is going to be a combination of state constitutional analysis and state legislatures really thinking about what is age appropriate accountability for young people in their state.”

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The new dividing lines between Washington justices could pave the way for more transformative decisions. And it has observers asking what has fueled the court’s shift. 

When Whitener was appointed last year, High told the Political Report that her background as a defense lawyer was “not the typical path to the bench.” (Gordon McCloud, who wrote the lead opinions in the new life without parole  and drug cases, has worked as a criminal defense lawyer as well.) Whitener, a former prosecutor and trial court judge, has also worked as a public defender, which remains relatively rare for judges. A Political Report analysis in October found that California’s Supreme Court includes three former prosecutors, but that no state justice since the 1980s has been a public defender. Federal appointments have long followed similar patterns.

But California notwithstanding, a new attitude may be spreading to some governors. This week, for his second appointment to the New Jersey Supreme Court, Governor Phil Murphy announced that he had chosen a civil rights attorney and former ACLU of New Jersey staffer, Rachel Wainer Apter. Washington’s justices could also be a model for presidential appointments amid a push to rework who makes the bench. Locally, activism around the power of local judges is growing.

Greenfield warns that until now conservatives have been generally more proactive about organizing state courts.

In recent years, Arizona Republicans expanded the size of the state Supreme Court to drive it to the right; Georgia’s GOP governor maneuvered to cancel multiple judicial elections on the 2020 ballot; and Montana and Pennsylvania Republicans are plotting to overhaul electoral rules and set up gerrymandered judicial maps in hope of grabbing control of the judicial branch.

In addition, it remains challenging for advocates or candidates to explain the stakes of these  appointments and elections—especially in places, such as Washington, where these shifts are about ideological nuances that partisan identification alone cannot manifest. Making elections for local judge salient can be even more difficult despite their vast powers on matters such as bail.

Greenfield, whose litigation focuses on prison conditions, insists that far more can be done to advance civil rights by leveraging the power of state courts. “There’s no reason why, say, Washington can’t afford its citizens greater liberties than is the minimum required by the federal Bill of Rights,” he said. 

And he added that changes in one state can build into a national wave that ends up bigger than the sum of its parts. “If a majority of state courts ultimately hold that, say, prolonged solitary confinement is unconstitutional,” he said, “federal courts would likely take notice of that.”

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