After court rulings in December struck down several states’ electoral maps, from Michigan to New York, what districts will millions of people even vote in later this year? How prepared will local election offices be after suffering harassment for years? Will the Voting Rights Act (VRA) still stand as a tool for civil rights litigation in the wake of an ominous ruling that came in late 2023? Who will even be running elections in North Carolina and Wisconsin, two swing states that are experiencing an intense power struggle?

Our team at Bolts has identified a dozen key questions that will shape voting rights and democracy this year. This is born less of a desire to be comprehensive than to offer a preliminary roadmap for our own coverage.

That’s because, while some questions that matter to 2024 will come down to federal decisions—likely starting with decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on Donald Trump’s prosecutions and presence on the ballot, and on the VRA’s fate—a lot will hinge on the policies and politics of state and local governments: your county clerk in charge of organizing Election Day, your county board that decides where to put ballot drop boxes, your lawmakers tweaking the rules of ballot initiatives, your secretary of state wielding the power to certify results. (Be sure to explore our state-by-state resources on who runs our elections and who counts our elections.) 

These are the officials we will be tracking throughout the year to help us clarify the local landscape of voting rights and access to democracy during a critical election year. 

1. How will federal courts affect voting rights and the 2024 election?

A maelstrom of major legal cases on voting rights and the 2024 election are currently working their way through the legal system, and many are heading straight toward the nation’s highest court.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS is set to hear several cases that will affect one presidential candidate: Donald Trump. The first is whether Trump will be allowed to appear on the ballot in several states. Colorado’s state supreme court disqualified him from the primary ballot in late December, ruling he was ineligible due to the Fourteenth Amendment because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6. (Maine’s secretary of state came to a similar conclusion one week later.) Trump has appealed the Colorado decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the justices have not yet announced whether and when they will hear the cases; their ruling is likely to also shape how other states do, amid the former president’s protests that his removal would unduly disenfranchise millions. The Supreme Court could also decide at least five other cases that touch Trump, including the shape of his Atlanta trial on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.

Also keep an eye on: SCOTUS may decide any major litigation that emerges in the aftermath of the November elections. But it’s also set to consider plenty of non-Trump voting rights cases this year, including several that may further gut the VRA. One devastating blow for the landmark civil rights law may come from a case out of Arkansas, where a federal appeals court ruled that private groups and individuals cannot bring VRA challenges. If the Supreme Court upholds this ruling, legal experts say it would make the law largely unenforceable. As the VRA continues to be weakened, some states have adopted state-level voting rights acts to reinforce its principles; debate may resume in Michigan and New Jersey this year over such legislation.

Federal appeals courts have also recently rejected other VRA claims, including in a case in which civil rights groups in Georgia challenged the state’s election system for its public utility commission as racially discriminatory. If the high court upholds the ruling, it would have major implications for the statewide elected utility commission in neighboring Alabama as well.

2. How will state election maps change by November?

Nearly four years after the decennial census that kicks off redistricting, election maps across the country remain in flux, and major legal and political battles are set to unfold this year. At stake is not just who will have power in each state, but also whether people get to vote under fair maps.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Republicans enjoy large legislative majorities that are effectively election-proof thanks to their gerrymandered maps, but 2023 began to unravel their hold on power. Liberals flipped the state’s supreme court in April after a heated campaign during which Janet Protasiewicz, the winning candidate, called the legislative maps “rigged.” And in late December, the court issued a 4-3 ruling, with liberals in the majority, striking down the legislative maps.

But there’s still a long way to go before voters can get fairer maps in November. The court set up a process to draw new remedial maps, but left the door open for lawmakers to try first. The state’s GOP speaker has largely backed off his earlier threats to impeach Protasiewicz but still has not ruled it out. And Democratic groups must decide whether they’ll also sue over the congressional map and whether to do so in state court.

Also keep an eye on: A federal judge ordered Louisiana to draw a new congressional map by late January to stop diluting the power of Black voters, but lawmakers may stall. Michigan needs to redraw its legislative maps after another federal ruling found that 13 districts violated the Voting Rights Act. New York is also in the midst of a fresh round of congressional redistricting after Democrats won a court battle in December, though it remains to be seen whether the process ends up producing minor tweaks or an aggressive Democratic gerrymander. And from Texas to Florida, there’s still active litigation in many states alleging that maps are unlawful. 

3. How well will local election officials and offices be prepared to handle the election?

The country’s elections workforce has been decimated in the past few years, amid a deluge of threats and harassment stemming from coordinated efforts by some Republicans to attack and undermine local and state administrators, as well as funding challenges. The capacity of these local offices will now be seriously tested in 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Nevada

Nevada has suffered acutely since 2020 from election-worker brain-drain. Not a week into 2024, these woes have already deepened: Jamie Rodriguez, the elections chief in Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, announced her resignation on Tuesday. Rodriguez’s predecessor, Deanna Spikula, herself stepped down in 2022 after some residents smeared her as a “traitor” and threatened her office. In an interview with Bolts last year, Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state, warned of where he sees this all heading: “If we don’t take care of the human component,” he said, “these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Also keep an eye on: Election officials have similarly resigned en masse in recent years in many states, from Colorado to Pennsylvania, leading many to worry about the amount of experience lost. And while election workers are crucial, so is election infrastructure. Aging voting equipment presents a projected multi-billion-dollar problem. Look to Louisiana, for example, to see why this is worth worrying about: That state’s voting machines are nearly 20 years old. They break down often and, when they do, elections administrators struggle to obtain the parts to fix them. One local elections chief told Bolts her office is “barely hanging on”— a statement many of her counterparts around the country have echoed.

4. Who will actually run the 2024 elections?

It’s tough enough for election offices to prepare for the 2024 cycle amid all the personal overhaul they’ve experienced since 2024. But in some of the nation’s most important battleground states, election rules and administrators are in limbo going into this critical year. 

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Election Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe became a target for right-wing conspiracists in the wake of the 2020 election, and GOP lawmakers resolved to oust her last year. After a complicated set of maneuvers, Senate Republicans voted to remove her from the position in September, but a judge later ruled that vote had no legal effect for now. Wolfe has not stepped down from her position even though her term has technically expired. This political and legal imbroglio has created huge uncertainty over who will actually administer Wisconsin’s elections this year. Adding to the limbo: Wisconsinites in April will elect some of the local officials who will then run the state’s August and November elections. 

Also keep an eye on: North Carolina Republicans were primed to oust the director of the state’s State Elections Board, Karen Brinson Bell, thanks to a new law they passed last year. The law changed the structure of the board so that it no longer has a Democratic majority, instead creating an even split between parties, and it entrusted the GOP legislature with resolving ties; this would likely set up Republicans to oust Bell and usher in new leadership. But a state court in late November blocked the law in a preliminary ruling, a legal dispute set to resolve this year. 

5. What happens if any election officials try to stall or halt certification?

After losing the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump asked state and local officials to stall or stop the election’s certification, hoping to overturn state results and convince his congressional allies to accept his slates of fake electors. If Trump loses the presidential race again this fall and repeats that strategy, would he find allies who are willing to disrupt the process and have the authority to stop it? Be sure to bookmark our nationwide resource on who counts elections since answering this difficult question requires a keen understanding of the mechanisms of power in every state, which Bolts will track throughout 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Michigan

The recent revelation by the Detroit News that Trump personally pressured members of the Wayne County (Detroit) Board of Canvassers in 2020 was no surprise given what was already known of his actions that year. But it was a reminder of the critical role these local bodies play in Michigan: Boards of canvassers are divided equally between parties, which leaves Democrats particularly vulnerable to shenanigans in a populous stronghold like Wayne. 

Since 2020, the Michigan GOP has replaced their local election officials with people who have defended subverting elections. Republicans on the statewide board of canvassers have also shown they’re willing to go along with such maneuvers. Still, Michigan has new legal standards clarifying that canvassers lack the discretion to reject valid results; in 2022, Democrats defended their majority on the state supreme court, the body that would be called on to enforce such standards.

Also keep an eye on: Election deniers lost most of their bids to take power in swing states in 2022, but there are plenty of other spots to watch. Officials with a history of delaying election certification won reelection last year in Pennsylvania, though Democrats solidified their hold on the state’s supreme court. Trump allies will run local election offices in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia, heightening the potential for havoc. And a fake Trump elector from 2020 has a seat on the Wisconsin Election Commission, the body that runs elections in a key battleground state.

6. How easy will it be for voters to vote by mail?

If you want to vote by mail in this year’s elections, will you need to provide an excuse to get an absentee ballot? Will you have easy access to a drop box to drop off your ballot? What are the odds your mail ballot gets tossed on a technicality? That all depends on your state, the bills your lawmakers are crafting, and may even hinge on the decisions of your local government. 

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s most decentralized systems when it comes to mail voting procedures. As Bolts reported this fall, county officials there have a startling amount of discretion on how to deal with deficient ballots, whether to install drop boxes, and even whether to have armed law enforcement guarding them. Democratic wins in November’s local elections are likely to preserve the status quo in the most populous counties. But democracy advocates are pushing for better procedures on how voters can fix mistakes, and more robust requirements for drop boxes; they’ll be waging this battle both statewide and county by county throughout 2024.

Also keep an eye on: Since the 2020 presidential race saw an explosion of mail voting during the pandemic, many states have revised their rules—some to make it harder, others to expand its availability. The 2024 cycle will be the biggest test yet for how these laws impact turnout. For instance, Democrats in Michigan this year passed new laws that make it easier to vote by mail and set new requirements for drop boxes. Inversely, Georgia Republicans’ restrictions on mail voting, adopted in 2021, just survived their latest court challenge in October. In Mississippi, a new state law that criminalizes helping people with absentee voting is currently blocked by a federal court ruling. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Democrats are hoping that their new majority on the state supreme court enables voters to use ballot drop boxes, a practice the state disallowed in 2022.

7. Will more states ease voter registration?

By requiring citizens to register to vote, states have erected a barrier between voters and the act of voting. But some have pushed boundaries in recent years, finding ways of shifting the burden of registration onto the state or eliminating unnecessary deadlines or paperwork, with some proposals questioning whether we need registration at all. This will be another critical year to watch how states ease or curtail access to this fundamental right.

The stakes are clear in: New Jersey

Almost half of states allow voters to register on the day of an election—a major convenience for any of the countless people in those states who may otherwise have missed a deadline. Liberal as it is, New Jersey is not among the states with this option, mainly because of opposition from its Democratic state Senate president. The state is weighing the policy afresh this year.

Also keep an eye on: Oregon and Colorado have been badgering the Biden administration for years to allow states to automatically register people to vote when they sign-up for Medicaid; if the feds acted on this,  hundreds of thousands of people would be registered to vote. Other states are considering new laws that would set up or expand automatic voter registration, including applying it to new state agencies, including Ohio, where organizers are pushing for a November initiative; and California, where proposed legislation would likely end up with more people on voter rolls; as well as Maryland and New Jersey, where progressives hope to copy Michigan’s recent first-in-the-nation move to automatically register people to vote as they exit prison.

8. How will states keep changing felony disenfranchisement laws? 

Each state sets its own laws governing whether—and to what extent—people with previous felony convictions lose voting rights, and the national landscape on this front is ever-changing; 2023 alone saw landmark voting rights restoration in New Mexico and Minnesota, plus dramatic rollbacks in Virginia and Tennessee. The United States has long stood out among democracies worldwide for how aggressively it denies voting rights to people with criminal records, and that won’t change in 2024: an estimated 4 million citizens will be blocked from the ballot, but upcoming legal cases and political decisions could affect that number.

The stakes are clear in: Mississippi

A panel of judges on the federal Fifth Circuit appeals court issued a shock decision last summer that struck down Mississippi’s extraordinarily harsh disenfranchisement rules, which strip hundreds of thousands of people of their voting rights for life. (An estimated 11 percent of the state’s adult population can’t vote, currently a national record.) But when the state appealed that panel ruling, the full Fifth Circuit agreed to reconsider it, voiding the prior decision and setting up a major legal showdown this year. If plaintiffs win again, it would bring about one of the most significant expansions of the franchise in a given state in recent history. But don’t bank on that, as voting rights advocates have been bracing for defeat.

The stakes are also clear in: Virginia

Virginia Democrats have been sharply critical of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s 2023 decision to reverse his predecessors’ policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights. Having just seized control of the legislature, they say they’ll now look to bypass Youngkin by referring to voters a constitutional amendment to remove rights restoration power from the governor’s office. That process would take multiple years to reach the ballot, though.

Also keep an eye on: Progressives in California, Massachusetts, and Oregon hope to go further and altogether eliminate felony disenfranchisement this session, enabling anyone to vote from prison. (This is already law in Maine, Vermont, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.). Inversely, Tennessee stepped up restrictions on rights restoration in 2023, and now requires people to pay new application fees; 2024 will be the new system’s first major test.

9. Will sheriffs, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials step up policing and intimidation around elections?  

Trump’s lies about the 2020 election inspired right-wing officials across the country to launch special law enforcement units to root out and punish election crimes. They also fueled crackdowns in states where GOP officials had spread the myth of widespread voter fraud long before Trump, leading to a raft of laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing penalties around voting. Some GOP law enforcement officials have partnered with far-right election denier groups that are ramping up their own efforts to police voting ahead of Trump’s attempt at re-election. 

The stakes are clear in: Texas

Bolts reported last year that the elected sheriff and DA in Texas’ Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, were launching a new law enforcement task force to investigate and prosecute voter fraud. Phil Sorrells, the DA, ran with Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and won on promises to ratchet up policing of elections. The sheriff, Bill Waybourn, has become a right-wing celebrity for his fealty to Trump while also facing mounting criticism at home for a spike in deaths and other scandals at the county jail he oversees. 

Political pressure over baseless claims of fraud have already disrupted the running of elections in Fort Worth; Tarrant County’s widely respected elections chief stepped down last year after months of harassment from election deniers, which included racist attacks about his heritage. And election deniers have claimed without evidence that Waybourn’s close reelection win in 2020 suggests there was fraud. (Waybourn is up for reelection again this year.) That all sets the stage for even more allegations and investigations in a county with a long history of harsh and questionable prosecutions for voter fraud during a critical election year.

Also keep an eye on:  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 established the country’s first statewide agency dedicated solely to investigating election crimes, which quickly resulted in a series of arrests of people with prior felony convictions accused of voting illegally—many of whom have said the government had told them they could vote and whose prosecutions have since fizzled. Bolts has also reported how sheriffs in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin have bolstered election conspiracies and partnered with leading purveyors of election conspiracies to increase policing of elections. 

10. Where, and how, will the assault on direct democracy continue?

Many Republican-run states have curtailed the ballot initiative process in recent years, looking to limit citizens’ ability to put new issues on the ballot. After the GOP failed to derail an abortion rights initiative in Ohio in August, Bolts hosted a roundtable with democracy organizers who all said they expected the assault on direct democracy to continue unabated in 2024, fueled by conservative efforts to protect abortion bans and fight off redistricting reforms.

The stakes are clear in: Missouri

Reproductive rights advocates have turned to the only tool at their disposal in red states: directly asking voters to protect abortion rights. In Missouri, organizers have already had to fight off their attorney general’s effort to sabotage such a measure. In 2024, they’ll also have to contend with GOP proposals to change the rules and make it harder for voters to approve initiatives. One bill, filed by a GOP lawmaker for the 2024 session, would create a new requirement for initiatives to receive a majority in half of the state’s congressional districts in order to pass. Because the state’s map is gerrymandered to favor Republicans, this would force a progressive ballot initiative to carry at least one district that’s far more conservative than the state at large—a tall order for the abortion rights measure to meet. 

Also keep an eye on: Republicans are eying changes to state law in other states like Oklahoma to block abortion rights measures. In Arkansas, where the GOP passed a law last year that made it much more difficult to get a measure on the ballot, the coming year will test what space the law has left for organizing efforts. And democracy advocates in Idaho and Ohio expect Republicans to look for new maneuvers to restrict the initiative process.

11. What will happen to DAs and judges targeted for removal in southern states? 

Conservative officials in southern states have in recent years created, expanded, or ratcheted up the use of state powers to oust local DAs who make policies they disagree with—such as declining certain low-level charges or ruling out abortion prosecution. They have also targeted high-court judges over their decisions and statements.

States to watch: Georgia and Texas 

Republican anger toward local prosecutors reached a fever pitch in Georgia last year with Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ decision to investigate and ultimately prosecute Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Bolts reported, Georgia Republicans established a new board with authority to oust DAs over their charging decisions, though the law has so far been tied up in court. Similarly, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered a near total criminal abortion ban in Texas, GOP lawmakers there pushed through legislation expanding powers to oust local DAs who said they would refuse to prosecute abortion and other cases, a law that may be turned against some local officials this year. 

Also keep an eye on: Florida, where the governor has broad power to remove and replace local elected officials, DeSantis has ousted two local prosecutors over the past two years, and voters will get to weigh in on who should occupy those offices for the first time since. Residents of St. Louis will also vote for the first time since the removal of their elected prosecutor by the Republicans in the Missouri state government. And Tennessee Republicans have stepped up efforts to sideline Memphis’ new Democratic DA. There are similar efforts to target judges, like the only Black woman justice on North Carolina’s supreme court, for removal. 

12. How will localities innovate to boost participation in democracy and local elections?  

Even as some places tried to make voting more difficult, 2023 also saw many states and cities experiment with new strategies to expand the franchise and encourage more participation in democracy. This year’s elections will see some of the first fruits of those efforts, as well as other places possibly following suit. 

The stakes are clear in: Municipalities experimenting with noncitizen voting

Boston’s city council in December passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, a landmark win for progressives who’ve championed this issue locally for years, as Bolts reported in 2022. But the Massachusetts legislature would need to authorize Boston’s reform, which may come to a head this year. Boston’s move comes as other cities have adopted noncitizen voting. Last year, Burlington became the latest Vermont locality to allow noncitizen voting in local elections, giving more members of the state’s growing immigrant communities a say in things like school boards and municipal budgets. Washington, D.C. passed a similar ordinance last year, though a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the measure, a battle likely to continue into this year.

Also keep an eye on: Other innovations to increase participation are set to take effect this year, and will face their first tests. Michigan allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote before their 18th birthday,  while New York passed a law requiring high schools to distribute registration and pre-registration forms to students. Colorado and Nevada recently expanded voting access on Tribal lands. New York also just moved some local elections to even years to boost turnout, a reform that may inspire proposals in other states on an issue that is gaining steam around the nation.

Correction: The article has been corrected to reflect where Trump appealed his disqualification from the Maine ballot.

The post Twelve Questions Shaping Democracy and Voting Rights in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans had been barreling ahead with legislation that would make it a felony in most cases to aid another person in requesting, filling out or returning voting ballots. The bill had sailed through one chamber of the Alabama legislature, and was widely expected to pass the other. But when the Alabama senate convened for its final day of the 2023 legislative session last Tuesday, the controversial bill was not among those included for floor debate.

That news was a welcome surprise to the bill’s opponents, a coalition of voting rights, civil rights and disability rights groups that expected it would pass. And it came in the same week as another unexpected victory for the state’s voting rights community, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Alabama’s aggressively gerrymandered congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act. 

“We’re absolutely thrilled over here,” said ACLU of Alabama Policy & Advocacy Director Dillon Nettles.

Voting rights advocates were able to breathe a sigh of relief at these two victories for now, but that doesn’t mean that the fight is over: these groups are already bracing for Republicans to revisit the absentee ballot bill in next year’s legislative session.

“It will come back. I think it’s going to be a big issue next year. I think they’ll push it much earlier next year,” Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, a Democrat, told Bolts.

Republicans’ House Bill 209 would have created draconian punishments for people if they help others fill out or return their absentee ballots, in an attempt to dramatically reduce efforts from get out the vote organizations.

The bill would have made it a class D felony punishable by up to five years in prison and $7,500 in fines for people who distribute, order, request, collect, complete, obtain or deliver an absentee ballot or ballot application on behalf of another person. That’s the same felony category as credit card fraud.

Anyone paid to help fill out an absentee ballot could have faced class C felony charges and a prison sentence as long as 10 years. Those who knowingly pay a third party to take any of these actions on an absentee ballot could have faced a class B felony charge—the same class of felony as first-degree manslaughter in Alabama—and one with prison sentences as long as 20 years. 

“That bill would have made felons out of folks that are just trying to help their friends and neighbors,” said Alabama League of Women Voters President Kathy Jones. “If it had passed, we would have sued.”

Opponents of these proposals argue that these penalties would have a chilling effect on absentee voting by making it harder for people who need assistance to receive, fill out and return their ballots. And they say it would have an outsized impact on Black voters—especially those who live in the poor, rural Black Belt region of the state.

“The highest percent of absentee ballots come out of the Black community, out of the Black Belt counties. We don’t have a lot of jobs in those communities, so those who live in those communities have to drive 40, 50, 60 miles a day. So the absentee ballot is the way that they can vote,” said Singleton. “It could look to be voter suppression based on where the large number of absentees come from—out of the Black community.”

The bill would have exempted family members and roommates from the ban, and an amendment exempted people who help blind, disabled and illiterate people fill out their ballots from the criminal penalties.

But disability rights advocates remained alarmed by the legislation even after it was amended, saying it might violate federal law.

“We were very concerned about HB 209 even after the amendment was presented. According to the Americans With Disability Act, every individual should be provided equal opportunity to participate in all services, programs and activities,” Barbara Manuel, president of the Alabama chapter of the National Federation for the Blind, told Bolts.

Alabama is already one of the most difficult states in the nation for voters. It’s one of only three states that doesn’t allow any options for in-person early voting. It’s also one of only 15 states that requires voters to provide a specific excuse to request an absentee ballot. Approved reasons include if the voter won’t be in their home county on Election Day, if they’re ill or disabled, if they’ll be at work for the entire 10-hour stretch that polls are open, or if they’re a caregiver for a homebound family member. And Republicans passed a strict voter ID law more than a decade ago. 

This bill is the latest GOP attempt to criminalize get out the vote efforts, casting a pall over normal political organizing in the name of election security. Alabama Republicans’ stated goal was to end what they describe as “ballot harvesting”—outside groups churning up large-scale operations to collect absentee ballots from voters and deliver them to election offices. Republicans claim these operations create ripe opportunities for voting fraud. While absentee ballot voting fraud does exist, there are only a few known examples (the best-known of which was actually carried out by a Republican operative in North Carolina who was eventually indicted for it).

But voting fraud has become a rallying cry for Republicans across the country as they seek to restrict methods of voting—especially by those Republicans who have embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. A recent analysis by States Newsroom found that more than 100 election-related legal penalties were added to state laws in 2022 alone, across 26 different states. The majority of them were directed at voters and people assisting them.

This bill has been championed by Alabama Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen, who has pushed conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election and who introduced a similar bill in 2022, when he was still in the legislature. 

Allen said the bill “makes incredible strides in protecting the rights of Alabama voters to cast their own votes without undue influence” in an opinion column in the Alabama Ledger.

“HB209 would make it illegal to pay, or to be paid by a third party to collect absentee ballot applications or absentee ballots from Alabama voters. Furthermore, it would eliminate the ability of organizations to sow the seeds of chaos and confusion by sending pre-filled absentee applications into our state,” he continued. “Our elections are the foundation of our constitutional republic, and nobody should be paid for their absentee application or their ballot. Ballot harvesting should not be a job description.”

Allen’s vocal support of this bill is his latest attack on voting access. When he was a state lawmaker, Allen introduced legislation to ban curbside voting and outside donations and grants to help finance local election offices, both of which became law. 

Allen was one of four election deniers to win a secretary of state election during the 2022 midterms. One of his first acts in office was to withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national system used by 30 other states to share voter registration data to identify people who had moved or died so they could be removed from voting rolls. That system became the target of right-wing conspiracy theory websites like the Gateway Pundit after the 2020 election, and Allen echoed their false claims, claiming the bipartisan, multi-state organization was a “Soros-funded, leftist group.”

In the session’s final stretch this year, HB 209 e seemed to be on a glide path to becoming law. It was approved by the GOP-dominated house by a 76-28 vote along party lines last month and had been approved in committee in the senate, where Republicans hold a 27-8 majority.

But the bill was surprisingly left off the schedule when the senate convened last Tuesday on the final day’s legislative session.

It’s unclear exactly why the bill stalled out. Sources say that some Republican lawmakers privately expressed concerns about collateral impacts on voters—and some speculated that the Republican tasked with pushing it through the senate had other priorities.

“Some concerns came from the Black caucus, and some came from some Republicans who thought the elderly would get confused,” an Alabama Republican who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations told Bolts.

Sources also speculated that Garlan Gudger, the bill’s lead sponsor in the senate, may have prioritized another controversial bill of his that targeted vaping products, to the detriment of the absentee voting bill. Neither bill passed the senate.

“He had the vaping bill, which had really been a priority for him,” said ACLU of Alabama Policy & Advocacy Director Dillon Nettles. “I think that that certainly did play out in our favor.”

Allen, Gudger and Representative Jamie Kiel, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill in the state House, didn’t respond to calls and emails requesting comment for this story. 

The bill died in the Senate just days before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama Republicans’ aggressive congressional gerrymander, upholding a key section of the Voting Rights Act ruling to rule that the state had illegally diluted Black residents’ voting power. The conservative Supreme Court has been hostile to the Voting Rights Act in past rulings, so this 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s liberal wing, came as a shock. Alabama will likely now have to create a second Black-majority congressional district.

The ruling does nothing to stop Alabama Republicans from pushing aggressive bills to curtail voting access, however. A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that Alabama and other states with a history of racist voter suppression no longer had to submit any changes to their voting rules for preclearance by the federal government. That’s led Republicans to flood those states—and others—with a bevy of restrictive changes to election law. Voting rights advocates and Democrats think there’s a strong possibility that HB 209 will be reintroduced next legislative session—with more time for Republicans to push it through.

“It’s coming. This secretary of state is not going to give up,” said Singleton. “We know we’re going to have to have a real fight next year on this bill. It’s going to come back.”

“I don’t think we’re out of the woods,” said Nettles.

The post Voting Rights Just Got a Second Surprise Win in Alabama appeared first on Bolts.

But voters by and large rejected election denier candidates while embracing measures that expanded access to the ballot in places like Michigan and Connecticut. Outside of elections, states and municipalities saw big policy shifts around democracy and voting procedures—some of it expanding voting access, like North Carolina restoring the voting rights to tens of thousands people on probation and parole, and a lot of it threatening to curtail and criminalize voting, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s new elections police force. 

In the coming year, expect these fundamental conflicts around democracy to remain at the forefront, so we here at Bolts have identified ten key questions that will shape these issues in 2023. They range from the continued threat of election denialism in state governments to the power of state supreme courts over the gerrymandering of congressional maps—and Bolts will be watching it all for you. 

1. How will the election deniers who won secretary of state act once in office?

Election deniers largely failed in their efforts to take over election administration offices during the midterms, with the exception of four candidates in deeply red states—Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming. As they now prepare to enter office as the elections chief of their respective states, these incoming officials will have the clout to push for significant changes to election procedures.

The stakes are clear in: Alabama

Wes Allen, who won the secretary of state race in Alabama, already seems to be making good on his promise to remove the state from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national organization that assists states in maintaining accurate voter rolls and has become a target of right-wing conspiracies. Shortly after he was elected, he released a statement saying that he informed the organization that he would end Alabama’s membership as soon as he is inaugurated in January. 

Member states—including Alabama—have relied on the ERIC program to detect voter fraud. Outgoing secretary of state John Merril defended the system, saying that the program helped Alabama detect 12 instances of voter fraud in 2020. Despite this, Allen has said that the state will be able to maintain its own voter rolls using drivers license records, death records, and change-of-address information from the US Postal Service. 

Also keep an eye on: In South Dakota, Monae Johnson has expressed her distrust of vote tabulation machines and has already said she would encourage county election officials to do a hand-count audit of election results. In Wyoming, Chuck Gray has maintained that he wants to ban ballot drop boxes. 

2. Where will conservatives ramp up policing of elections and expand criminal statutes around voting? 

Trump’s lies about fraud fueled a raft of GOP-crafted state laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing criminal penalties around voting. As Bolts has reported, those laws are part of a larger effort in red states to police elections and criminalize voting under the pretense of cracking down on fraud. That includes an entire new state agency designed to investigate elections in Florida. Heading into 2023, conservatives are already gearing up to set up new tripwires that could ensnare more people in the criminal legal system.

The stakes are clear in: Texas 

The last time the Texas legislature gaveled into session in January 2021, it was less than a week after a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that had been fanned by many top GOP officials in the state—including Attorney General Ken Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and even rallied Trump supporters in Washington D.C. hours before they rioted on Jan. 6. Conservative leaders then used Big Lie rhetoric to make ‘election integrity’ a top priority, ultimately ushering in the passage of Senate Bill 1, a sweeping elections law that raised new threats of criminal penalties around assisting voters and election workers. 

Now Texas Republicans are once again pointing to the most recent elections to justify more policing of elections. GOP lawmakers say problems voters experienced at the polls around Houston on election day—polling places that opened late and shortages of ballot paper—inspired them to file a bill that would direct the secretary of state to appoint state police officers as “election marshals” to investigate voting. Republicans have also proposed legislation ahead of the session that would impose harsher penalties for election crimes and expand Paxton’s ability to initiate prosecutions for voter fraud. 

Also keep an eye on: The administration of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis this summer arrested people for allegedly voting when they were barred from doing so, despite evidence that state officials told them they were eligible. Judges have since tossed out some of those cases, but many remain to be adjudicated in 2023—and Florida’s new election police force has the authority to launch new prosecutions. Other cases involving people prosecuted for voting are ongoing elsewhere in the country, such as Crystal Mason‘s in Texas.

3. Will more states curtail felony disenfranchisement or enable voting from prison? 

In 2022, 4.6 million Americans were barred from voting due to a felony conviction—a number that’s high but also considerably down from just four years ago, before a wave of reforms ended or curtailed felony disenfranchisement in more than ten states. Will more states join the efforts to restore people’s voting rights in the coming year?

The stakes are clear in: Oregon

Since 2018, the states that have expanded the franchise have largely acted to restore the rights of citizens who are already out of prison. In states that had already done that, activists have focused on also enabling people to vote from prison, though so far those bills have mostly stalled. (After a milestone 2020 reform, D.C. joined Maine and Vermont as the only places that strip no one’s rights.) Such a push failed in Oregon earlier this year. But a new legislative effort on the issue is coming in 2023, a state advocate confirmed to Bolts. 

The stakes are also clear in: New Mexico 

New Mexico is a rare blue state that bars people on parole and probation from voting, and a bill to enfranchise anyone who is not incarcerated failed last year in chaotic circumstances and mutual recrimination among Democrats. Voting rights advocates told Bolts that they would try again; they have a short window in early 2023 given the state’s brief legislative session.

Also keep an eye on: Other states where bills to end or curtail felony disenfranchisement have been considered in recent years or may be introduced this year include Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Inversely, in Kentucky, the fate of an executive order announced by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear in 2019 that has restored the voting rights of most people who have completed their sentence may hinge on the results of the governor’s race in November.

4. Which states will further ease ballot access and voting procedures?

From automatic voter registration to universal vote-by-mail, specific policies meant to ease ballot access have snowballed in recent years, largely in Democratic-run states. In 2023, which states play catch-up and what new proposals emerge that push existing boundaries further?

The stakes are clear in: Connecticut

Connecticut is close to shaking off the distinction of being the bluest state in the nation with no in-person early voting. In November, residents approved a ballot measure that amends the state constitution to authorize in-person early voting, but the state legislature must adopt legislation to set up such a system before it can go into effect and change anything about how elections are actually run. In advance of the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers and advocates are now debating how long the early voting period should be, with disagreements already emerging between some officials and the state ACLU, which is pushing for a longer window.

The stakes are also clear in: Washington, D.C.

The city council of Washington, D.C., held a hearing in 2022 on a proposal that could, should it move forward next year, redefine common assumptions about the need for voter registration. The bill, as Bolts‘s Alex Burness reported in September, would mail ballots to people it knows are eligible, even if they are not registered. “Traditionally, registration has been used as a way to keep people from voting,” the bill’s chief sponsor told Bolts.

Also keep an eye on: Voting rights advocates in New York are pushing many reforms to ease registration and strengthen local administration. As Democrats take power in Michigan, they are eying possible legislation on election procedures and they will be in charge of implementing a voting rights package that Michiganders adopted in November. And Delaware lawmakers are back to square one after the state supreme court struck down their voting reforms this fall. 

5. Will more states pass voting laws restricting ballot access?

This year’s was Georgia’s first federal election since the passage of Senate Bill 202, a sweeping voting law passed by Republicans that introduced new restrictions to voting such as stricter ID requirements for absentee voting, restricting the availability of ballot drop boxes, and making it illegal to offer people standing in long voting lines food or water. The law, as Anoa Changa reported for Bolts, also created a critically short four-week runoff election period. But Georgia is not alone: SB 202 implemented a slew of measures that Republicans nationwide have used as a template for legislative changes, and more may come in 2023.

The stakes are clear in: Ohio

Republicans in the Ohio legislature pushed through a new bill this month tightening voter ID requirements for in-person voting, shortening the period for absentee voting, and limiting the number of ballot drop boxes per county to just one. The bill, which was originally intended to get rid of certain election days, was expanded to include these other provisions just before it was passed in both houses. The bill is now on Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s desk; Democrats have signaled they will bring a lawsuit next year if he signs it.

Also keep an eye on: Pennsylvania Republicans are eying stricter voter ID laws as a priority in the upcoming session. Since they lost control of the state House in November, they may be hard pressed to find the votes to succeed; but Republicans are looking to take advantage of multiple vacancies in the chamber to keep control until the spring, a chaotic situation that may give them a legislative window. In Texas, lawmakers have already pre-filled 66 bills having to do with election administration, some of which would shorten early voting and purge voter rolls. 

6. Will states change their rules around ballot initiatives? 

Facing popular referendums to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions or expand healthcare access, Republicans in many red states have tried to change the goalposts to make ballot measures harder to pass, including this year in South Dakota and Arkansas. Expect more states to try to raise the threshold for passing voter-initiated reforms next year. 

The stakes are clear in: Ohio 

Republicans in the Ohio legislature have been rushing to change the rules for constitutional amendments since activists began discussing a potential ballot measure to solidify legal protections for abortion in light of the state’s criminal ban. While abortion activists used the ballot initiative process to protect abortion rights in neighboring Michigan, the vote didn’t clear 60 percent, the new threshold Ohio Republicans now want to set for such changes in the future. 

The stakes are also clear in: Missouri

In Missouri, GOP lawmakers have filed nearly a dozen bills to increase requirements for ballot initiatives in the state—from raising the signature requirements to get a proposal on the ballot to increasing the threshold for approval from a majority to 60 percent. Those proposed changes come on the heels of voters legalizing recreational marijuana via the ballot initiative process in November and discussions among abortion rights advocates about pursuing a ballot measure to challenge the state’s criminal abortion ban. 

7. How will the politics of state supreme courts affect mid-decade redistricting?

While redistricting typically takes place at the start of the decade, new majorities in state courts can shift the balance of power and trigger new rounds of map drawing.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin is extremely gerrymandered, making it very unlikely that Democrats could win the legislature this decade under present maps. Could they get state courts to force fairer maps, as their peers in Pennsylvania did last decade? At the moment, conservatives enjoy a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, which ruled on those ideological lines last year to effectively preserve the skewed maps in effect during the 2010s. But a supreme court race looms in April that could transform state politics: Should a liberal candidate gain the seat, it would flip control of the court and likely change its outlook on the Republican gerrymanders.

Also keep an eye on: The GOP swept state supreme court races in North Carolina and Ohio in November, wins that are likely to deliver newly-robust conservative majorities and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering in each state. For different reasons, both states are required to redraw congressional maps by the 2024 or 2026 cycles, and now the Republicans who control the redistricting process will get to do so under friendlier judges than over the past two years. 

8. Will Harper vs. Moore throw a wrench in redistricting and other democracy debates?

If you are reading this, odds are you’ve heard of the “independent state legislature” theory, a largely obscure legal doctrine just twelve months ago that is now on the brink of receiving the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority. If not, Cristian Farias’s primer in Bolts has you covered: this is the “feverish idea is that state legislatures should have complete and unfettered control over how federal elections are run and regulated, shielded from the oversight of state courts,” Farias wrote in March. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court took a case, known as Moore v. Harper, that tests this doctrine, and heard it on Dec. 7.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

The Supreme Court could rule in the case anytime between January and June, falling anywhere between a repudiation of the theory to an embrace of its strongest form, which would unleash state legislatures to regulate federal elections as they please. During the Dec. 7 hearing, court watchers observed that some conservative justices did not seem to support the theory’s strongest iteration but may be willing to fashion a weaker version. 

Also keep an eye on: Depending on how the justices rule, the outcome could unleash GOP lawmakers to ramp up voter ID rules, restrict voting procedures, or draw new maps without worrying about intervention from their state courts in places like North Carolina or Ohio where state judges have been a thorn on their side has been an issue for them. The conservative justices could also make it tougher for a new majority on the Wisconsin supreme court, should liberals flip it in April (see above), to have any effect on the congressional map. But if the justices is affirm some version of the independent state legislature theory, the consequences could also be felt in blue states where judges have constrained Democratic legislatures: Just over the past year, for instance, New York’s highest court struck down Democrats’ gerrymander of the state in 2021, and Delaware’s highest court threw out new laws enabling same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail voting—all moves that may be called into question by Moore v. Harper.

9. Will other cities move on democracy vouchers?

In 2022, Oakland, California, followed in the footsteps of Seattle in offering residents a novel way to more actively participate in local elections. Voters in November approved a ballot measure for a Democracy Dollars program, giving every Oakland voter four $25 vouchers to donate to a candidate of their choice in future city and school board elections. 

As Spenser Mestel reported for Bolts in July, the idea behind the program is to engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

The stakes are clear in: California municipalities

Advocates elsewhere in California are looking to Oakland as an example. Los Angeles and San Diego have each had their respective campaigns for democracy dollars in place for some time, and in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the editorial board offered up these vouchers as one of several tools that could be used to restore LA voters’ confidence in local government shaken by the racist comments made city council leaders on a leaked tape. 

Also keep an eye on: At a recent city council meeting in Evanston, Illinois, officials discussed democracy vouchers as one of two new proposals for using government dollars to fund campaigns. The discussion was tabled until February, when the proposals will go up for a committee vote. 

10. What is next for local initiatives to expand voter eligibility? 

Cities around the country are experimenting with ways to broaden their electorate. In recent years, some have passed reforms allowing non-citizen residents to vote in local elections, and others have tried extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds. Watch for more of those efforts next year as well as pushback from conservative groups. 

The stakes are clear in: Massachusetts 

Several Massachusetts cities have in recent years passed ordinances allowing both 16-and 17-year olds and noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections. But to implement those reforms, the cities must get approval from the governor and the Democratic-run legislature, which have so far ignored their requests. As Bolts reported this year, proponents of expanding the franchise have hoped that a breakthrough in Boston would help push state leaders to finally act. Last month, Boston’s city council overwhelmingly passed an ordinance giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in municipal elections, and GBH News reports that council members who also support noncitizen voting are pressing for the city to take up that issue next.

The stakes are also clear in: California

Conservative activists in California have sued to block expanding the franchise in the state since San Francisco voters in 2016 approved letting noncitizen residents vote in local school board elections. This past summer a judge struck down the ordinance, ruling that it violated the state constitution. While the courts allowed noncitizens to vote in the November election as the city appealed, it could be the last time depending on how the legal challenge shakes out. Meanwhile, Oakland seems willing to join the fight, with voters overwhelmingly approving a resolution last month that also seeks to allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. 

Also keep an eye on: Other legal fights over expanding the franchise include Washington DC’s attempt to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, which the DC council passed in October but Republicans in Congress have already vowed to block. New York City is also currently appealing a trial court ruling this summer that struck down the city’s attempt to authorize close to 900,000 noncitizen residents to vote in local elections. In Vermont, two cities implemented noncitizen voting in local elections, and where the incoming secretary of state says she supports expanding voting eligibility. 

The post Ten Questions that Will Shape Democracy and Voting Rights in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

Jamie told Wisconsin Watch that the couple was motivated by a desire to help re-elect Donald Trump when they registered to vote for the first time in 2020. But they listed their P.O. Box, unaware that Wisconsin law makes it a felony to register with anything other than a residential address. The Wellses ultimately became two of five people Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney charged earlier this year with “falsely procuring voter registration,” which carries a punishment of up to three and a half years in prison and a fine of $10,000 each. 

According to a criminal complaint Toney filed this past February, Jamie insisted that the offense “didn’t matter anyways” because she’d voted for Trump, who lost. But she also told a detective on the case “he should be looking at the election in Wisconsin because the election was cheated and ‘they took it away from Trump.’” 

Toney, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin attorney general this year, has run for statewide office in large part on “prosecuting more election fraud than anyone in Wisconsin.” 

His actions and aggressive stance as DA have added a veneer of law enforcement credibility to the groundswell of baseless conspiracy theories about elections that have circulated in the Wisconsin GOP since Trump’s loss in 2020. If he wins, Toney would assume even larger authority to pursue investigations and press criminal charges, potentially spreading his agenda statewide in one of the nation’s most critical swing states.

Toney has also taken steps to distance himself from the Big Lie as a way of appealing to more moderate voters. “I’ve been the most vocal Republican statewide candidate opposed to decertification, saying there was no widespread voter fraud that would overturn the results of the election here in Wisconsin,” Toney said in a debate early this month after his Democratic opponent, incumbent Attorney General Josh Kaul, accused him of “fanning the Big Lie.” 

But Toney has associated himself with Wisconsin conservatives at the front row of election conspiracies. He recently attended a fundraiser alongside Michael Gabelman, a former state supreme court judge who released a widely-discredited report calling for decertifying the 2020 election; Toney supported Gableman’s purported investigation. He has also joined in conservative attacks against the state’s bipartisan elections commission and sought to remove its members.

Toney didn’t respond to requests for comment about the prosecutions for illegal registration or his campaign for attorney general.

The AG election in Wisconsin has drawn attention from national Democrats for its potential ramifications on abortion rights in the state. Kaul joined a lawsuit attempting to block a 1849 law banning all abortions in Wisconsin after this summer’s Dobbs ruling. Toney called the lawsuit “a political stunt with dubious legal standing” and has since received endorsements from anti-abortion groups for pledging to enforce the state’s abortion ban and saying he would prosecute instances of abortion even for pregnancies that resulted from rape. Toney has also said a Republican AG’s office would be better suited to bring abortion prosecutions to avoid the discretion of local DAs.

“From touting bogus claims of election fraud, to refusing to rule out prosecuting abortions even in cases of rape and incest, it is clear that Eric Toney will say or do anything to win, including pander to the extreme far-right,” Democratic Party of Wisconsin Rapid Response Director Marnie O’Malley said in a statement to Bolts.

Toney has joined Big Lie evangelists like Christopher Schmaling, the Republican sheriff of Racine County, in calling for the prosecution of Wisconsin Election Commission members (WEC) who, because of the coronavirus pandemic, voted to relax requirements for how ballots were handled in nursing homes ahead of the 2020 election. 

The Wisconsin sheriff’s groundless claims of fraud around voting in nursing homes have helped fuel a larger conservative war on the WEC, and they were included in the report released to Republican lawmakers earlier this year by Gableman, who called for shuttering the WEC and transferring its duties to local election clerks. After the Racine County DA declined to bring any charges, Toney echoed Schmaling’s allegations and filed a complaint with Democratic Governor Tony Evers, seeking removal of the WEC members. Toney also asked for the matter to be referred to another county DA’s office, like his, or a special prosecutor, for criminal charges.

Toney has brought his tough talk toward election officials to the campaign trail. His campaign website says he’s “fighting to hold the Wisconsin Election Commission Board accountable for their actions in 2020.” All around the country, local and state elections officials have reported being harassed and threatened by people who believe the conspiracies about the 2020 election, and they have left their positions in droves.

Kaul, the current AG, has argued that Toney’s stances on the WEB or Gableman call into question whether the GOP nominee would defend the results in 2024, should Trump or another candidate seek to overturn an election again. 

Kaul has also criticized Toney’s prosecutions over P.O. Box registrations as being fueled by politics, which Toney has in turn called hypocritical. Toney points to the incumbent’s prosecution of a conservative activist who ordered absentee ballots for two other people to try and bolster his argument that it’s too easy to violate state election laws. 

Toney’s invective against the WEC represents just one of the GOP attacks on the state’s bipartisan elections commission. A conservative group also sued to overturn WEC guidance that expanded the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots ahead of the 2020 election, resulting in a ruling this summer by the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court that effectively outlawed nearly all drop boxes in the state and made it illegal for anyone, including family members, to submit another person’s completed ballot.

Along with the state elections commission, another bogeyman for Toney’s campaign is protests against the police. One of his campaign videos features footage from demonstrations in 2020 with a dramatic voiceover saying, “Wisconsin is under siege by a woke mob.” He has criticized Kaul’s office for opening an investigation into the Kenosha officer who shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake in August 2020 and for advocating for various policy changes like de-escalation training and revised use-of-force standards. 

Toney has claimed Kaul’s handling of Blake’s shooting convinced him to run for attorney general, saying in an interview with PBS Wisconsin, “To have an attorney general that’s not standing with our law enforcement, I could not sit back and watch that continue.”

Toney mirrors a larger movement in conservative politics to criminalize voting and elections. More than two dozen states have enacted, expanded or increased the severity of election-related criminal penalties since the 2020 election, according to a recent analysis by States Newsroom. States like Florida have ramped up policing of elections this year, while election denying activist groups in states like Texas have escalated private efforts to monitor voting. 

But Toney’s prosecutions in Fond du Lac, which remain pending, still stand out compared to how other DAs in the state have handled similar cases. In La Crosse County, the DA declined to prosecute 16 cases where voters used UPS stores as their address, telling the Milwaukee Journal  Sentinel, “We decided it was not an intentional plan to fraudulently vote.” An investigation by Wisconsin Watch found over 100 people registered to vote at a UPS store address, yet only Toney in Fond du Lac County chose to prosecute people. 

The fraudulent registration cases Toney is prosecuting also came from an unusual source: tips by an election denier and self-styled vigilante named Peter Bernegger, who in April was fined more than $2,400 by the WEC for filing “frivolous complaints.” In addition to targeting people who registered at P.O. Boxes, Bernegger, who was previously convicted of bank and mail fraud for deceiving investors in two startup companies, also used state open records laws to gather millions of copies of ballots to hunt for election crimes—although he offered no proof earlier this year when called by a Republican-led Assembly panel to testify about “fake votes” in the 2020 election.  

Ion Meyn, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, accused Toney of basing the prosecutions on a bad-faith reading of the existing statute. 

“I find it a total abuse of prosecutorial discretion that undermines democracy,” Meyn told Bolts. He said Toney seems to be pushing for election crimes prosecutions to make a political point, which he called unethical and disqualifying for state office. “Using the criminal system against defendants for your own personal gain is the worst type of abuse of discretion,” Meyn said.

The post The Prosecutor Who Wants More Power to Investigate Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Shelby County has been notorious for punitive practices that leave people languishing in jail for years without a conviction and fuel harsh youth prosecution, largely against Black residents. Local advocates have fought for years to change the system. The county was under federal monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the rights of Black children between 2012 and 2018. In 2018, a DOJ report found continued violations and discrimination in juvenile courts, and characterized the policies of the district attorney’s office as a “toxic combination for African-American youth.”

The local officials who oversaw that system, District Attorney Amy Weirich and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael, were both ousted on Thursday. The winners, Steve Mulroy in the DA race and Tarik Sugarmon in the juvenile judge race, ran on reform agendas and secured eight-year terms.

Mark Ward, a local criminal court judge, also appears to have lost his re-election bid. Ward sparked an outcry earlier this year for sentencing Pamela Moses, a Black activist who was erroneously told by a state agency that she was eligible to register to vote, to six years in prison. That case was prosecuted by Weirich’s office, and Moses decried the aggressive charges as a scare tactic.

“I’m very excited,” Raumesh Akbari, a Democratic state senator from Memphis who champions criminal justice reform, told Bolts as she was leaving Mulroy’s victory party. “I think it’s a new day in Shelby County, with a new district attorney and new juvenile court judge, and it’s gonna be a totally different approach to how we handle the criminal justice system in Shelby County.” 

Weirich, a Republican, won her last DA race, in 2014, by a nearly two to one margin. While Shelby is a blue-leaning county, Tennessee holds general elections for local offices over the summer, and the resulting lower turnout can scramble expectations. But on Thursday, Mulroy, a Democrat, defeated Weirich by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. In the nonpartisan race for juvenile judge, Sugarmon won by 10 percentage points, in a rematch of the race he lost in 2014.

The DA race is one of the first elections to take place in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning federal protections for abortion rights. A ban on abortions is now in effect in Tennessee, which Mulroy pointed to as a critical issue for the campaign. He attacked Weirich for lobbying on behalf of a “fetal assault” bill in the past, and vowed that prosecuting abortion cases would be a “very low priority” for his office. He has not outright ruled out such charges, saying in part that taking a blanket stance may trigger retaliation by GOP politicians; on the same day as Mulroy’s win, the governor of Florida indefinitely suspended a local prosecutor who said he would not prosecute abortions.

Akbari told Bolts that she thinks abortion “definitely made a difference” in the race, noting that Tennesseans voted just two days after Kansas rejected an effort to erode abortion rights. “This is a big deal that impacts women and families across this country.”

The DA race also unfolded in the wake of the prosecution against Moses. Faced with the state’s extremely strict and complicated felony disenfranchisement laws, Moses had received written guidance from a state agency that she was eligible to get her voting rights restored, but when she acted on that guidance that turned out to be erroneous, Weirich’s office threw the book at her andWard sentenced her to six years in prison after accusing her of “tricking” the probation’s office. After The Guardian’s Sam Levine revealed holes in the case, Ward overturned the conviction and Weirich dropped the charges.

“I think the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang,” Moses told Bolts in March after being released from prison. Ward and Weirich both lost their races on Thursday.

In voiding Moses’s conviction in February, Ward faulted Weirich for failing to disclose evidence that Moses had been told by a probation officer she was eligible to vote. Weirich’s office has drawn attention from the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility and from the media for withholding evidence in the past, including in a New York Times Magazine investigation in 2017.

Local and national advocates told Bolts that the case against Moses was a window into other patterns of harsh and unequal treatment in Shelby County as well. They fault the DA’s office and local judges for overcharging defendants, imposing a harsh “trial penalty,” and for ramping up pretrial detention. Human rights organizations have denounced local bail practices as discriminatory and unconstitutional, and a report released last year by a court-appointed inspector documented that people are held pretrial in the county jail “for months or years.”

Mulroy ran for DA on planks associated with criminal justice reform, including working to reduce pretrial detention and decreasing  the volume of prosecutions for lower-level charges like drug possession. He told Bolts in a phone interview this spring that the DA’s office should not have prosecuted Moses and that, as DA, he would try to counter any chilling effect felt by residents who are unsure about their voter eligibility.

Mulroy said that he wanted to confront the “demonstrated recent history of racial discrimination in our justice system,” telling Bolts that, “I think any district attorney should make it a high priority to try to reduce the obvious and blatant racial disproportionality in our criminal justice system. That goes double for somebody in Shelby County.”

“Excessive bail and excessive seeking of pretrial detention, along with adult transfer of juvenile cases, have a hugely disproportionate minority contact rate,” he added.

The disparities in prosecution and sentencing extend into the electoral realm due to felony disenfranchisement rules. 21 percent of Black Tennesseans were stripped of the right to vote in 2020, compared to 7 percent of other adults, which barred thousands of Shelby County residents from voting on Thursday. 

Weirich seized on her opponent’s commitments to say he would endanger safety in Shelby County, and she ran a campaign centered on promises of law and order. “I believe violent offenders should go to prison,” she wrote on Facebook last week. “If you do too, please vote for me.”

“The most dangerous words in Shelby County would be ‘DA Steve Mulroy,’” that statement also said.

But Weirich’s critics scoffed at the implication that her policies were more effective to bring public safety, and point out that violent crime and murders have increased since she came into office. “If what they’re doing, this tough on crime stance was working, then there wouldn’t be a need to have reform,” Akbari said. “It’s not. It’s costing states, cities and counties an exceptional amount of money. Lives are destroyed by it, communities are destroyed by it.” 

The county’s treatment of Black children was a central theme in Mulroy and Sugarmon’s campaigns. Besides the DOJ’s 2018 report on systemic rights violations, local advocates from organizations such as Memphis for All and Just City have assailed continued disparate treatment, and earlier this year they demanded a racial equity audit of local decisions. Data released by the county shows, for instance, that Black youths were held in pretrial detention nearly three times as often as white youths in 2021. And nearly every single minor who gets prosecuted as an adult, facing far tougher sentences, is Black; the raw numbers are high, too, as Shelby County prosecutes far more children as adults than other counties.

In Tennessee, the DA seeks a child’s transfer into adult courts, and the juvenile court judge then decides on the transfer. This judge also gets to appoint the magistrates who hear the cases.

Michael, the juvenile court judge who lost his re-election bid on Thursday, resisted the federal monitoring, calling for it to end until Trump administration officials granted his wish and ended the oversight in 2018. He defended his record against critics during the campaign. “It’s a very, very difficult decision to make,” he said of his decisions to transfer children into adult court. 

Sugarmon, the victorious candidate against Michael, has called for the DOJ to resume its monitoring. He told MLK50 that he would allow fewer children to be transferred into adult court, and that he wants fewer children to be prosecuted in the first place. Black children were nearly five times more likely than white children to have cases referred to the juvenile court in 2021.

Mulroy echoes Sugarmon on the issue. “I think we also need to call for the U.S. Justice Department to resume its monitoring of our juvenile court,” he told Bolts. 

The incoming DA has not ruled out seeking adult prosecutions of minors, though he told the Daily Memphian, “we would create a strong presumption against transfer. Absent some very, very severe circumstances, adult transfer needs to be a last resort.” 

To Akbari, the election results prove that local residents are looking for a change from the status quo. “It’s easy to just throw somebody in jail. It’s hard work to actually do reform and get to the root of what causes crime, and to make sure that juvenile offenders do not become adult offenders,” she said. “And I think this vote proves that people are ready for something different. You can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

The post Memphis Ousts DA and Judge Who Oversaw Its Notoriously Harsh Court System appeared first on Bolts.

Still, Moses believed she was eligible to have her rights restored. She sought guidance from the probation office and received written confirmation that she was indeed eligible. But Tennessee’s rules for restoring voting rights are so dizzyingly complicated that even state workers get it wrong. In fact, Tennessee had banned Moses from voting for life. And after Moses followed a probation officer’s bad guidance and tried to register to vote, prosecutors threw the book at her.

Shelby County DA Amy Weirich took Moses to trial for illegally registering to vote, and then trumpeted her conviction and sentence when a Memphis judge sent Moses to prison for six years in January. The case sparked an outcry after The Guardian revealed that the state had given Moses faulty guidance and had already identified its error at the time of the conviction. The judge pointed to prosecutors’ failure to disclose evidence showing that Moses had been misled to order a new trial and Weirich then announced that she would drop the charges. 

“Nobody, including Pam Moses, should ever face criminal charges for attempting to restore their voting rights,” Tikeila Rucker, an organizer with the group Memphis for All, told Bolts. “How or why DA Weirich sent a community activist, advocate, and voting rights activist to jail for six years is incomprehensible.”

To Rucker, Moses’s prosecution was an effort to suppress democracy in the county’s Black community. “Moses is an example to the people: don’t you have the audacity to fight for change, to be the change, to step up against authority,” Rucker said. “That right there is the subliminal message.”

Moses also believes that she was targeted due to her race, political beliefs, and public activism on behalf of Black Lives Matter. “I think that the goal was to scare people,” she told Bolts shortly after being released in March, “but it could boomerang.”

Whether the aggressive prosecution of Moses boomerangs for Weirich will be tested on Thursday, when voters will decide whether to keep her in office.

Weirich, a Republican, faces Democratic nominee Steven Mulroy, with the winner securing an eight-year term. Although Shelby County leans blue, Tennessee holds the general election for county offices over the summer, and lower turnout could scramble expectations. In addition, many residents like Moses remain barred from voting.

Mulroy, who beat two other Democrats in the party’s primary in early May, is a fixture in local politics, having served as a county commissioner from 2006 to 2014. Now a law professor at the University of Memphis, he is running for on a platform that emphasizes criminal justice reform. In candidate questionnaires and media interviews, he has pledged a slate of changes to local practices—including working to reduce pretrial detention, decreasing the transfer of minors into adult court, and prosecuting fewer lower-level offenses like drug possession.

These are all major issues in Shelby County, a majority-Black county of more than 900,000 residents. Local advocates have denounced local bail practices as discriminatory and unconstitutional, and a report released last year by a court-appointed inspector documented that people are held pretrial in the county jail “for months or years.” Moreover, Shelby County prosecutes far more children as adults than other counties in Tennessee, a process that is initiated by the DA’s office, and nearly all of the youth transferred to adult court are Black. (The rate was 97 percent in 2018 and 95 percent in 2019, according to The Memphis Flyer, compared to an overall county population that is 54 percent Black.)

Shortly after Moses was released from prison in March, a coalition of local advocates, including members of Memphis for All and Just Audit, called for a racial equity audit of Weirich’s office. 

“The reality is that disparate treatment of the Black community is continuing to take place and has taken place for far too long,” said Rucker, who is also demanding an audit. 

Andrea Woods, an attorney at the ACLU who has criticized bail practices in Shelby County, told Bolts that the harsh prosecution of Pamela Moses offers a window to how Weirich’s office approaches other cases. “Fundamentally, it’s symptomatic of a county where the DA is over-prosecuting and criminalizing Black people,” Woods said. “There’s rampant overcriminalization and racial disparities, which the DA is a key driver of.”

Weirich’s campaign did not respond to questions about Moses’s case and her broader record as DA. She has said elsewhere that the fault lies with the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) rather than by her office, and that her staff was unaware that the TDOC had acknowledged the mistake. “When reporters or political opportunists use the word ‘state’ they need to be crystal clear that the error was made by the TDOC and not any attorney or officer in the office of the Shelby County District Attorney,” she said in a statement after Moses’s conviction was overturned.

Mulroy, who says Moses should have not been prosecuted for registering in the first place, says Weirich’s handling of the case “fits a pattern.” “Overcharging and overreach is a theme with this prosecutor and has been for many years,” he told Bolts in a phone interview. “Pile on as many duplicative charges as possible to intimidate the defendants into a guilty plea that they might otherwise nor feel comfortable agreeing to.” 

Mulroy says Weirich’s actions in Moses’s case also exemplify her predilection to impose a “trial penalty,” where prosecutors seek steep punishment if defendants don’t accept the initial plea deal offered. Weirich significantly ratcheted up the prison sentence she sought against Moses after Moses refused Weirich’s offer to plead guilty. “I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time,” Weirich said in February. “She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her.” Mulroy says jumping from an offer with no prison time to seeking a sentence of six years is retaliation. “That’s not justice,” he told Bolts.

Under the state’s byzantine rules, it can be tricky for Tennessee residents who have lost the right to vote to determine whether they’re eligible to have them restored, and how to go about it. Tennessee is among just eleven states that does not automatically restore voting rights when people complete a sentence, and this places a heavy burden on them. The U.S. Department of Justice’s guide to rights restoration, released earlier this year, includes a three-page flow chart to help Tennesseans figure out their rights; rules vary based on the date of conviction, whether the conviction includes the word “infamous,” and the exact charge of conviction. Tennesseans who have lost the right to vote must also pay off all court debt to regain the right. 

“You add all of that up, and you ask a layman to figure it out, and it’s pretty darn hard,” Mulroy said. “I studied this for a living and even I find them confusing.”

Mulroy indeed practices and teaches election law—an unusual background for a DA candidate, but one that has become very relevant in the race. He is an advocate for ranked-choice voting, has helped file lawsuits to expand voting rights, for instance to facilitate mail-in voting during the pandemic, and recently wrote a book on the topic. He told Bolts that he thinks this experience is relevant to his seeking the DA’s position given how criminal law is wielded to decide whether people are allowed to vote. 

“The Pamela Moses case is a perfect example of the intersection between the two,” he said. “We have a racialized criminal justice system.”

Other states also have a maze of complicated restoration rules that threaten steep criminal consequences over errors, and zealous prosecutors threaten to ensnare people who make mistakes, like Crystal Mason, a Texas woman who wrongly thought she could vote while still on probation and was targeted by a conservative local prosecutor for casting a provisional ballot that wasn’t counted. This is a strong dynamic in Tennessee due to the large numbers of people who have lost their rights. Roughly 450,000 Tennesseans were barred from voting in 2020, according to the Sentencing Project; 39 percent of them were Black, compared to an overall state population that is 17 percent Black. Many more who are eligible to vote may not know it or worry about pursuing the option because of the example Weirich set with Moses. 

“It does instill fear in the citizens when harsh laws are passed that criminalize what could be innocent behavior,” Linda Harris, a Memphis attorney who ran in the Democratic primary for DA and lost to Mulroy, told Bolts. 

“What we’re talking about is individuals …who want to vote, they want a part of selecting other leaders,” Harris said. “So why is that a crime? Why is it a crime for people to want to vote? I don’t understand it.”

Mulroy says that, if elected, he would try to counter any chilling effect felt by residents who are unsure about their eligibility. “If I were DA, people should not worry about having their right to vote killed or intimidated by a prosecutor who is looking for ways to prosecute voters,” he said. “If a person is honestly unsure, and thinks they have a good faith basis for thinking that they can register or they can vote, then they won’t have to worry about being prosecuted if it turns out they’re wrong.” 

He also criticized the felony disenfranchisement laws at the heart of Moses’s case, as well as other voter restrictions championed by state Republicans like voter ID rules.  “We’re really just preventing huge numbers of people from voting who should be allowed to vote,” he said. 

But Mulroy also did not rule out prosecuting people for registering to vote when ineligible, only saying that ”these kinds of crimes” would be a “very low priority” for his office. He told Bolts that DAs shouldn’t rule out whole categories of charges, as they should consider individual circumstances. He has also said he worries that making categorical promises would invite state Republicans to intervene and transfer cases to other prosecutors. 

He has staked similar positions on the death penalty and abortion. “It is definitely the case that it would be a very low priority for me,” he told The Daily Memphian about prosecuting abortion cases. “Prosecutors should never say never, in large part because there’s a Tennessee law that would allow for the appointment of an independent prosecutor and basically stripping jurisdiction over that class of offenses away from the DA. But also just as a general prudential matter, DAs should not be in the habit of overruling things or ruling things out forever in the abstract.” He has also criticized Weirich for lobbying for harsher laws on reproductive rights.

On Thursday, Shelby County voters will decide the practices of the DA’s office and decide these major issues. And yet thousands of residents will be barred from participating because of their past entanglements with those same systems. Moses herself is permanently prohibited from voting, but she has called people to action, telling Bolts, “If you can’t get your right [to vote] back, support the people who are going to Nashville pushing for laws to be changed, show up with them: There’s strength in numbers.”

The post Tennessee DA Faces Voters, Months After Prosecuting Activist for Wanting to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

Starting when he joined the Texas House in 2013, and continuing session after session since, the Fort Worth Republican has filed bills seeking to end or restrict no-fault divorces in the state. And he has mounted other efforts to preserve his conservative Christian ideal for marriage and family over the years, including being one of the state’s most staunch anti-abortion lawmakers and pushing to end benefits for same-sex spouses of government employees—even after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Texas and across the country in 2015. In recent years, Krause, like much of the Texas GOP, has trained his sights on transgender children, their families, and medical providers who give them gender-affirming care. 

Now he is running to be a culture warrior as the next Tarrant County District Attorney. Krause thinks that prosecutors should be on the frontlines in the latest wave of conservative efforts to police trans families. 

During a recent candidate forum for a Fort Worth GOP group, he bragged about helping kick-start the latest round of attacks. After failing to pass legislation he authored last session banning gender-affirming care for minors, Krause filed a legal request eventually ballooned into state GOP attempts to reclassify abuse outside of the legislative process; Krause’s request eventually snowballed into a misleading legal opinion by Attorney General Ken Paxton that called gender-affirming care for minors “child abuse.” Governor Greg Abbott then cited that opinion in his directive to state child protection workers to investigate families for seeking such care. A Texas Supreme Court ruling last week largely allows those investigations to continue. 

“My approach went after the medical community more than it did the parents,” Krause explained in between asking voters for their support. “I absolutely think that we ought to be prosecuting those medical professionals that engage in this practice.” 

Similar decisions await the county’s next DA on a range of issues from the fate of abortion access in a post-Roe world to conservative efforts to ramp up the involvement of law enforcement in elections. The shifting political and legal landscape on civil rights in Texas has emboldened right-wing attacks to carry severe criminal consequences. The attorney general’s office has sought to bring its investigative powers to bear on how people are voting, and the DA’s office in a county far smaller than Tarrant made national headlines recently for charging a woman with murder over an allegedly self-managed abortion.

Krause faces Phil Sorrells, a Trump-endorsed former judge, in a runoff election on Tuesday to decide the GOP nomination for the Tarrant prosecutor’s seat. Whoever prevails will be well positioned to win the November general election and replace longtime Republican DA Sharen Wilson, who is perhaps best known for sending Crystal Mason to prison for a voting mistake. Mason, who is Black, argues that her prosecution was politically and racially charged, and her conviction has since been called into question by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA), the state’s highest criminal court.

Krause and Sorrells, neither of whom responded to repeated requests for comment for this story, have both promised in forums and campaign materials to follow in Wilson’s footsteps if elected. Both have indicated they may even dedicate more resources to policing elections; this has been a priority for conservatives in Texas and elsewhere, raising alarms that increased risks of criminal prosecution may ensnare voters over simple mistakes or intimidate others away from voting. Krause said in a campaign forum that he would dedicate a prosecutor to election crimes full time while Sorrells wants to start an “election integrity task force” inside the DA’s office. 

Sorrells and Krause have also both slammed a recent CCA ruling that limited Paxton’s ability to prosecute election crimes, saying they’d fill in the gap and prosecute more cases. 

Krause has claimed that Wilson, the outgoing DA, effectively asked him to run after announcing that she’d step down last year, before anyone had officially joined the race; Krause had initially launched a campaign to challenge Paxton but bailed from the attorney general race and filed to run in Tarrant County just before Thanksgiving. In the first round of the primary in March, he edged out Mollee Westfall, a longtime judge who had accumulated endorsements, and joined Sorrells in a runoff since neither received 50 percent of the vote. 

Sorrells, who is older and folksier than his runoff opponent, also has unimpeachable far-right credentials and is running with the endorsement of former President Donald Trump. Political connections likely helped Sorrells, a longtime judge and former prosecutor, get Trump’s support —Sorrells’ campaign consultant is also a political strategist for Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a far-right figure who has reportedly helped influence the former president’s endorsements in the state and is notorious for his xenophobic tirades. 

Sorrells sounds most Trump-like when talking about undocumented immigrants, whom he has made central to his campaign. “The people who are crossing the border illegally, they’re coming here to Tarrant County to commit crime,” he said during a recent campaign forum. “My goal is to hold those people in state custody for as long as we possibly can… until we get somebody else in the White House who’s actually gonna enforce our immigration laws.” 

Sorrells’ main critique of his GOP opponent is that he has zero experience in criminal law. But Krause, who worked for a conservative Christian legal advocacy group famous for its homophobia before joining the Texas legislature, is playing up his political career. He tells voters that his experience at the capitol has prepared him to be “a faithful conservative fighter as your next Tarrant County DA.” 

Waiting in the wings is longtime prosecutor Tiffany Burks, who has already secured the Democratic nomination. Tarrant County has been a longtime GOP bastion, and Republicans continue to hold all statewide offices—a rare feat for an urban area. It has, however, started to trend blue, narrowly voting for Joe Biden in 2020, the first win by a Democratic presidential candidate here since Texan Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but Democrats have yet to break through locally, failing to oust the sheriff in 2020. They are now eying midterm elections for DA and other local offices like county judge.

Burks, who was chief of the Tarrant DA’s criminal division before resigning last year, told Bolts in an interview that she chose to leave and run to lead the agency because she disagreed with the direction it was taking. Burks also claimed the office was beset with morale problems.

“For me there was no consistency, I wasn’t quite sure what the criteria was for the decisions that were being made,” Burks said. “The community deserves to have a DA that cares about the concerns of all of its citizens, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or a libertarian—everyone’s needs in the community matter.” 

In addition to facing criticism over her selective prosecution of election laws, Wilson has also drawn the ire of North Texas activists and victims of police brutality who accuse her of failing to hold law enforcement accountable. 

During a recent campaign forum, Sorrells insisted one of his main priorities as DA would be to “back the police,” saying, “They have to know that if they need help on anything, that the DA is ready and willing to help—and I’m that guy, I’m going to help them.” Krause also points to his support from local law enforcement officials; he is running with the endorsement of Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a Trump favorite who has become a fixture of the national conservative media in recent years even as deaths have spiked at the local jail on his watch. 

Local jail monitors have called for fewer people to be detained pretrial as one remedy to dangerous and deadly conditions, and the county’s bail policies are emerging as one of the major fault lines in the general election. 
Burks told Bolts that the DA’s office could help address problems at the jail and reduce crowding by requesting lower bond amounts, and in some cases no cash bonds, when dealing with low-level, nonviolent cases. Sorrells, meanwhile, said at a recent campaign event, “I would oppose all the low bails that are being issued right now, because we’ve got to keep those people in jail.” Krause reiterated his support for state laws to restrict some jail releases.

Pamela Young, an organizer with United Fort Worth who has called for Waybourn’s resignation over the string of scandals at his jail, said local activists tried to schedule a forum for people impacted by the criminal legal system to ask questions of all three Democrats running for DA before the March 1 primary. Only one participated, Albert Roberts, who was his party’s nominee against Wilson in 2018, losing by six percentage points. Burks was a no-show for the forum alongside a third candidate. (Burks easily won the primary with 60 percent of the vote.)

“That speaks to where we have to continue moving—putting people forward who have been impacted the most, whose communities have been harmed the most and affected the most by the criminal legal system,” Young told Bolts. “No matter who is in that DA’s office—even if Sharen Wilson ran and won again—no matter who is there, we have to continue the work of fighting to get our people free, bottom line.” 

The news earlier this month that the U.S. Supreme Court may be poised to overturn Roe vs. Wade now also looms large over this DA election. 

Texas has a so-called trigger ban that would immediately criminalize abortion in the state if Roe falls next month. Elizabeth Sepper, a scholar of health law at the University of Texas at Austin, told Bolts that a pre-Roe law on the books in Texas could threaten charges against not just abortion providers but potentially also others who help pregnant people access abortion—like partners, family members or friends. Texas also made it a felony last year to give someone abortion-inducing medication after seven weeks of pregnancy, effectively criminalizing medication abortion. Sepper suspects that some prosecutors in Texas are eager to test the bounds of those laws. 

Sepper also worries about more pregnant people in the state being at risk for prosecution in a post-Roe future, pointing to a case last month where authorities near the Texas-Mexico border jailed and prosecuted a woman for murder, allegedly after self-managing her own abortion, despite state law clearly exempting pregnant people from such charges. The woman was released and the case dismissed only after intense pressure from abortion rights activists and calls from across the country demanding that prosecutors drop the charge.

“If Roe is overturned, I suspect that enterprising prosecutors would comb through the criminal code to try and figure out whether a variety of general criminal laws that aren’t abortion-specific could be used to bring even other abortion related crimes,” Sepper told Bolts. “Right now we’ve seen Texas legislators get pretty creative over anti-abortion laws. The next step, if Roe falls, could be prosecutors who get creative and try going after pregnant people who aren’t subject to these abortion specific criminal laws.”

Burks told Bolts 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.” Democratic prosecutors who serve in the state’s big urban centers, including neighboring Dallas County, issued a joint statement last month that said they would not prosecute cases related to abortion. Neither Sorrells nor Krause have addressed in detail how they would handle cases relating to reproductive rights, and the question did not come up in a series of forums reviewed by Bolts.

But if Krause makes it into the DA’s office at least, he would bring a history as an anti-abortion crusader with him. 
“I think one of the things in this race that could help me or hurt me is that I’ve got a long record from like 10 years in the Texas House on these kinds of issues,” Krause said during a recent campaign forum when asked about the recent investigations into trans families. “You know exactly where I stand.”

The post The Culture Warrior Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.

Except Lopez wasn’t being robbed. He had instead stumbled into the crosshairs of local conservatives hunting for voter fraud ahead of the 2020 presidential election. 

When actual police officers later questioned the man who allegedly held Lopez at gunpoint, former Houston police captain Mark Aguirre, he said his crew had been monitoring Lopez around-the-clock for days and accused the repairman of harboring 750,000 fraudulent mail ballots. According to the lawsuit, Aguirre told police that Lopez had been “using Hispanic children to sign the ballots because the children’s fingerprints would not appear in any database.” Aguirre, who was fired from the Houston Police Department in 2003 over a botched raid, according to the Houston Chronicle, was eventually indicted for a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon two months after crashing into Lopez and holding him at gunpoint. 

Aguirre wasn’t acting alone, but rather as part of a broader effort by the right in Texas to set up and finance private election police. When it indicted Aguirre, the Harris County DA’s office alleged that he received wire transfers of over $250,000 from the Liberty Center for God and Country, a nonprofit run by notorious conservative activist Steven Hotze. Lopez is now suing Hotze and his nonprofit for civil conspiracy and civil theft.

Hotze has kept up his efforts since 2020 and, despite this bungling tack record, some prominent Texas Republicans are supporting him.

On April 2, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton helped headline a “Freedom Gala” at a hotel in downtown Houston. The gala was a fundraiser organized by Hotze and his group to raise money to, among other goals, “hire private detectives to investigate, identify, and expose the criminal vote fraud scheme in Harris County and across Texas.” Speakers included Big Lie evangelist Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, as well as Harris County (Houston) Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel, who also sits on the county’s elections commission. 

Civil rights advocates warn that deploying police or police-like forces to monitor voting has chilling effects, and that it echoes a history of intimidation deployed against Black voters. Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said Lopez’s experience highlights the dangers of hired-guns motivated by the Big Lie. “The possibilities are kind of endless for how that could go really badly,” Gutierrez said of Hotze’s plans to hire more voter-fraud detectives. 

Other Republican officials in Harris County, a diverse and increasingly blue area that is home to nearly 5 million residents, have built parallel efforts to monitor voting. Last year, as Republican lawmakers passed legislation emboldening partisan poll watchers, local officials started building what they’ve called an “army” to monitor busy urban polling places. In one presentation, party officials even pointed to Houston’s Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, a hub for civil rights activism that once hosted Martin Luther King Jr., as the kind of inner-city polling place conservatives need to more closely watch in the future. 

Christina Das, an attorney who leads the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s election protection work in Texas and South Carolina, says Texas’s new voting law, Senate Bill 1, already seems to be impacting local election systems. “Staffing shortages, poll sites closing… these happened in the March 1 election,” Das told Bolts, saying the threat of new penalties for election workers exacerbated those problems.

“It’s a 360-degree approach to criminalizing our elections so that people don’t turn out, they don’t show up, they don’t work the polls and they don’t get to the polls,” Das said. 

Private voter-fraud squads and S.B. 1 are part of a larger attempt to criminalize elections in Texas. Paxton, who aided in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race, has beefed up the voter fraud unit of his office in recent years in order to prosecute more election-related cases, the vast majority of which appear to target Black and Latinx people. And other states are following suit. Last year Georgia Republicans passed a law criminalizing volunteers who give free food, water, or other relief to voters waiting in long lines. Florida’s governor is expected to soon sign a law establishing a new state police force to investigate election-related crimes. Advocates for voting rights argue that these measures, coupled with high-profile prosecutions of Black voters who commit voting errors, seem designed to scare people away from the polls. 

Even if Paxton spoke at Hotze’s fundraiser for more private voter-fraud detectives, it’s unclear what other ties his office has to the group’s actual investigations. Conservative activists in Texas have in the past boasted about working with Paxton’s office to cook up criminal cases alleging election-related crimes. Lopez’s lawsuit against Hotze and his Liberty Center claims that Aguirre called a lieutenant in Paxton’s office to request that they conduct a traffic stop for his investigation three days before Lopez’s roadside assault in October 2020. The lieutenant told Aguirre he couldn’t assign police to make a stop for him, according to the lawsuit, but Aguirre kept calling Paxton’s office, including the morning he pulled a gun on Lopez. 

Paxton, who is up for re-election this year and faces a May 24 runoff against George P. Bush in the GOP primary, dedicated much of his speech at this month’s gala to attacking the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a recent ruling that limits his authority to prosecute election-related crimes across the state, according to Quorum Report editor Scott Braddock, who attended and wrote about the event. Paxton has urged his supporters to pressure the high court judges to reverse their ruling restricting his authority to initiate voter fraud cases. A prosecutor challenging one of the judges who signed the ruling was endorsed by Hotze and his group but lost in the GOP primary on March 1.  

In Harris County, that March 1 primary was marred by mistakes by election officials, which conservatives have seized on with more unsubstantiated rhetoric about voter fraud. After delays in vote-counting and thousands of mail-in ballots that were accidentally left off the county’s initial vote tally, Harris County’s nonpartisan elections administrator Isabel Longoria announced she would step down this summer. Harris County’s election commission—comprised of three elected county officials and the local party chairs, including Siegel—met for the first time in more than a year last week to discuss a timeline and plan for replacing Longoria. During public comments, one conservative activist said Longoria “should probably be put in jail for her actions.” The commission adjourned without taking action after arguing over the proper way to move forward with Longoria’s replacement.

In a video announcing his recent fundraiser, Hotze called the mistakes made in Harris County during the primary “a prelude to what they will do to us in the general election if we don’t organize.” Hotze also referenced Lopez’s lawsuit. “I’ve already been sued over this whole issue of trying to stop and expose voter fraud by the Democrats,” he said. “I am going to stand, nobody’s going to back me down, I’m going to be the tip of the spear here in Harris County.”

The post Texas Conservatives Want Private Cops to Police Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Jim Crow-era election laws are getting a facelift in Florida. 

Senate Bill 524, which Republican lawmakers passed last week, would establish Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security, a new state office staffed with law enforcement meant to investigate election crimes. The bill would also give Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign the legislation, unprecedented authority to initiate criminal investigations of election-related matters. 

At the same time, SB 524 would make it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison for volunteers to drop off more than two people’s ballots, and dramatically ratchet up penalties for grassroots organizations and other get-out-the-vote groups who make mistakes on forms for voter registration and mail ballot applications, raising the fine from $1,000 to $50,000. 

While Florida’s bill mirrors a wave of similar legislation in GOP-controlled states that restrict and complicate voting processes, it goes the furthest in establishing a state agency dedicated to policing the vote. DeSantis initially called for $5.7 million to fund an office employing a staff of 52, though by the time it landed on DeSantis’s desk the budget shrunk to an estimated $3.7 million.

DeSantis pushed for the new law despite saying the state’s voting systems are secure and passed the test of the 2020 presidential election with “flying colors.” But DeSantis, alongside other Florida Republicans, has also invoked vague claims of widespread voter fraud to justify new restrictions on voting. 

Advocates for voting rights worry that an election police force will now crack down on voters in the name of investigating baseless claims. They say policing the elections process more heavily will further alienate Black and Latinx voters, who already face disproportionately high barriers to the ballot box because of previous voting restrictions passed by Florida Republicans. 

“It makes voting sound like something criminal,” Steven Lance, policy counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), told Bolts. “If you were looking for messaging to intimidate Black and brown voters without accountability, this is the kind of thing you’d want to use.”

Jonathan Alingu, co-director of the labor rights group Central Florida Jobs with Justice, said the law dovetails with “a national campaign, particularly by conservative-leaning politicians, to further disenfranchise Black and brown voters and scare them from the polls.” Alingu, who is Black, called Florida “just another testing ground.”

Many Republican-run states have added criminal statutes to the voting process in recent years, threatening to chill turnout and civic engagement. Last year, civil rights groups already sued Florida for likely criminalizing volunteers who give free food, water, or other relief to voters waiting in long lines; Georgia Republicans passed a similar measure over the same period. Local officials who promote mail voting in Texas may now face criminal charges as well due to a 2021 law that added many provisions to criminal statutes. In addition, high-profile prosecutions of Black voters who commit voting errors have been decried as an effort to scare voters from the polls. 

Florida’s new law adds to this recent wave, but it is also the latest chapter in a long history of voter suppression in the state. Like in much of the country, white violence terrorized Black people who tried to vote in the decades following Reconstruction. On November 2, 1920, white mobs near Orlando lynched July Perry, a leader in the local Black community, for helping others who attempted to vote, part of a spasm of election-day violence that is now remembered as the Ocoee Massacre. In addition to constant harassment and intimidation, officials also used poll taxes, literacy tests and all-white primaries to suppress Black voters. 

Despite the civil rights and voting rights acts of the 1960s, barriers to voting that disproportionately target Florida’s Black voters through law enforcement stretch into the present day. The state had permanently banned more than one in five Black adults from voting due to felony convictions as of 2018, when voters loosened the rules, and the state even wrongly purged voters who were not convicted. State Republicans adopted a law in 2019 that required people to pay off their court debt before they could get their rights restored.

Many Black Floridians were turned away from the polls during the tight 2000 presidential election and intimidated by police presence near several polling locations.

Police presence also served as an intimidation tactic during the 2020 elections. A 2020 LDF   report listed volunteer recollections of armed officers lingering around poll stations in Miami and Washington County. Voters also submitted evidence of threatening text and email messages from Trump supporters.

Florida Republicans have pushed through a plethora of other changes. In 2011, legislation signed by former Governor Rick Scott added barriers to registering voters and slashed early voting days. The same 2021 bill that threatened people with criminal charges also introduced stricter rules for voting by mail and eliminated accessible locations.

In response to the new law proposed this year, Democratic lawmakers in Florida have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate efforts to restrict voting access in the state. 

“Harmful proposals to create new partisan bodies to oversee our voting process are exactly the kind of action that demand oversight as we work to ensure that our voting process is unquestionably trustworthy,” Democratic lawmakers wrote in a January letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland about SB 524.

During a recent state Senate hearing, Florida lawmakers confirmed that the new agency would receive and investigate anonymous tips, which voting rights advocates fear could be weaponized. “Someone could leave an anonymous denunciation of a voter or group they don’t see as legitimate and that can lead to investigations and voter intimidation,” Lance told Bolts. “It could potentially have the result of deterring organizations from engaging in important work because they’d be afraid of crushing financial penalties if they made a mistake.” 

Brad Ashwell, the Florida state director at All Voting Is Local, said voting rights advocates will keep pushing for ways to expand ballot access and reduce voter confusion in the face of increased efforts to police the vote. “They could be making sure we have more early voting sites, its supervisors of elections have more current voting technology or different services that would make it easier for voters to track their ballots,” Ashwell said. “They could do things to extend the deadline to cure a vote by mail ballot, which would mean less ballots getting rejected.” 

Ashwell is particularly concerned about whether small voter outreach groups that organize in communities that are less likely to vote will be able to continue operating. “They’re really focused on communities that are hard to reach and usually those are the voters we need most to get out to the polls,” Ashwell said. “This is going to hurt everybody from churches to Girl Scouts.” 

The post Florida Creates a New Police Force to Investigate Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Paxton, who achieved hero status among conservatives for aiding in the legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race, has long fixated on baseless accusations of widespread fraud. He beefed up the voter fraud unit of the attorney general’s office to hunt for election-related crimes that GOP lawmakers can then cite when passing new voting restrictions. The court’s 8-1 ruling complicates that effort, keeping the power to prosecute in the hands of local district attorneys, and it prompted howls from all corners of the Texas GOP. Governor Greg Abbott urged the court to reconsider while Paxton fanned the controversy with help from Big Lie evangelists like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump loyalist Mike Lindell. During an appearance on LindellTV, Paxton solicited help pressuring the judges to reverse their ruling, asking viewers to “call them out by name.” 

The barrage that followed ranged from angry to outright threatening, according to emails sent to the court that were obtained by the Austin American-Statesman. “Your court now is on my list to go after in The Patriot hunt for Communists,” said one message. “We are armed at all times so do not cross the line.”

Anger against the all-Republican court is now spilling into the GOP’s March 1 primary. Conservative activists have rallied against Scott Walker, one of the CCA judges who signed the opinion limiting Paxton’s power and the only member of the court who faces a primary challenger. Clint Morgan, a Houston-area prosecutor running to unseat Walker, has racked up support from conservative groups across the state, including some of the state’s most rabid purveyors of the Big Lie. 

A down-ballot reckoning in Paxton’s name fueled by “Stop the Steal” conspiracies might signal just how deep their influence runs. 

During his campaign, Morgan has touted endorsements from right-wing activists who have made it clear that voting issues are why they care about ousting the incumbent judge. He has not publicly shared his views on the 2020 presidential race, and he did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Bolts. But last month, he cheered a slate of endorsements that included Conservative Republicans of Texas, a group led by Houston doctor and hard-right activist Steve Hotze. 

Hotze has been fueling the anger against the CCA judges over their decision limiting Paxton’s power. According to the Houston Chronicle, his group placed a robocall last month to tens of thousands of conservatives across the state asking them to contact the court, with a pre-recorded message of Hotze warning, “If this decision isn’t reversed, then the Democrats will steal the elections in November and turn Texas blue.” 

Hotze has been a central player in Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in Texas far before the December ruling. Largely known for stirring up hatred against LGBTQ people, Hotze has in recent years focused on groundless fears of widespread fraud. He helped lead the Texas GOP’s fight to limit safe voting options during the pandemic and filed lawsuits attempting to invalidate more than 100,000 votes cast at drive-thru polling sites in Houston during the 2020 election. He also hired a team of investigators, purportedly to root out fraud in the state—including a former Houston police captain who was later criminally charged with detaining an air conditioning repairman at gunpoint in October 2020 and accusing him of “using Hispanic children” to steal the election from Trump.

Morgan also features on his website the support of the True Texas Project, an influential group in North Texas Republican circles that has helped fuel conservative infighting in the state in recent years. The group pushed for a state audit of election results despite assurances from the Republican-appointed secretary of state that voting in the state was “smooth and secure” (that official was later replaced by a former Trump lawyer who had challenged the 2020 results). The True Texas Project now recommends that voters fire Walker because of his December vote in the court’s election prosecution case. 

“This is Texas’s chance to undo a silly vote for Scott Walker, who only won because he has the same name as someone famous!” the True Texas Project says, a reference to the former Republican governor of Wisconsin. 

But Walker is himself not willing to shut the door on Trump’s false claims. Reached over the phone, he wouldn’t say whether he thought Trump lost in 2020. “I’m not qualified to say to what extent voter fraud has played in any particular election,” he said. 

Walker also would not talk about the recent ruling impacting Paxton’s authority to prosecute elections crimes, saying state rules governing conduct for judges bar him from discussing it. “I think it would be best for me to stay away from that completely,” he told Bolts. 

That has not stopped the campaign against Walker, which dovetails with a larger backlash by GOP officials against judges who issue rulings they disagree with in election-related cases. 

While baseless conspiracies about voter fraud have long animated the Texas GOP, they now drive right-wing politics in the state. Paxton, whose office has been the tip of the spear in these efforts, faces indictments and investigations over criminal and ethical lapses, and he faces several seemingly formidable challengers in the March 1 primary, including a scion of the Bush dynasty. But he has channeled his fixation on voter fraud, and his accusations that Democratic prosecutors in the state are closing their eyes to election-related crimes, into conservative support. He landed Trump’s endorsement last year. 

The issue is now casting unusual attention on CCA judges whose elections rarely take center-stage in the state’s politics. “There’s no money, nobody fundraises, they’re just backwater races,” said Scott Henson, a longtime advocate for criminal justice reform in the state. He says voters may not even know the state has two different high courts, since civil appeals land at the Texas Supreme Court. (Oklahoma is the only other state with separate high courts). 

“Voters not only don’t know who the candidates are, they for the most part don’t even know that the court exists,” Henson told Bolts. “Those endorsements can matter a lot.” 

The winner of the Republican primary between Morgan and Walker will face a general election against Dana Huffman, who is the only candidate running in the Democratic primary for this seat. Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas in decades, though they came closer than usual in 2018.

Two other CCA judges are also running for re-election right now, but neither faces an opponent in the Republican primary. The filing deadline passed days before they issued their ruling against Paxton, and conservatives lamented the missed opportunity to recruit more challengers against them.

Morgan was already running against Walker at the time of the decision, espousing rhetoric traditionally associated with elected positions inside the criminal justice system. He currently works as a staff prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, and he is largely running on a tough-on-crime platform, with endorsements from state and local police unions. 

Walker has not stood out during his time on the court as especially sympathetic to defendants’ rights, though he is a former defense lawyer. But Morgan was still a blast from the past during a candidate forum last month. “I believe we have a crisis of crime in our state, and I believe that we need to confront it the way that Republicans confronted the last wave of crime in the 1990s—with law and order,” Morgan told the crowd.

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