Every night one of his neighbors was scheduled to be executed by the state of North Carolina, Glen Edward “Ed” Chapman would look up at the window slit in his cell and say to the black sky, “I’ll see you again.”

Saying goodbye was hard. Chapman and his peers who were also condemned to die formed a small community within the prison system. And whenever the state executed someone, that community would shrink by one member.

“I was close to those guys on death row,” Chapman said. “They were like family.”

One of the people killed while Chapman was on death row was Ernest Basden, sentenced to death in 1993 in a murder-for-hire scheme. After he got to prison, Basden stopped using alcohol and drugs and found God. His family had traveled around the state to build public pressure to convince then-Governor Mike Easley to grant Basden clemency and spare his life.

They failed. One cold winter evening, Basden’s family huddled in the mailroom of Central Prison in Raleigh to say goodbye, able to freely talk with and touch him in the last hours of his life.

“My mom had not hugged him in 10 years,” said Kristin Stapleford, Basden’s niece.

Basden was executed in the early morning of Dec. 6, 2002.

More than 20 years later, Chapman is on the other side of the bars, having been exonerated and released from prison, and is now joining Basden’s family in again urging a North Carolina governor to spare the lives of the men and women sentenced to death.

“We promised him that we would not give up the fight, that we would fight to see the death penalty abolished in North Carolina,” Stapleford said.

Stapleford and Chapman are members of a coalition of more than 20 social and criminal justice organizations and religious leaders calling on Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to commute the sentences of the people on North Carolina’s death row to prison terms before he leaves office at the end of 2024. A Bolts and NC Newsline analysis shows there are currently 136 people on this death row—the fifth-largest number in the U.S.—whose lives would be spared if Cooper were to act. 

Commutation is one form of clemency, a broad power most U.S. governors have to change a person’s criminal conviction or prison sentence, most often due to individual circumstances of a person’s incarceration; whether they were convicted as a youth, for example. Former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford, who held the office from 1961 to 1965, saw his clemency power as a form of grace.

“It falls to the governor to blend mercy with justice, as best he can, involving human as well as legal considerations, in the light of all circumstances after the passage of time, but before justice is allowed to overrun mercy in the name of the power of the state,” Sanford wrote in 1961, after shortening the sentences of 29 prisoners through executive clemency.

But what Cooper is being asked to do now is much broader.

This coalition of activists is calling on him to commute death sentences as an act of racial justice. In North Carolina—a state where people were legally enslaved for more than 100 years—just over 22 percent of residents are Black, but over half of those on death row are Black or African American, according to figures provided to Bolts and NC Newsline through a public records request. Of the dozen people who have been sentenced to death in North Carolina and later found innocent, 11 are people of color.

Advocates are now hoping Cooper will offer clemency for the 136 people on death row en masse, regardless of the circumstances of the crimes of which they are convicted, because of the injustices of the death penalty and North Carolina’s criminal legal system at large.

Granting clemency would not mean that the people on death row would be released from prison, nor would it mean the abolition of the death penalty going forward. The state constitution only grants the governor discretion to shorten a sentence as he sees fit. Cooper could, for instance, commute the sentences to life without the possibility of parole. Or, he could sentence them to life and leave the possibility of parole open. 

It’s similar to a petition made by advocates in Louisiana, who earlier this year asked Governor John Bel Edwards to commute the sentences of more than 50 people on that state’s death row. So far this mass request has been blocked by the Louisiana Board of Pardons. 

While North Carolina governors frequently granted clemency in the late 1970s until 2000, commutations became rare starting in 2001.

Executions have slowed as well—North Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, and North Carolina’s district attorneys pursue the death penalty at a much lower rate than in years past. But with Republicans controlling the state supreme court and holding supermajorities in the House and Senate, many anti-death penalty advocates are concerned that they could restart, especially if a Republican moves into the executive mansion.

The death penalty has been raised as a talking point in early debates among Republican gubernatorial candidates and has been an issue in previous elections as well. In 2017, top Republican legislators demanded Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat now running for governor, resume executions after four prisoners at Pasquotank Correctional Institution were charged with killing four employees in a failed escape attempt. 

Two of those four men have since been sentenced to death.

A new governor couldn’t simply sign a slip of paper and reopen the execution chamber since the courts are the reason for the pause in executions. There are ongoing legal battles over the application of the Racial Justice Act, landmark legislation that gave people an opportunity to get off death row if they could prove racial discrimination had played a role in their death sentence. Democrats passed that bill in 2009, Republicans repealed it in 2013. Then, when Democrats controlled the state supreme court in 2020, it struck down the retroactive repeal of the law, allowing the claims that had already been filed to continue to play out through the present day. 

But conservatives now control the state supreme court, and advocates worry they could revisit that ruling, clearing a path to resume executions. There are also still legal questions about North Carolina’s protocols for using lethal injection drugs to carry out executions, though advocates worry North Carolina Republicans could find a way around that, as they have tried to in South Carolina and Alabama. 

Republican control of the other branches of state government has given those opposed to the death penalty a sense of urgency. At a recent rally, Kristie Puckett, the senior project manager of Forward Justice, told a crowd of around 200 supporters that Cooper was their last hope because of North Carolina’s current political climate.

“We can’t trust our legislature. We can’t trust the courts,” she said. “And so we are forced to rely on Governor Cooper.”

The coalition has staged marches, written letters and met with the governor’s staff. They’ve held film screenings on the “Racist Roots” of North Carolina’s death penalty and handed out postcards so residents can write Cooper directly. Soon, they’ll post billboards and travel to communities across the state to build support for the campaign as it enters its final year before Cooper leaves office.

“Our commutations campaign is very focused on 2024 because we have a sense of urgency that executions could resume, as they did in the federal system,” said Noel Nickle, executive director of the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “I am concerned that the political climate of our state has become more entrenched in policies and practices that would lead to executions resuming.”

Cooper, who has had a mixed record on commutations, has been pressured for years by criminal justice reformers, many of whom have gathered outside the governor’s mansion annually calling on him to use his clemency powers. Cooper didn’t grant any commutation until March 2022—two years into his second term—shortening the prison terms of three people who committed crimes when they were children. In December 2022, after three weeks of protests outside his home, Cooper commuted the sentences of six more people.

So far, Cooper has made no public comment on the 136 currently on death row. In 2017, after the murders at the prison in Pasquotank, a spokesperson for the governor said Cooper supported the death penalty and had a “long history of upholding it” during his 16 years as attorney general. The governor’s spokesperson did not answer recent questions from Bolts and NC Newsline on whether he still supports the death penalty or if he was considering commuting North Carolina’s death sentences.

Puckett credited the annual campaign for getting Cooper to issue commutations last year. She doesn’t think he would have exercised clemency otherwise.

“That’s the only reason he’s doing something: because he’s forced to do something,” she said.

A lasting legacy

The North Carolina governor’s office is weak by design but clemency is one area where the executive branch has broad authority to commute prison sentences without approval from a parole board.

“This is a rare policy area where the governor has power, can exercise it, and doesn’t need to ask anyone else for permission,” said Christopher Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University (who has no relation to the governor).

Even so, it would be novel for a Democratic governor—especially in the South—to use their power to unilaterally empty their state’s death row. Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards, tried to grant the mass clemency request he received before he left office, but he was ultimately thwarted by the state board of pardons.

Cooper has already laid the groundwork for clemency on a systemic level. In June 2020, just after a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, the governor established a Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice that he asked to make recommendations for ending racial disparities in the criminal justice system. One of the subjects they tackled was the death penalty.

Ken Rose, who was a senior attorney at the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation for 35 years before retiring in 2017, gave a presentation to members of the task force in November 2020 showing two strikingly similar maps of the United States: One showing where Black people were lynched across the nation between 1883 and 1940, an another marking the execution of Black defendants between 1972 and 2020. 

Later that year, the task force published a report noting the death penalty has a “relationship with white supremacy.” They did not recommend abolishing capital punishment, but they did propose ways to narrow its use. 

The task force also identified commutation as a remedy to address injustice, suggesting officials examine commuting sentences of people sentenced to death before July 2001, when North Carolina had a “quasi-mandatory” death penalty law that forced prosecutors to seek a death sentence in capital cases. More than two thirds of the people on the state’s death row are there because of that law, according to Rose.

“You have a lot of people on death row, still on death row, who wouldn’t be there if DAs had a choice for pleading cases to life,” he said.

Following another recommendation of the task force, Cooper created the Juvenile Sentence Review Board in 2021, which reviewed the sentences of people who committed crimes as children and recommended suitable applicants for clemency. Of the nine commutations Cooper granted in 2022, five were based on recommendations from that board. In a press release, his office acknowledged science showing children’s brains are different than adults’, and that state and federal laws treat minors differently in sentencing in criminal cases.

“As people become adults, they can change, turn their lives around, and engage as productive members of society,” Cooper said in a press release.

Kerwin Pittman, one of the members of the task force, thinks Cooper’s own political ambitions could make him reticent to use clemency more broadly. At 66 years old, he is a relatively young politician and could have decades left in public office.

“To just issue a blanket clemency to everybody, or commute everybody, he may not feel that is in his best interest,” Pittman said. “I’m sure he doesn’t want to make a misstep that’s going to come back and bite him.”

But this reluctance is frustrating to advocates who see Cooper as wasting his authority to commute sentences as he sees fit. 

“Why do you work so hard and be so shrewd to get to the top just to piss the power away?” Puckett asked. 

The exonerees

More than 20 organizations from across the state and country are working with the North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to persuade Cooper to use his clemency powers. Members of the European Union also came to Raleigh in November to meet with Cooper and Attorney General Stein to talk about the death penalty.

But it is exonerees like Alfred Rivera and Ed Chapman who are leading the charge—men who intimately know the hopelessness of death row but escaped it once they proved they should have never been convicted. 

Rivera is both a victim of violence and wrongful incarceration. After his father was killed in a robbery when Rivera was a toddler, his mother, left alone with five children to care for, started drinking. She died from cirrhosis of the liver seven years after her husband passed away. 

“This is the toll that it took on her,” Rivera said.

Two decades later, a jury sent Rivera to death row, convicting him for murder. But he was exonerated in two years, after the state supreme court ruled he should get a new trial because jurors hadn’t heard evidence suggesting he’d been framed. 

Chapman, meanwhile, spent 14 years on North Carolina’s death row before being exonerated in 2008 after a judge ordered a new trial and a district attorney dropped the charges. He had been sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit. There were serious issues with the investigation; police had withheld evidence, and a detective later faced perjury charges for lying on the stand.

Chapman struggled after he came home. He lost a job, isolated himself and used drugs and alcohol to cope. He moved to Florida, staying in a spate of recovery houses before sleeping on the streets for about a year. 

He felt guilty about how he was living, like he was wasting the second chance he’d been given. “I let those people down that fought for me,” he said.

The guilt, shame and remorse compelled Chapman to join the commutation campaign after he moved to Durham in 2022. Now he is fighting for a cause bigger than himself.

“I’m trying to be better than I was before,” he said.

On Aug. 19, 2023, almost 17 years to the day since North Carolina’s last execution, Chapman and the coalition met at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church and marched more than a mile to Central Prison to honor those executed there.

The crowd of roughly 200 held a vigil to remember the 43 people executed by the state since 1984. Dozens of people held signs with the names of those who were killed in the execution chamber within the prison behind them. They also called for an end to death row, chanting at cars driving past them on Western Boulevard.

It was the first time Chapman had been back at the prison since getting off death row. He got chills standing outside, knowing what it was like to live on the other side of the metal doors, behind the barbed wire. But he found strength standing beside death penalty abolition advocates and people like Rivera, those sentenced to death for something they didn’t do.

“I felt that the cause for me being there outweighed my anxiety,” Chapman said.

Innocent people like Chapman and Rivera are easy cases to make to the public. It is harder—and potentially poses a greater political risk—to show grace to those who did their crimes.

Rose has represented many people on death row. He’s found that those individuals can be caring and selfless, thoughtful and resilient. They can also struggle under the weight of the mental illness and the trauma they’ve endured. 

“I look at them differently because I’ve gotten to know them,” Rose said. “I think people can do really terrible things. I think people can do monstrous things. But I do not think that that makes them a monster.”

That is a sentiment shared by Lynda Simmons, another member of the commutations coalition. Simmons’ son Brian was murdered by a teenager named James Moore, in 2004. Simmons struggled for years with relentless waves of grief over Brian’s death. But in time, trying to make sense of a senseless act, she connected with Moore, who wound up serving 15 years for second-degree murder. The two traded letters, helping one another process the trauma and grief they’d both endured. 

As they were communicating through the mail, Simmons was also doing restorative justice work with people on death row. She’d share her story with the men at Central Prison, helping those sentenced to death connect with someone who had lost a loved one to an act of violence. There, working with men like Moore who had gone to prison when they were teenagers, she could see that Moore had done something terrible, but that action didn’t define his entire humanity. 

“Listening to them, I knew that when James murdered my son, that’s what he did,” Simmons said. “I believe with everything in me, that’s not who he was.”

Simmons has always been against the death penalty, but that belief was crystallized when she went to Moore’s sentencing hearing in 2005. When she walked into the courtroom and saw Brian and Moore’s friends and family on opposite sides, she saw the impact of the shooting echoing across generations and familial lines, lives irrevocably changed by a single violent act.

“I knew that they were victims, too,” Simmons said. “They didn’t shoot my son. And I don’t believe that they raised James to shoot my son.”

“I do believe that human beings are able to change,” she continued. “And when we execute people, we rob them of the chance to change.”

Politics vs. reality

Members of the North Carolina Republican Party have long campaigned on their support of the death penalty.

In 2010, the State Republican Party sent out a mailer slamming Majority Leader Hugh Holliman, a Democrat whose teenage daughter was raped and murdered, as a “Criminal Coddler” for helping pass the Racial Justice Act, legislation that offered people a chance to get off death row—but not, as the flier erroneously claimed, out of prison—if they could prove racial discrimination had affected their charging or sentencing. 

The front of the flier read: “Meet your new neighbors. You’re not going to like them very much.”

On the back were mugshots of two men sentenced to death: Wayne Laws and Henry McCollum. 

McCollum did eventually get out of prison, not because of the Racial Justice Act but because he was innocent, like Chapman and Rivera. 

Public support for the death penalty has declined since its peak in 1994, when 80 percent of Americans said they were in favor of capital punishment, and has been on the decline ever since. Now, just over half of Americans support the death penalty.

But in 2010, North Carolina’s politicking over capital punishment worked: Holliman lost the election, as did other Democrats targeted for their support of the Racial Justice Act. Rose said it was impossible to determine whether the misleading flier swung the elections, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a politically salient issue at the time.

“There was a lot of political use of the death penalty for a long, long time, in a way that arguably shaped elections,” said Rose.

Today, the exonerations of people like Rivera, Chapman and McCollum are eroding public support for the death penalty further, said Rose. But that doesn’t mean Republican politicians won’t bring it up when it is to their political benefit. It resurfaced in 2017 because of the prison escapes, and has been mentioned this election cycle. 

During the first Republican gubernatorial debate, one candidate called for resuming executions under the death penalty. Lawyer and businessman Bill Graham polled second in the governor’s race a few weeks after releasing an ad advocating for the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers. (He still trailed the Republican frontrunner, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, and 42 percent of respondents were undecided, but the director of the Meredith Poll told WRAL the ads seemed to be helping Graham.)

“As a prosecutor, I went after violent criminals,” Graham said in the ad. “As governor, I’ll put ‘em in jail or in the ground.”

The Republican-controlled state supreme court has also shown a willingness to overturn precedents set by previous Democratic majorities. Earlier this year they issued new rulings on partisan gerrymandering and the state’s voter ID law, reversing Supreme Court opinions written in 2022, when Democrats were in control.

“If you were an ordinary court and you were honoring precedent and you were trying to build on that precedent and navigate that precedent, then they have a long, long way to go before they restart executions,” Rose said. “But if what you wanted to do is resume executions and kill the people that are currently on death row, you could do that, but you’d have to ignore the precedent.”

But the politics of the death penalty are often divorced from reality. The most common outcome of a death sentence in North Carolina isn’t an execution, but a long process of appeals that leads to a reversal of a sentence, said Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a national expert on the death penalty.

“These things are reversed not because somebody put a paperclip on the wrong side of the paper,” Baumgartner said. “They’re reversed because evidence was withheld or because improper instructions were given to the jury, or, you know, something serious.”

Baumgartner maintains an internal database on capital punishment in North Carolina. According to his figures, 411 people have received death sentences since 1976; 190 of them, or 46 percent have been overturned.

Nationally, more than 8,500 people have been sentenced to death since 1972, Baumgartner said, wondering, “What are the odds that every one of them is guilty as charged?”

On death row, community

To live on North Carolina’s death row is to be constantly reminded of one’s mortality. The men housed on death row in Central Prison in Raleigh, can spend years, decades, entire generations together in their communal pod. Most of the people on death row have been there for 20 or 30 years. They grow old together; sometimes they die of natural causes. (There are two women on death row, incarcerated at a different prison.)

“Our memories of the dead become death row lore, significant to us, living on in our hearts and minds and dreams. We live together, die together, mourn together, and remember,” said Lyle May, who has been on death row since 1999.

That quote is included in “Bone Orchard: Reflections on Life Under Sentence of Death,” a book written by one of May’s peers, George Wilkerson, who was sentenced to death in 2006. The book, co-written with Robert Johnson, a professor of justice, law and criminology at American University, is a firsthand account of life on North Carolina’s death row. 

Most states keep those on death row in segregation, meaning the incarcerated are locked in their cells most of their days, for decades, until they win their appeals, die or are executed. But North Carolina’s death row is unusual in that it houses condemned people together. The consistent group setting makes people with death sentences in the state particularly suitable for commutation, Johnson argued, saying they have had time to develop social and emotional skills since they spend so much time out of their cells.

“You don’t get the feeling of a pressure cooker on North Carolina’s death row,” Johnson told Bolts and Newsline. “There’s the overshadowing threat of death, but there’s a lot of community.”

There are risks to the incarcerated if their death sentences are commuted. Breaking up the community established on death row, for one. There are also implications for their appeals. People on death row in North Carolina are entitled to attorneys in appellate proceedings. Plus, Johnson said he thinks people facing death sentences typically get more attention on their cases from criminal justice reformers and the media, compared to people serving life. 

“That is definitely a valid concern, them losing legal remedies if granted a commutation,” said Pittman, a member of the racial equity task force. “They could lose access to having automatic counsel in the appellate courts, as well as if somebody is on the row and somebody is innocent, they could lose access to their freedom through the court system.” 

Even still, Johnson said those on death row stand to gain much from clemency. They could have better access to rehabilitative programming.“We’d been told many times point-blank, ‘You are not here to be rehabilitated,’” Wilkerson writes in “Bone Orchard.”

Receiving clemency would also allow more opportunities for them to see their loved ones because of a less restrictive visitation policy, Johnson added.

And obviously, they won’t have a death sentence hanging over their heads. Only about 20 people have been added to death row since the last execution in the summer of 2006, according to the state’s roster. One of those is Wilkerson, who has been a part of the community since Dec. 20, 2006.

“We live shoulder-to-shoulder for ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years,” he wrote in the book, “and gradually this me versus them mentality I’d walked in with, melted away, leaving only us.”

Two miles from Wilkerson’s cell, on a warm, wet December afternoon, members of the clemency campaign met in a parking lot across the street from the governor’s mansion. They sang, chanted and chatted about their support for emptying death row. Nickle said the theme of the day was “community, compassion and commutation.” 

Cooper has yet to say publicly whether he will commute the death sentences, or if he is even considering such a broad use of his clemency powers. He will leave office at the end of 2024, giving advocates about a year to build support for emptying North Carolina’s death row.

Chapman and Rivera stood in a corner laughing amongst themselves as two people sang “We Shall Overcome” to the crowd. After a few minutes, the exonerees went separate ways. Rivera stepped onto the sidewalk, glancing at the signs that listed the birth date and day of execution of 43 people killed by the State of North Carolina. 

The rallies are a surreal experience for Rivera. The names on the signs aren’t just words to him. When he sees or hears the names of people still facing a death sentence, those who haven’t yet been executed, he can still see their faces, and he wonders how they’ve changed in the 24 years he has been free.

“I knew these guys personally,” Rivera said. 

He feels a sense of survivor’s guilt for having gotten off death row. He still thinks about what it was like living there, “the horrible conditions,” having to reckon with “how I went from that to this,” as he gestures at the wide open parking lot, the community of supporters. 

“Is it fair that people are still suffering under those conditions?” he asked. “I think about that, me being free and at these events.”

The post Inside the Urgent Campaign to Commute North Carolina’s Entire Death Row appeared first on Bolts.

Some ties are merely anticlimactic: Think a 0-0 soccer match or a chess stalemate. The ties that would become possible under new legislation pushed forward by Republican leaders in North Carolina’s General Assembly could prove much more consequential.

For over 120 years, the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) has consisted of five members, all appointed by the governor, with no more than three from a given political party. County elections boards have the same partisan composition. Those bodies oversee just about every step of the democratic process, and their odd-numbered makeup means they must reach a decision in any vote they take.

State Republicans are close to upending that longstanding system. Senate Bill 749, which is nearing its final vote in the legislature, would instead give all of those boards an even number of members, expanding the state board to eight members while shrinking county boards to four. 

Because Democrats currently control the governor’s mansion, they also hold a majority on these election boards heading into the 2024 elections. This bill would deprive them of that edge; instead, all boards would be equally split between Republicans and Democrats. 

The bill would also shift power to appoint members of the state elections board from the governor to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate. The changes could lead to tie votes along party lines on both local and state election boards, and the bill is largely silent about how such deadlocks would be resolved.

With North Carolina again poised to be an important swing state in next year’s presidential race, the bill could complicate local election boards that oversee a wide swath of administrative decisions. 

From the appointment of precinct judges to the final certification of election results, there is no clear mechanism for what would happen after tie votes, which could in turn delay electoral processes, compromise ballot access for early voting, and potentially move decisions to the courts. SB 749 does say that, if an evenly divided state board cannot decide on an executive director, or if a county board cannot choose its chair, the General Assembly, currently in Republican hands, would step in. 

Republican lawmakers have criticized current NCSBE executive director Karen Brinson Bell for changes she approved to voting rules during the 2020 election. The new rules under SB 749 would allow them to seek her ouster if the state board deadlocks over her reappointment in 2025.

The bill passed the Republican-controlled Senate along party lines in June, and passed in a slightly modified form along party lines in the House on Sept. 19. It now awaits a final Senate vote.

Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has promised to veto the bill if it comes to his desk. In an Aug. 24 press release, he wrote, “The bill would change the structure of the state and county Boards of Elections in a backdoor maneuver to limit early voting and satisfy the Republican legislature’s quest for more power to decide contested elections.”

But Republicans hold a supermajority in both the House and Senate, meaning they have the votes to override Cooper’s veto. Both chambers adopted the bill by margins that fell short of a supermajority because many GOP lawmakers were absent the days of the vote. But not a single Republican crossed-over to oppose the bill, so the party remains on track to overturn a governor’s veto if and when the bill returns to the legislature.

None of SB 749’s three Republican primary co-sponsors in the state Senate—Deputy President Pro Tempore Ralph Hise, Majority Leader Paul Newton, and Sen. Warren Daniel—responded to multiple requests for comment on the bill.

During a Sept. 12 committee hearing on the bill in the House, Republican Representative Destin Hall argued that requiring bipartisan decisions from election boards would make North Carolina voters more confident that their state’s elections were being administered fairly. His Democratic colleagues, noting how the Republican-dominated legislature has often ignored minority input, were skeptical. 

“This is encouraging government not to work,” said House Democratic Leader Robert Reives.

Hall also said the possibility of intractable ties was a feature of the bill, not a bug.

“There’d be a stalemate, and by many ways, that’s by design,” Hall said of split election board votes. “No action would occur.”

North Carolina Republicans aren’t the only ones seeking to remake their state’s election administration bodies in a way that introduces the possibility of partisan gridlock. In 2016, Republicans in Wisconsin changed the state’s election governance from an odd-numbered nonpartisan board to an even-numbered board split between Democrats and Republicans. 

In the years since, the board has deadlocked on a number of issues, including most recently the reappointment of Megan Wolfe, a nonpartisan elections administrator who became a target for false conspiracies in the wake of the 2020 election. (The situation is now headed to the courts for resolution.)

But there’s no historical precedent for split decision-making boards in North Carolina, notes Chris Cooper, a professor of political science at Western Carolina University. From the state supreme court to county commissions, he points out, the state’s institutions are set up with odd numbers of members to avoid ties.

“There’s a reason we do this by design every time. I really can’t think of any example where there’s been a true deadlock in this way,” Cooper says. 

If Republicans and Democrats on election boards refuse to compromise, it could theoretically impact decisions on everything from disputes over voter eligibility to the certification of election results. Patrick Ganon, a spokesperson for the state elections board, declined to comment on the pending legislation. But many of North Carolina’s voting rights groups have drawn attention to early voting as a part of the electoral process that could immediately suffer from indecision.

Early voting is North Carolina’s most popular method of casting a ballot, employed by over 53 percent of voters in the 2022 general election. Those voters tend to lean Democratic: In the state’s 2022 Senate race, in-person early voters favored Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley by five percentage points, even as she lost the election overall by more than three percentage points to Republican Ted Budd. 

Under current state law, each county’s board of elections must unanimously approve a plan for the number and location of early voting sites. It’s not unusual for all members not to agree, and in those cases, the contested plan goes to the NCSBE for consideration. In 2022, the state board approved 14 of these non-unanimous plans.

If the state board were restructured according to SB 749, however, one party’s members could unilaterally refuse to adopt a county’s contested early voting plan. State law then mandates that the county would only have one early voting site, located at its board of elections office.

A single early voting site might work in some of North Carolina’s smaller counties. Tyrrell County in the state’s northeast, for example, had a population of just 3,245 as of the 2020 census.

But in larger areas, “such an outcome would be catastrophic,” says Bryan Warner, spokesperson for the nonpartisan democracy watchdog Common Cause NC. “It would gut early voting, overwhelm election administrators, and could require county residents to travel long distances and stand in long lines to cast their ballot early.”  

Wake County, home to the capital of Raleigh, had well over 1.1 million residents in 2020, and it established 20 early voting sites for that year’s election. “In a major urban area, [having just one early voting site] would be an important issue,” says Gerry Cohen, a Democrat who serves on the Wake County Board of Elections and is former special counsel to the General Assembly.

A recent study in the Election Law Journal authored by Chris Cooper, Michael Bitzer of Catawba College, and investigative reporter Tyler Dukes found that changing or eliminating early voting sites reduces voter turnout. The effect was greater for voters of color, who in North Carolina are more likely to be Democrats.

“Particularly in a competitive two-party state like North Carolina that has experienced a number of close elections in recent years, it is not an exaggeration to say that administrative changes to a polling location could impact electoral outcomes,” the study concludes.

The consequences are less clear for deadlock in other parts of the election system. While North Carolina law specifies deadlines for county and state boards to complete tasks like canvassing (confirming preliminary vote totals) and certification, it generally doesn’t outline next steps if those processes are delayed. Neither does SB 749. “It’s the Underpants Gnomes theory of election administration,” Cooper quips, referencing a crew of South Park characters with notoriously incomplete plans.

Voting rights groups’ biggest fear is that a failure by election boards to certify results would allow the General Assembly to intervene. Melissa Price Kromm, director of N.C. Voters for Clean Elections, warned the House on Sept. 12 that gridlock from SB 749 would let the legislature resolve ties, “even deciding the outcome of elections.”

Cohen, the Wake County elections official, believes such worries are overblown. He says state law clearly requires elections boards to certify results if there are no issues of fact. If one party’s members chose not to approve the results, he says, a judge would order them to follow the law under penalty of contempt of court. 

Such an order occurred last year in Arizona after Republican officials refused to certify the midterm elections. And in North Carolina’s Surry County, two GOP members of the county elections board were removed by the NCSBE after voting not to certify a 2022 municipal election.  

But given the current political climate, in which unfounded theories of voter fraud continue to circulate, it’s unclear what some elections board members might claim as issues of fact to justify a certification delay. It’s also unclear what sort of hearing North Carolina’s judges would give those claims. 

The North Carolina state Supreme Court, which came under Republican control last year, has so far been willing to make controversial rulings that favor the GOP. Its members have voted to permit previously illegal partisan gerrymandering, rolled back voting rights for thousands of North Carolinians on probation or parole, and restored a Republican-passed 2018 voter ID law that had been struck down as racially discriminatory.

If passed, SB 749 would take effect in July of 2024, creating new state and county boards in the final months leading up to the presidential election. That would chop a year off the terms of county board members who were sworn in just two months ago, and three years off the terms of the state board members seated in May.

“We have to go through another appointment process again. It’s really disruptive,” says Cohen. “I don’t own my position on the board of elections, but in life, you expect some sort of certainty.”

The post North Carolina May Increase Odds of Gridlock with Even-Numbered Elections Boards appeared first on Bolts.

In 2018, fierce organizing by immigrants’ rights groups led to a sea change in North Carolina: sheriff candidates who promised to stop collaborating with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement won in five of the state’s most populous counties. All were Black Democrats. Soon, the new sheriffs in Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties severed their contracts with ICE, and those in Durham, Forsyth (Winston-Salem) and Buncombe (Asheville) counties announced they would no longer detain immigrants for ICE without a judicial warrant, sparking immediate releases. 

“It was very euphoric,” recalled Stefanía Arteaga, co-executive director of the Carolina Migrant Network, which was closely involved in the organizing efforts. She recalls the relief felt by some of her friends, “not having to be so fearful that a simple traffic stop could lead to a deportation.”

ICE responded with heavy retaliation. It conducted raids across North Carolina, sweeping up over 200 people in just a few days. It was “a time of total panic,” recalls Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of the immigrants’ rights group Siembra NC. 

The agency also built a PR campaign to turn voters against Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden, posting billboards around Charlotte with the mugshots of immigrants who had been released on bond after the sheriff’s department rejected ICE’s requests to keep jailing them. (McFadden secured re-election anyway last year.) And it beefed up its presence elsewhere in the state, recruiting a dozen rural counties into a new form of partnership that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to identify undocumented immigrants and detain them for the agency.

Now ICE is closing in on another long-held goal: a state law that would force sheriffs to do the agency’s bidding anywhere in North Carolina.

Thanks to their new supermajorities, Republicans likely have the votes to push through legislation that would preempt the new sheriffs’ policies. Prior iterations of this bill, which ICE helped craft, were vetoed by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, but the GOP recently gained the ability to override his vetoes and quickly pushed through long-stalled priorities like abortion restrictions. Immigrants rights’ advocates tell Bolts they are bracing for ICE’s bill to be next. 

House Bill 10, titled “Require Sheriffs to Cooperate with ICE,” would force sheriffs to proactively contact ICE to check the status of anyone booked into their jail for a felony or class A1 misdemeanor. 

The bill would also mandate that sheriffs honor so-called immigration detainers—-administrative requests by ICE to keep someone in jail beyond their scheduled release, without a warrant, in order to give federal agents time to pick them up. 

One of its chief sponsors, Republican Representative Destin Hall, says the bill is meant to target “woke sheriffs.” He promised in a video that it would “put a stop” to their “sanctuary” approach. 

Up until now, sheriffs have enjoyed the discretion to disregard detention requests from ICE. After 2018, the newly elected sheriffs said that jailing someone under these circumstances violates their constitutional rights, since detainers are not backed by a judicial warrant. 

“We have a person fax over a document not viewed, not authorized, not verified by a judicial official, a judge, or federal magistrate,” McFadden told Bolts to explain why he stopped honoring detainers.

Elsewhere, some federal courts have ruled that ICE detainers violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable seizures. Colorado, California, and Illinois have outlawed them altogether. Still, McFadden and others may soon face a mandate to jail people based on them.

Passage of HB 10 could significantly alter the landscape of immigration detention in North Carolina given the volume of detainer requests ICE has historically made there. According to an immigration database managed by Syracuse University, the agency sent over 64,000 detainers to North Carolina jails between 2005 and 2021. 

“These detentions have huge negative consequences,” said Marín Baena. “All of a sudden a family is left in crisis. Oftentimes there are kids that get left behind—people are just scrambling to try to figure out how to pay rent for the next few months. It has a huge economic impact and it has a huge psychological impact on the people in our communities.” 

Because of the 2008 federal data-sharing program called “Secure Communities,” which automatically sends fingerprints of anyone booked into a jail through a federal database, ICE maintains a virtual presence in jails across the country regardless of their sheriffs’ approach to  immigration. But when sheriffs actively cooperate with ICE, it can increase the agency’s reach exponentially. 

Sheriffs represent a critical link for ICE because they oversee jails, which gives them a captive population to mine on ICE’s behalf. And zealous local officials like Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, who was the first in the state to sign on to the new partnership with ICE in 2020 and recently launched a statewide campaign for lieutenant governor, have gone out of their way to further fuse civil immigration law and the criminal legal system.

Proponents of HB 10 like Page defend this entanglement with rhetoric that conflates immigration and crime and casts immigration enforcement as a matter of public safety.

“I feel that assisting I.C.E by serving I.C.E federal arrest warrants and subsequently transferring criminal illegal aliens directly into their custody will make our communities safer,” Page said in 2020.  At a recent hearing for HB 10, he testified, “I truly believe the best way to make our communities safer is to remove any criminal elements.” Page has joined forces with other far-right sheriffs crowdfund donations to build a wall alongside the U.S. border and protest President Biden’s immigration policies. These efforts are often affiliated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national organization that is labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center; Page has traveled with FAIR and spoken at their events. 

Page, now the face of support for HB 10 among North Carolina sheriffs, declined an interview request, and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment for this story. 

Immigrants’ rights organizers warn that stepping up local collaboration with ICE will instill fear in North Carolina’s immigrant communities. “I’ve actually had clients who have told me that they didn’t go to the hospital when they had their first child because they were really worried,” said Adriel Orozco, an immigration attorney formerly with the North Carolina Justice Center who’s currently assisting the groups against HB 10.

Immigrants who land in local jails are typically still legally innocent and only held pretrial, often for minor reasons. North Carolina, for instance, does not allow undocumented people to apply for driver’s license, so someone could face a series of cascading ramifications—arrest, warrantless detention, transfer to a detention center in Georgia, since North Carolina has none of its own, and threat of removal—all for the alleged infraction of driving without a license. 

“The way that the bill is written puts anyone that’s charged at risk of being held for ICE,” said Arteaga. That includes not only people accused of serious crimes, whom HB 10’s supporters tend to focus on when discussing the bill, but also those who have been booked on minor infractions —and even people who may have been stopped for pretextual reasons because of the language they speak or the color of their skin.

“Racial profiling is utilized to intentionally place people into removal proceedings—because sometimes law enforcement knows that all it takes is an arrest,” Arteaga said. In Alamance County, for instance, the U.S Department of Justice  found racial profiling so extreme that the federal government stepped in to end a contract the county had with ICE in 2012; sheriff’s deputies, according to a federal civil rights investigation, were between 4 and 10 times more likely to stop Latinx drivers for traffic violations than white drivers. The county entered a new agreement with ICE during the Trump administration.

This year, 11 sheriffs wrote a public letter opposing HB 10 and denouncing immigration detainers, echoing the point that requiring local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE would make communities less safe, not more. “Multiple studies show that mandatory immigration enforcement makes people less likely to trust government authorities without improving public safety,” the group wrote. 

One of the sheriffs who signed the letter, Wake County’s Willie Rowe, is new to the office. He ousted a first-term Democratic incumbent last year in a primary before beating Republican Donnie Harrison, the longtime former sheriff who had forged a close relationship with ICE and whose possible return had alarmed local immigrants’ rights advocates.

McFadden also signed the letter. “Imagine people are being victimized in our city, our community, and [are] afraid to report it to law enforcement with the fear of ICE and deportation,” he told Bolts about his decision to no longer honor detainers. “For me, it was a very easy decision.”

The letter also warns of the “constitutional violations” and “Fourth Amendment concerns” that warrantless detention raises.

The group of 11 sheriffs represents over 40 percent of the state’s population. But the state’s influential sheriff association has not spoken up against HB 10. 

The association opposed an earlier iteration of the legislation in 2019, then switched to supporting it once lawmakers removed a provision allowing civilians to file a civil suit against sheriffs who don’t cooperate with ICE. The association said it had no formal position on the proposal’s 2022 iteration, though its sponsors claimed the association supported it. 

The association, which did not respond to requests for comment, has taken no position this year, and many sheriffs are staying quiet on HB 10.

Ten of the 11 sheriffs who signed the letter against HB 10 are Black, which stems largely from the turnover in the 2018 elections. “I think there’s a serious tension [within] the sheriffs’ association around this perceived loss of power by white sheriffs,” Arteaga says. 

For Felicia Arriaga, a professor at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs and the author of the new book Behind Crimmigration, which chronicles the recent history of local collaboration with ICE in North Carolina, this helps explain why more sheriffs in North Carolina haven’t rallied to the defense of those who are being targeted by ICE.

“If there were white sheriffs who were eager and open about not honoring detainers—because there are a handful of white sheriffs who do not honor detainers, at least in conversation with community members, that’s what they say—I think the conversation would be very different,” she told Bolts. 

McFadden, who is Black, echoes the point. “When the eight African American sheriffs took over the largest counties in North Carolina, it became a threat to the good ol’ boy system,” he told Bolts. 

The governor of North Carolina vetoed the bill’s prior incarnations when they came across his desk in 2019 and 2022, and Republicans lacked the votes to force it through. But the landscape is different this year. The GOP gained seats in both chambers in November, clinching a veto-proof majority in the Senate. They then secured a veto-proof majority in the House this spring thanks to Democrat Tricia Cotham’s defection to the Republican caucus.

HB 10 passed the House in March by a veto-proof majority. Every Republican lawmaker who voted supported it, as did three Democrats: Cotham, Michael Ray, and Cecil Brockman. 

It has since lingered in a Senate committee as Republicans prioritize these other issues and marking up the budget, but advocates tell Bolts they expect it to move forward.

“The votes are not in our favor. At all,” said Arteaga. 

In anticipation of the bill’s passage, the Carolina Migrant Network is switching course to consider litigation against it. The group is also reviving its immigration bond network in order to connect detained immigrants with lawyers and get them released on bond so that people aren’t sent to ICE detention centers out of state. 

They are also searching for ways to reduce arrests so that fewer people are booked in jail in the first place. This would interrupt the jail-to-deportation pipeline at an earlier stage in the process, Arteaga said. That could mean focusing attention away from sheriffs, whose hands would be more tightly bound by HB 10, and onto police chiefs and mayors who can choose to respond to infractions by issuing tickets rather than booking people into jail. 

Orozco noted that Democratic municipalities around the state could respond to HB10 by implementing local laws protecting immigrant communities. “Durham actually has a program to fund legal services for immigrants and an immigration court … so that’s a service other larger more populated counties could do,” he told Bolts. 

But, he added, there are already state laws on the books limiting what localities can do, such as the 2006 law cracking down on the issuance of drivers’ licenses to undocumented people. And if HB10, which its sponsor has referred to as a “test case,” becomes law, there’s no telling what other protections the legislature might seek to curtail. 

“One of the biggest fears,” Orozco said, “is that anytime there is a really great progressive or more inclusive policy for the immigrant community—that the legislature is just going to come back and figure out a way to restrict the ability for counties and cities to do that.”

To Marín Baena, HB 10 is just one piece in state Republicans’ larger agenda to transform North Carolina into a place that excludes entire groups of people from living safely and freely. 

“There’s a pattern here,” she said, pointing to other legislation like the recent 12-week abortion ban. “Who gets to call this state home and feel like they live here and don’t have to be afraid of hiding who they are?” 

The post North Carolina GOP Is Cracking Down on the Black Sheriffs Who Stood Up to ICE appeared first on Bolts.

This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and NC Policy Watch.

They packed the courtroom early, filling so many seats that a line stretched out the door of the building in downtown Raleigh that houses the North Carolina Supreme Court. In years past, many of the onlookers had been in handcuffs, jails and prison cells. Now, they wanted access to the ballot box. 

Those in line were told the courtroom was full shortly before oral arguments began. The overflow crowd walked down the street to First Baptist Church to watch the hearing streamed live in a basketball gym. Below the projection screen was a sign with a simple demand: “Unlock Our Vote.”

The state supreme court on Thursday held a hearing on whether North Carolinians should have the right to vote while on probation or parole. The case, CSI vs. Moore, is a challenge to North Carolina’s felony disenfranchisement law, which bars people from voting if they are incarcerated and if they are on some form of supervision over a felony conviction. 

Last year, a Superior Court in Wake County issued a landmark ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, effectively restoring the right to vote of 56,000 people in the run-up to the 2022 midterms.

The ruling kicked off a rush among civil rights organizers in North Carolina to tell those “second-chance voters” that they had regained their access to the ballot box, NC Policy Watch and Bolts reported in November. Some of them got to vote in November thanks to the ruling, which made North Carolina one of 24 states where anyone not incarcerated can vote.

But the 2022 midterms upended the political context in North Carolina by flipping the partisan majority of the state supreme court. Republicans picked up two seats, shifting the court to a 5-2 Republican majority and significantly diminishing the odds of major civil rights litigation like this lawsuit. 

The partisan shift loomed large at Thursday’s hearings. The two new Republican associate justices, Trey Allen and Richard Dietz, each signaled their skepticism toward the lower court ruling that expanded rights restoration. 

“The trial court seems to have imposed a remedy that’s beyond the authority of a court because the courts can’t grant the restoration of voting rights to felons,” said Allen. “The Constitution expressly provides that those rights can only be restored in the manner prescribed by law, and the authority to adopt such a law rests with the General Assembly, not with any court.”

“It seems that our constitutional doctrine is pretty clear, that in North Carolina, we don’t try to get into the minds of legislators,” said Dietz, pushing back against the idea that courts should remedy constitutional violations directly. “We declare something unconstitutional and then tell that other branch of government, ‘You need to try again. You enacted a law and it was unconstitutional. Enact one that is not unconstitutional.’”

Their GOP colleagues hinted that they largely shared this attitude. Should they rule to overturn the Superior Court, it could roll back last year’s voting rights expansion.

Kristie Puckett-Williams, an ACLU of North Carolina organizer and a field captain for Unlock Our Vote, said after the hearing that she thought the Republican justices seemed ready to uphold the state’s felony disenfranchisement law and overturn the lower court.

“The central debate is about who has the right to vote,” Puckett-Williams told Bolts and NC Policy Watch. And the justices during the hearing, she said, “foreshadowed that they are okay with us rolling back to a time in our history where poll taxes and literacy tests were common and standard.”

“I left feeling like they had an agenda.” she added.

Chris Shenton, a fellow at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a North Carolina-based organization that advocates for civil rights, said he couldn’t be sure what way the ruling would go. “I think the plaintiffs made a compelling argument that what was going on here is the same thing that happens with these statutes all over the country,” he said. “These laws were passed to disenfranchise Black voters in particular.”

It is not clear when the state supreme court will issue its ruling.

The supreme court is set to hear many other cases that touch on racial justice and civil rights this term. Next Wednesday the court will hear oral arguments in four separate cases involving alleged racial discrimination in jury selection, known as Batson violations. And, with the court’s rightward shift, many criminal justice advocates are concerned the high court will revert to its past practice and not find any Batson violations in cases that it hears.

Other voting rights issues could be at stake, too. Earlier this year, Republicans petitioned the supreme court to throw out last year’s opinions on a voter ID law and redistricting—written by the Democratic majority—and grant new hearings. In those cases, the majority had ruled against laws that, even if they appear race-neutral, have “profoundly discriminatory effects.”

The question at the core of Thursday’s hearing was whether North Carolina’s felony disenfranchisement statute should be struck down because it is racist.

The 65-page order, written last year by Superior Court Judges Lisa C. Bell and Keith O. Gregory, described felony disenfranchisement in North Carolina as a means by which white supremacists in North Carolina suppressed Black citizens’ political power, a tool that still disproportionately affects Black voters. The law, Gregory and Bell wrote, “continues to carry over and reflect the same racist goals that drove the original 19th century enactment.”

 In 2020, Black residents made up 22 percent of North Carolina’s voting-age population, but 45 percent of those disenfranchised because they were on parole or probation over a felony, according to a study conducted by The Sentencing Project. 

Pete Patterson, the attorney representing Republican legislators, argued in Thursday’s hearing that the felony disenfranchisement statute was race-neutral. 

The 1840 law that excluded people from the franchise if they had a felony conviction “couldn’t have been motivated by racial discrimination,” he said, since this occurred before Black people were allowed to vote in North Carolina.

The legislature in the 1970s relaxed those restrictions, restoring the voting rights of individuals convicted of felonies so long as they completed their terms of probation or parole, a reform Patterson called a “signature achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.” 

Stanton Jones, an attorney for the plaintiffs, defended the Superior Court’s findings. The statute in question might not explicitly mention race, he said, but it still disproportionately affects Black North Carolinians, given disparate outcomes in the criminal justice system involving people of color.

“It is intentionally designed to discriminate against African Americans, the trial court found,” Jones said. “This specific, intentional racial discrimination here was disenfranchising the class of voters, people who have felony convictions but are not incarcerated and living in the community. That was the racist design going back to 1877.”

Jones denounced the argument, made before the trial court, that the law is race-neutral since it treats Black and white residents who have felony convictions in the same manner. “That rationale would justify a poll tax or a literacy test,” Jones said. “A literacy test disenfranchises 100 percent of white people and Black people who can’t pass the literacy tests.”

Another core argument for Patterson was that the plaintiffs’ case is moot because the North Carolina constitution explicitly authorizes felony disenfranchisement—a point that at least one of the new GOP justices seemed to agree with. 

“This court would be creating tension if it says that felons have a fundamental right to vote, because there’s a provision in the constitution that says explicitly that they do not,” Patterson said.

Pointing to Article VI of the state constitution, he said people convicted of felonies did not have the right to vote “unless and until their rights are restored in the manner provided by law.”

Jones rebutted Patterson’s take on Article VI, stating that it “does not give the legislature a special license to intentionally discriminate against African Americans.” The Article authorizes laws pertaining to disenfranchisement and re-enfranchisement, he said, but those laws must comply with another part of the constitution: the Equal Protection Clause. He was joined by Associate Justice Anita Earls, one of two Democrats on the high court, in mentioning the Equal Protection Clause, which has been used to support voting rights claims.

Allen, the new GOP justice, pushed back. “I think we all agree that means that felons don’t have the right to vote merely upon their release from prison or incarceration,” Allen said. “As I understand the constitutional provision, the default is no felon voting, except in the ‘manner prescribed by law.’ Where’s the law that prescribes that felons can vote, or may vote, simply upon being released from incarceration?” 

Associate Justice Phil Berger, Jr., echoed Allen’s point, evoking “a specific class of individuals, without regard to race, who have no right to vote under the constitution.” Berger is the son of the Senate’s Republican leader Phil Berger, who is among the defendants in this case. He declined to recuse himself.

But Daryl Atkinson, another attorney for the plaintiffs, echoed Jones’s appeal for the supreme court to protect North Carolinians’ fundamental rights. 

He stressed that barring people on supervision from voting has meant that people have had to pay off fines and fines, tying the right to vote to how much money someone has.

“Basically what’s undergirding opposing counsels’ arguments is that, people convicted of felonies, you can do any manner of things to them to discriminate against them, and it wouldn’t violate the constitution,” he said. “Your honor, that can’t be the way.” 

“Folks must still have some constitutional protections under the North Carolina constitution,” he added.

The video feed at First Baptist Church shut off as the justices stood, signaling that the court was in recess. The plaintiffs and their attorneys would soon join the overflow crowd at First Baptist for lunch. They would celebrate all that they had accomplished since the lawsuit began in 2019—even if their hard-fought gains may soon be lost.

Corey Purdie, the founder and director of Wash Away Unemployment, an organization that helps people released from prison transition to life in the free world, told NC Policy Watch and Bolts that those in the courtroom came bearing a message. 

“It’s showing that we care,” he said, “that people are present, that people are concerned, that people matter.”

The post North Carolina Supreme Court Signals It May Roll Back Voting Rights for Thousands appeared first on Bolts.

This was not the election that politicians and pundits expected.

Defying the historical trends of midterms, Democrats held the U.S Senate and have a chance to expand their majority if they win a runoff in Georgia next month. Republicans are on the brink of capturing the U.S. House but their still-uncertain majority will be far tighter than they envisioned.

Democrats did even better in state-level fights. They defended or flipped most of the cycle’s competitive governorships, seized at least three legislative chambers, and defeated all election deniers who were running to take over election administration in battleground states. They also seized control of four state governments—Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota—which should yield major policy ramifications next year. 

The result is most historic in Michigan, which will experience its first period under Democratic governance since the early 1980s, and where voters also approved enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution.

Republicans did score important wins, notably flipping control of North Carolina’s supreme court and Nevada’s governorship. But they have gained no state government as of now, and they have lost control of the state government in Arizona for the first time since 2009.

Bolts has updated its cheat sheet of more than 500 elections to watch with results that are known, so you can keep track of all these developments in one place.

But we are most focused at Bolts on the politics of criminal justice and voting rights, two areas where local officials wield tremendous powers but are often overlooked. Since Tuesday, the Bolts team has extensively reported on how the elections will affect political power on those issues. 

This post lays out all our findings—on prosecution, policing, immigration, voting rights, the politics of courts, and more.

— Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief

In secretary of state races, election deniers (mostly) lose

Ever since his failure to cling to power in 2020, Donald Trump hoped to install allies into the offices that run and certify elections in 2022. But voters last week repudiated the candidates who were signaling that they may override the wishes of the electorate.

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

Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee in Nevada, came closest, losing by only two percentage points. Mark Finchem, an Arizona lawmaker who has championed proposals to decertify his own state’s presidential results, lost by a slightly wider margin. In Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, incumbent Democrats crushed election deniers by margins ranging from 9 to 14 percentage points. And in Pennsylvania, voters resoundingly rejected a far-right candidate for governor who had promised to appoint a like-minded secretary of state, with the risk of throwing the election process into chaos.

Still, Republicans who ran on the Big Lie did not end up empty handed on Tuesday. A nationwide Bolts analysis found 12 election deniers who were running for secretary of state. Four of them won in red states: Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

Read more from Camille Squires and Daniel Nichanian in Bolts about how the Big Lie fared on Tuesday. 

Criminal justice reformers make inroads

Republicans bet that they would score gains in the midterms by attacking criminal justice reformers. But that strategy repeatedly failed last week, most notably in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania, where Democratic nominee John Fetterman prevailed after relentless attacks over his record of promoting clemency for people incarcerated for life.

Reformers also made inroads in local races and are poised to take over new prosecutor offices.

Mary Moriarty, a career public defender who has clashed with the local police and prosecutors, will be the next prosecutor of Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis. After a campaign that encapsulated the local conflicts over policing and prosecution since George Floyd’s murder, she easily prevailed against a former judge who had argued that reform rhetoric was threatening public safety.​

Moriarty made the opposite case, impugning the effects on safety of decades of tough-on-crime policies. “I thought, people who really value public safety, and a fair and just system need to step up during this time of turmoil and really present options that aren’t the same old things we’ve had for decades, which haven’t kept us safer,” she told Bolts and Mother Jones in October.

Other candidates who emphasized a reform message also prevailed. Kimberly Graham, who represents abused and neglected children in court, won in Polk County (Des Moines), Iowa’s most populous county. Kelly Higgins, a defense attorney, won the DA race in fast-growing Hays County, Texas, after promising a “sea change;” he told Bolts that he was moved toward more progressive positions by a group of activists organizing in Central Texas. They join Memphis’s new DA, who ousted a tough-on-crime incumbent in August, in growing reform ranks. In Dallas and San Antonio, Democratic DAs who have come under GOP fire for their policies and have promised to not prosecute abortion beat tough-on-crime challengers.

In King County, home to Seattle, voters chose Leesa Manion over a candidate who wanted to bring more punitive practices to the county. Manion, who has cast herself as a cautious reformer rather than embrace progressive priorities, helped roll out reforms as chief of staff of the retiring prosecutor.

Reform candidates lost important races, though, in counties where they were challenging incumbent prosecutors. They fell short in Maricopa County, Arizona, Pinellas and Pasco counties, Florida, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, and Douglas County, Nebraska. In Maricopa, the nation’s fourth most populous county, Republican Rachel Mitchell defeated a Democratic challenger who promised to never prosecute abortion and to work to lower incarceration. In Plymouth, the defeat of a civil rights attorney adds to other losses by state progressives in September’s Democratic primaries.

One of the year’s most important DA races remains undecided, as candidates are separated by less than one percentage point with tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted in Alameda County (Oakland). 

Debates over police accountability shake up local elections

Running for DA in Oklahoma County, Republican Kevin Calvey vowed to drop the charges filed by the outgoing DA against five Oklahoma City police officers who shot and killed 15-year Stavian Rodriguez outside a convenience store. “I would have shot him myself,” he said during a primary forum. Calvey lost last week to Democrat Vicki Behenna.

The local Fraternal Order of Police in Marion County, Indiana, targeted chief prosecutor Ryan Mears this year and endorsed a Republican candidate who wanted to ramp up low-level arrests and prosecutions. Mears prevailed last week.

And in Los Angeles, Kenneth Mejia captured the office of controller after an unconventional campaign that highlighted the magnitude of police spending in the city, including putting up billboards visualizing the size of the LAPD budget compared to other city services. Throughout the Los Angeles region, many candidates backed by police groups were trailing as of the latest count, including Rick Caruso in the Los Angeles mayoral race (against Karen Bass) and Suzie Price in the Long Beach mayoral race (against Rex Richardson).

In San Francisco, though, interim DA Brooke Jenkins, who replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin over the summer, prevailed against challengers who have criticized her handling of police accountability. Bolts reported two weeks ago that Boudin’s ouster has disrupted the prosecution of police officers who killed civilians, alarming victims’ families.

Ballot measures revamp voting rules

Ballot measures around the country resulted in expansive changes to election rules through reforms that are meant to increase turnout or make results more representative. 

The biggest expansion of ballot access came with Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. It will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, where voters authorized the legislature to set up early voting.

Oakland, California revamped campaign finance by adopting a democracy vouchers program. In future local elections, the city will provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to candidates of their choice.

In at least seven localities, including the state of Nevada, voters approved ranked-choice voting, which could durably shake up political dynamics. The measure in Nevada must be passed a second time by voters in 2024 to go into effect.

Read more from Camille Squires in Bolts about the ballot measures and referendums that touched on democracy.

Measures to protect abortion triumph

Voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont on Tuesday adopted constitutional amendments that enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions. The result in Michigan will have the most immediate effects since, unlike California and Vermont, Michigan has a statutory ban on abortion on the books. Prosecutors were already preparing for questions about whether they will prosecute abortion cases.

Pro-choice advocates also scored victories in referendums that were organized by anti-abortion forces in Kentucky and Montana.

An analysis published by Bolts in July found that a dozen state supreme courts have ruled that their states’ constitution shields abortion access, a critical protection in the face of the federal judiciary’s refusal to protect reproductive rights. But until Tuesday, no state constitution explicitly declared such a right; judges in those states relied on provisions that talked about a right to privacy or about due process. California, Michigan, and Vermont are the first three states to add provisions into their constitution that explicitly codify the right to an abortion. 

Read more from Quinn Yeargain in Bolts about how abortion fared on the ballot, and the new state constitutional landscape after the midterms.

Wins and losses for state referendums to legalize weed and psychedelics 

Drug policy reformers saw mixed results last week. Voters in Maryland and Missouri supported proposals to legalize marijuana for recreational use, joining the 19 U.S. states that have already done so. 

However, similar proposals in Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota all were shot down by voters.

Also, ten years to the week since Colorado and Oregon became the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana, Colorado voters are poised to approve a measure that removes criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. Oregon went first on this front with a measure decriminalizing those substances in 2020, though several conservative counties chose to opt-out last week. 

Read more from Alex Burness in Bolts about how drug policy fared on Tuesday.

Conservatives largely fail to oust sitting judges, but soar in two states

Mitch McConnell lost big last week, and not just because he failed to become the U.S. Senate Majority Leader. Back home in Kentucky, a local judge that has long drawn the right’s ire survived despite his opponent’s significant financial support from national conservatives, including McConnell’s PAC. 

Conservatives also lost in a series of efforts to oust sitting supreme court justices in Arkansas, Michigan, Montana, and New Mexico.

The Arkansas and Montana races were ostensibly nonpartisan, but two justices secured additional terms by beating candidates with deep ties to the GOP; the result in Arkansas is the right’s second loss of the year since they failed to oust another justice in May. In New Mexico, two Democratic justices won—at least one against a candidate who echoed election conspiracies—enabling the party to retain a large majority on the court. 

Democrats also retained their 4-3 edge on the Michigan supreme court; this was one of the biggest prizes of the night, with criminal justice, abortion, and voting cases hanging on the balance. They also maintained control of the hotly-disputed Illinois supreme court, one of the few that could have changed hands last week; they even expanded their majority by sweeping both seats on the ballot.

But GOP wins in two states will have vast consequences going forward.

North Carolina Republicans swept two seats and vaulted into a new majority on the high court. The results will have huge implications for redistricting, as the state must draw new maps before the 2024 elections, as well as for other civil rights cases. Bolts and NC Policy Watch reported two weeks ago on a pending case that will decide whether people on probation and parole in the state can vote.

Ohio Republicans swept all three supreme court seats that were on the ballot. All were technically already in GOP hands, and the party maintains its 4-3 edge. But the departure of Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican who hit the mandatory retirement age, will significantly alter the court’s dynamics as she has repeatedly sided with Democratic justices in redistricting cases.

Elsewhere on state supreme courts, things went as expected. Republicans prevailed in red Alabama and Texas; all justices were retained in Florida and Kansas, where abortion rights may have been at play; and in seven states judicial candidates ran unopposed. Bolts previewed all of the cycle’s supreme court elections earlier this year.

In sheriff races, voters oust the “Trump of LA” and the “Arpaio of the “East”

Massachusetts reformers were jubilant following the defeat of Thomas Hodgson, a far-right sheriff whose 25-year reign in Bristol County has been marked by extreme medical neglect, mounting jail suicides, and staunchly anti-immigrant policies. 

“Today is a great day!” Kellie Pearson, the former partner of Michael Ray, who committed suicide in a Bristol County jail, told Bolts on Wednesday. “People are becoming more educated about the state of our jails and they are ready for a change.” A Massachusetts watchdog dubbed Hodgson the “Arpaio of the East” in September.

On the other side of the country, Angelenos fired Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose office faces a mountain of allegations of abuse and retaliation—enough to fill a book, Bolts reported in May. Villanueva, the “Trump of LA” and a determined foe of the county’s reform DA George Gascón, conceded on Tuesday while trailing challenger Robert Luna 60 to 40 percent. Still, many local progressives are pressing for independent oversight rather than rely on internal change given the dark history of the department.

But change was not on the horizon in other counties led by sheriffs who have courted investigations. In Columbus County, North Carolina, a sheriff who reportedly unleashed racist tirades and resigned last month to avoid judicial removal won a new term. In Klickitat County, Washington, a far-right sheriff who has threatened to arrest state officials appears to have survived by about one percentage point; but a candidate with a similar outlook in the state’s Clark County appears to have narrowly lost. In Frederick County, Maryland, a longtime sheriff who is similarly embedded in far-right networks leads by 6 percentage points as of publication, with some ballots remaining.

Immigration hardliners lose critical sheriff elections

Immigrants’ rights advocates cheered landmark wins last week in counties that have a history of closely working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify and detain immigrants. 

Barnstable County, home to Cape Cod, stood out as the only county in New England to contract into ICE’s 287(g) program, which enables sheriff’s deputies to act like federal immigration agents. But voters elected a new sheriff who promises to “rip up” the county’s contract. In neighboring Bristol County, voters ousted Thomas Hodgson, a  sheriff with a history of draconian anti-immigrant policies. (See above.)

In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, longtime sheriff Donnie Harrison failed in his comeback effort and lost to Democrat Willie Rowe. While in office, he joined the 287(g) program and frequently demonized immigrants but abruptly changed his stance on collaborating with ICE when asked by Bolts in August. Advocates took his flip as a sign that protecting immigrants remains a potent issue. In Doña Ana County, New Mexico, a border county that is home to Las Cruces, Democratic Sheriff Kim Stewart easily prevailed over a Republican challenger who was advocating for a tighter relationship with federal agents. 

Voters also approved a ballot measure in Arizona to provide in-state tuition to students regardless of their legal status, and in Massachusetts to enable undocumented immigrants to access drivers’ licenses.

Still, several of the nation’s notorious anti-immigrant sheriffs likely survived in more rural areas, including in Alamance County, North Carolina, and in Frederick County, Maryland.

Read more in Bolts on the results in sheriff’s races that matter to immigration.

And also don’t miss…

Alabama and Ohio each adopted ballot measures pertaining to bail that could expand pretrial detention. Alabama also voted to introduce new restrictions on their governor’s ability to grant reprieve for a death sentence.

Wisconsin re-elected its Democratic attorney general over a GOP challenger who threatened to ramp up prosecutions over elections.

Montana voted to require police to obtain search warrants before searching electronic data.

Dallas Republicans lost their last seat on the county’s commissioner court, in a proxy battle over whether to pursue criminal justice reforms.

Four states voted to remove the so-called slavery loophole from their constitutions, which permitted forced and unpaid labor as punishment for crimes; advocates have hoped this may help their legal fight against forced prison labor. 

South Dakota expanded their Medicaid program, after a decade of GOP politicians refusing to expand the program as provided by Obamacare. In June, state voters rejected a separate measure that the GOP rushed onto the ballot that would have increased this measure needed.

In Los Angeles, voters appear to have approved ballot measures that will strengthen affordable housing.

And New York State approved a $4.2 billion bond to fund green infrastructure. 

The article was updated on Nov. 15 with the outcomes of elections in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The post Nine Midterm Stories You Should Not Miss on Criminal Justice and Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

But the tide turned on Tuesday, as Massachusetts voters approved giving people in the state driver’s licenses regardless of their immigration status. The referendum followed the adoption of a law earlier this year that expanded access to licenses; Republicans petitioned a veto referendum onto the ballot, and voters blessed the law this week.

“People are going to feel safer going on the roads, doing what Americans do—go to a doctor appointment, take children to school,” Reiter said. She works at the Brazilian Worker Center of Boston, an immigrants’ rights group that helped spearhead the Yes campaign.

The state’s immigrant advocates also cheered landmark wins this week in two counties where sheriff’s offices have long worked closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify and detain immigrants. Under such local arrangements, minor interactions, like traffic stops, can escalate into detainment and even deportation. 

Barnstable County, home to Cape Cod, stood out as the only county in New England to contract into ICE’s 287(g) program, which enables sheriff’s deputies to act like federal immigration agents. But voters on Tuesday elected a new sheriff who promises to “rip up” the county’s contract to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

“The sheriff’s office should not be doing ICE’s job,” Democratic nominee Donna Buckley, who will replace a retiring, 23-year Republican sheriff, told Bolts in September. Her GOP opponent favored maintaining the county’s contract with ICE.

In neighboring Bristol County, voters ousted Thomas Hodgson, a far-right sheriff with a history of draconian anti-immigrant policies. In 2017, Hodgson famously offered to send people detained in his custody to the U.S.-Mexico border to help build former President Donald Trump’s wall, and last year the federal government shut down his county’s immigrant detention facility over alleged civil rights violations.

Each of these changes was driven by on-the-ground organizing by immigrants’ rights activists in a state that tilts heavily Democratic but hasn’t always embraced immigrants in policy-making. Local groups like Bristol County for Correctional Justice and the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities mounted active campaigns to educate voters in their counties about the stakes of these local elections. 

Elsewhere in the country, two GOP candidates with a history of championing harsher immigration enforcement failed to seize sheriff’s offices.

In Doña Ana County, a border county in New Mexico that is home to Las Cruces, Democratic Sheriff Kim Stewart easily prevailed over a Republican challenger who was advocating for a tighter relationship with federal agents. 

In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, longtime sheriff Donnie Harrison failed in his comeback effort and lost to Democrat Willie Rowe. While in office, Harrison joined the 287(g) program and frequently demonized immigrants. He was ousted from office in 2018, alongside many other Republican sheriffs known for contracting with ICE who lost their reelection bids in North Carolina that year.

During his campaign, Harrison abruptly changed his stance on collaborating with ICE. When asked by Bolts in August about his public desire for Wake to rejoin 287(g), which his Democratic successor had quickly terminated, Harrison said he no longer wanted to. Advocates took his flip as a sign that protecting immigrants remains a potent issue.

Felicia Arriaga, a sociology professor at Appalachian State University, in western North Carolina, has compiled data showing that Harrison’s policies as sheriff contributed to hundreds of deportation a year; she says Harrison’s change this year was an electoralist effort to woo the center, and that his loss was met with relief by local organizers. Other North Carolina counties like Durham and Mecklenburg reelected Democratic sheriffs who came into office in 2018 and promptly limited ties with ICE.

North Carolina Republicans also failed to win veto-proof majorities in their legislature; that is likely to keep legislation they have championed to force sheriffs to work with ICE at bay for two more years, since the Democratic governor opposes it.

But at least one of the nation’s notorious anti-immigrant sheriffs survived on Tuesday in a more rural area. In Alamance, a North Carolina county roughly one hour west of Wake County, GOP Sheriff Terry Johnson won another term. He has faced federal accusations over racial profiling and for detaining immigrants in abusive conditions, and he reportedly once directed his deputies to discriminate against people who “appeared” to be Mexican, telling staff to “go out there and get me some taco-eaters.”

In Frederick County, Maryland, another mostly rural but rapidly-diversifying county north of D.C. Republican Sheriff Chuck Jenkins has a hefty lead as of publication, though many mail-in ballots, which lean heavily Democratic, remain to be counted. Jenkins has been under national scrutiny for policies that have ramped up fear among immigrants even as the county rapidly diversified under his tenure. Besides his connections to prominent national politicians and far-right groups, Jenkins has been a longstanding member of the 287(g) program and has been successfully sued over racial profiling in traffic stops.

“As an immigrant, you never really felt safe,” local resident Jesus Santiago told Bolts in September. He was once arrested in Frederick County over driving with a suspended license and then transferred into immigration detention; he was later shielded by former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. 

Democrats on Tuesday gained full control of the state government in Maryland for the first time in eight years and may look to pass more protections for immigrant residents. In recent years, they already passed bills curtailing local cooperation with ICE with enough votes to override the vetoes of outgoing Republican Governor Larry Hogan. 

“With the way Congress is, a lot of people are very focused on what they can do in their own states right now to try to improve the situation,” Sarang Sakhavat, political director at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told Bolts. “With Congress, we don’t really expect them to be changing much of anything.”

In Massachusetts, where Democrats also flipped the governorship and grabbed control of the government, advocates have been frustrated at the Democratic legislature’s failure to pass a bill limiting immigration enforcement; known as the Safe Communities Act, the reform was opposed by outgoing Republican Governor Charlie Baker. 

Massachusetts organizers who worked on various immigrant-rights campaigns this year also focused on making a public-safety argument.

The coalition that supported the Massachusetts driver’s license measure called itself “Yes on 4 For Safer Roads,” making the case that everyone is less safe when people are denied licenses because more driverspeople are uninsured. Similarly, opponents of county-level ICE partnerships are telling voters that communities are less safe if certain populations are disincentivized to interact with police and the legal system in general.

Working with ICE “doesn’t improve safety in any measurable way, and if anything it’s detrimental because it scares witnesses and victims away,” Sakhavat said.

Daniel Nichanian contributed to the reporting for this article.

The post Immigration Hardliners Lose Sheriff Races in Massachusetts and Beyond appeared first on Bolts.

One hot afternoon in early October, Corey Purdie helped put the finishing touches on the exterior of the 300-square-foot house at Broad and Queen streets in New Bern, North Carolina. He touched up a corner of the building with white paint as other volunteers interrupted him to ask questions, say hello and point out that he was using the wrong paintbrush. Soon, an elderly man would move into the bright blue house, the first place he’d be able to call his own after spending more than eight years in prison and about three in a halfway house.

Purdie, the founder and director of Wash Away Unemployment, helps people released from prison transition to life in the free world by providing a set of “wraparound services.” Purdie and his organization connect the formerly incarcerated to education, housing and employment opportunities. They support people in reconnecting with their families, and assist in getting them mental health treatment.

Those amenities extend beyond essentials like a roof over somebody’s head or a job to pay their bills: It also includes registering people to vote. 

North Carolinians lose the right to vote when convicted of a felony, and until this election cycle they could not regain it until they had served all parts of their sentence, including probation, parole, and post-release supervision. But a ruling by the Superior Court earlier this year upended those rules. It allowed people to vote as soon as they leave prison, even while on probation or parole.

The ruling has “unlocked” the vote of more than 56,000 North Carolinians, who otherwise would have been barred from voting in the 2022 midterm. And it has set up a new stream of service for Purdie. 

“Not being able to vote and having that liberty taken away does something to the mental aspect of being able to have the confidence to move past any of the hurdles that they have in life,” Purdie said. “Being told ‘no’ or being told you’re not allowed to use your voice is one of the most traumatizing aspects that can happen in a person’s life. Almost like telling a child to shut up.”

“After a while, people lose hope,” Purdie said. “Our job is to restore hope in the vote.”

Purdie and others participating in the “Unlock Our Vote” movement—organizations like Black Voters Matter, the Community Success Initiative and the NC Justice Center—are registering and encouraging the newly re-enfranchised North Carolinians to vote, framing the court ruling as the largest expansion of voting rights in the state since the 1960s. [Note: NC Policy Watch is a project of the Justice Center.]

North Carolina is now one of 24 states where anyone not presently incarcerated has the right to vote. (Two of those also enable people to vote from prison, as does Washington, D.C.). The only people barred from voting in the state this fall are those who are in prison for a felony.

But this expansion of the franchise is precarious because an appeal of the Superior Court’s decision is pending before the North Carolina Supreme Court. Oral arguments won’t take place until the first quarter of 2023. Democrats currently enjoy a 4-3 majority on the high court, but the partisan make-up may flip in the November election, where voters will decide two seats; as a result, the Superior Court judges’ ruling could receive a more skeptical review.

Purdie thinks there is strength in numbers. The more people he and other plaintiffs in the lawsuit register, he believes, the trickier it would be for state courts to backtrack.

“It’s easier for the judges to make a decision to overturn something that affects 100 people versus something that affects 56,000,” he said. “If we registered 56,000 people, them judges are gonna think twice about overturning 56,000 people back to non-participating status.”

“I felt as if I was not a citizen”

It is not an easy or fast sell to convince someone to register. Purdie gets that. He spent eight years in prison starting when he was 16. It took him years to cast a ballot after getting out.

“I was so traumatized about it, and didn’t really think it mattered,” he said.

But in time he came to understand the power voting affords – the ability to put people in office willing to fight for his interests, “candidates who may be friendly to those that want to have a second opportunity at life.” When he finally voted in 2008, “it was traumatizing and liberating at the same time,” he says. “When I walked out, I said, ‘Man, I did it. I got a piece of myself back.’”

Purdie now talks to a lot of people getting out of prison who have things to do that seem more pressing: Getting a driver’s license and figuring out transportation. Finding a landlord willing to rent to them and an employer who wants to hire them. He also stresses why life is so difficult when they come home from prison: Elected officials pass laws that make it hard for people with a criminal record to find work or secure housing. And those officials can be voted out of office.

Central to Purdie and his peers’ efforts is the idea that people who have been disenfranchised are especially effective in convincing people of the importance of voting.

“We believe that people hear you different if they know you share their same story,” said Dennis Gaddy, the founder and executive director of Community Success Initiative and a plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to this year’s ruling. (The lawsuit was originally filed by Forward Justice in 2019 on behalf of organizations like Community Success Initiative, Justice Served, and the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP.)

Gaddy was disenfranchised for 13 years—seven and a half years on probation, and five and a half years in prison. He still couldn’t vote in 2008 when the country elected Barack Obama, its first Black president. For Gaddy, who is Black, this was a dehumanizing experience that clashed with the clear memories he has from childhood of riding through rural North Carolina with his mother, helping people register to vote by hand.

“I was always taught that my vote was my voice, and that we should all exercise our right as citizens to use our voice through the ballot,” Gaddy said in an affidavit in the lawsuit. “By not being able to use my voice in this way, I felt as if I was not a citizen.”

A legacy of racism

The history of felony disenfranchisement in North Carolina is rooted in racism. Much of the 65-page Superior Court ruling delves into the ways white supremacists used the criminal justice system as a means of taking away Black citizens’ right to vote beginning in the late 1860s.

In 1865, former plantation owners reeling from losing their enslaved workers were looking for labor to continue their farming operations, said Irving Joyner, a law professor at North Carolina Central University’s School of Law. Scores of formerly enslaved people were arrested on vagrancy charges and then forced to participate in a convict-labor system as part of their sentence.

Joyner sees a connection between the disenfranchisement of Black citizens in the 1860s because of vagrancy laws and the disproportionate number of Black citizens currently disenfranchised because they are on supervision for a felony.

“This is the end result of what started back in 1865 and continued up until it was more modernized, but still had these shackles on people to prevent them from being able to vote,” Joyner said.

North Carolina’s constitution forbade African Americans from voting between 1835 and 1868. It also disenfranchised “infamous” people, those convicted of crimes like treason, bribery or perjury, as well as those who received an “infamous punishment” like whipping.

North Carolina adopted a new constitution in 1868 as a condition of rejoining the union after the Civil War. It allowed all males to vote, got rid of property requirements for voting and abolished slavery. However, it still allowed for people to be disenfranchised if they were punished for their crimes by a whipping. The state amended the constitution in 1875, passing an array of measures to control and disempower African Americans. One of those amendments imposed a lifetime ban on voting for anyone convicted of a felony. 

Joyner said the initial purpose of felony disenfranchisement laws was to disenfranchise African American voters. After the Wilmington massacre of 1898, the state redoubled its efforts to dilute the voting power of Black residents through felony disenfranchisement, poll taxes, the “grandfather clause” and literacy tests to suppress the vote.

In the 1970s, lawmakers slightly loosened the disenfranchisement rules. They enabled people to regain their voting rights once they completed their sentence, including probation and parole terms—this is the status quo struck down earlier this year.

Still, Joyner said the modifications did not sever the system’s initial purpose: disenfranchising Black citizens. “It was borne with that intent,” he said. “It’s kind of like your name. Unless you change it, it stays with you forever.”

The Superior Court agreed earlier this year. “The legislature cannot purge through the mere passage of time an impermissibly racially discriminatory intent,” Judges Lisa C. Bell and Keith O. Gregory wrote in their opinion. The current felony disenfranchisement system “continues to carry over and reflect the same racist goals that drove the original 19th century enactment.”

According to a study by the Sentencing Project, 2.5 percent of Black adults in North Carolina were barred from voting during the 2020 presidential election due to a past criminal conviction, compared to 0.8 percent of the rest of the voting-age population.

This inequality also means that the Superior Court’s ruling disproportionately relieves Black people. Reports filed as part of the ongoing lawsuit state that Black people make up 42 percent of the pool of people whose vote was “unlocked” this year; only 22 percent of the voting age population in North Carolina is Black. There is not one single county in the state that has a higher rate of disenfranchisement for whites than for Blacks.

These numbers reflect the deep inequities in the state’s criminal legal system. Black people are arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted, and serve longer sentences compared to whites, and therefore they are more greatly affected by laws that rely on convictions to block a citizen’s access to the ballot box.

Such widespread disenfranchisement goes beyond depriving individual people of their right to vote, said Theodore Shaw, a law professor at the University of North Carolina and the Director of the school’s Center for Civil Rights.

“The impact is not only personal, but it has a collective impact on Black and brown communities,” he said. Felony disenfranchisement represents “a continuing individual judgment about their worthiness and whether they have a place in the larger society.”

Kristie Puckett-Williams, an ACLU of North Carolina organizer and a field captain for Unlock Our Vote, was detained over drug charges in 2009 before agreeing to a guilty plea to avoid giving birth in jail. “The system racially profiled my addiction,” said Puckett-Williams, adding, “That the system was dysfunctional does not negate the harm that I caused.”

She could not vote during the 15 years she was on probation, but she took part in the first election in which she was able to. 

“Whether the state recognized my humanness or not, I recognized I was still a human,” she said.

“These people are going to be so tired of us”

In the campaign’s final stretch, North Carolina’s civil rights organizations are sounding the alarm that public authorities are not informing people of their new rights, or that some counties may be providing individuals with false information, for instance that they may need paperwork to vote. 

Disenfranchisement rules around the country are very confusing, and many individuals who are eligible choose to not head to the polls because they feel uncertain of their rights. Recent high-profile criminal prosecutions of people who made voting errors in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, as well as North Carolina under the state’s old rules, have ratcheted up worries of intimidation. North Carolina’s new rules are comparatively straightforward, and advocates want the state to communicate that more aggressively.

In the meantime, these groups have taken it upon themselves to conduct extensive outreach.

“This ain’t about Ds or Rs because quite frankly I’ve enfranchised some folks who probably are diametrically opposed to my political viewpoint,” he said. “And you know what, that’s okay. Because I actually believe in democracy, that people should have a choice to be able to pick who they choose.”

David Bright, a 46-year-old white man who registered to vote when he was 18 and voted Republican his whole life, has not been able to vote for about a decade, ever since he was put on probation. 

He says he felt embarrassed and shied away from conversations with friends around election season. He couldn’t even vote for the school board that governs where his daughter gets her education, limiting his ability to not only vote for his own interests, but his children’s.

Bright was one of the people in New Bern who was working with Purdie on the tiny house in October. He wore a white “Unlock Our Vote” T-shirt and paint-speckled pants and shoes as he sat in the shade eating a sandwich during lunchtime. He had only recently heard about the Superior Court ruling, but he was happy to have the opportunity to vote again.

Being re-enfranchised lets him show the world that he’s not the same as he once was, he said. It telegraphs a message to everyone he had to tell he couldn’t cast a ballot: “We do change.”

Puckett-Williams sees her own organizing as a way to give back to a community that she hurt when she was in active addiction.

“Me showing up every day in the community doing what I can do is my way of atoning for the behaviors that I did in the past,” she said. “This is just one redemption, one reconciliation that I can make.” Through her voting and advocacy, she hopes that more elected officials will recognize that the formerly incarcerated are their constituents, too. 

“The conditions of incarceration that I and others have endured is a direct result of those who are in office,” she said. “The kind of justice you receive is based on who is in power.”

As much as disenfranchising someone revokes their ability to choose their government, it also implicitly acknowledges the power they would have if they enjoyed unrestricted access to the ballot. That’s what Diana Powell, executive director of Justice Served NC and a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, says when she tries to register people who tell her they don’t see the point in voting.

“If our vote wasn’t so important,” she said, “why would they fight us so hard to silence our voice and take that right away?”

The post In North Carolina, a Rush to “Restore Hope in the Vote” in People with Felony Convictions appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

1. Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor

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

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

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

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

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

3. California | Los Angeles County sheriff 

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

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

4. California | San Francisco prosecutor

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

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

5. California | San Diego County sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

7. Indiana | Marion County (Indianapolis) prosecutor

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

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

8. Iowa | Polk County (Des Moines) prosecutor

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

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

9. Maryland | Frederick County sheriff

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

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

10. Massachusetts | Barnstable County (Cape Cod) sheriff 

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

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

11. Massachusetts | Bristol County sheriff

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

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

12. Massachusetts | Plymouth County prosecutor

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

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

13. Minnesota | Hennepin County (Minneapolis) prosecutor

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

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

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

14. Nebraska | Douglas County (Omaha) prosecutor

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

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

15. New Mexico | Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

17. North Carolina | Alamance County sheriff

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

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

18. North Carolina | Columbus County sheriff

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

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

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

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

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

20. North Carolina | Pasquotank County sheriff

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

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

21. North Carolina | Wake County (Raleigh) sheriff

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

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

22. Oklahoma | Oklahoma County (Oklahoma City) prosecutor

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

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

23. Texas | Bexar County (San Antonio) prosecutor

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

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

24. Texas | Dallas County prosecutor

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

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

25. Texas | Hays County prosecutor

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

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

26. Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) prosecutor

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

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

27. Washington | Clark County (Vancouver) sheriff

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

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

28. Washington | King County (Seattle) prosecutor

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

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

29. Washington | Klickitat County sheriff

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

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

30. Washington | Spokane County prosecutor

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

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

And some honorable mentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Willie Rowe beat Donnie Harrison on Nov. 8, 2022.

A week before Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, 13-year-old Alex Matehuala asked Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison to cut his office’s longstanding ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Standing in a church in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in front of nearly 100 people, most of Central American descent, Alex told Harrison that his schoolmates worried every day that their parents would be taken before they got home. 

“Will you continue to renew a racist program that puts families at risk of being separated?” he asked. 

The 287(g) program, which Harrison joined in 2007, authorized local deputies to check the immigration status of people they arrested—a job that’s usually the purview of federal authorities—and detain suspected undocumented immigrants after they’d otherwise be released. Over the previous two years, it had led to more than 1,000 deportations, according to data compiled by Appalachian State University sociologist Felicia Arriaga. It had also spread fear among immigrant communities: a low-level traffic infraction could easily escalate into deportation proceedings. 

But Harrison said he saw no reason to end the program. In 2016 and 2017, ICE deported another 498 people from Wake County through 287(g), according to Arriaga.

“I have been in forums with [Harrison] where community members have literally been crying. Their families have been torn apart by having a loved one deported for a very low-level offense, getting flagged through 287(g) and leaving their kids behind,” Angeline Echeverría, the former director of El Pueblo, the Latinx advocacy organization that sponsored the 2016 event, told Bolts this month. “Just, like, terrible, devastating stories. And Donnie was not moved.”

Ahead of the 2018 midterms, with Trump’s immigration policies rattling the nation, local law enforcement agencies’ cooperation with ICE came under intense scrutiny. In North Carolina, that dynamic put several sheriffs in the hot seat—including Harrison, a Republican who hadn’t faced a serious challenge since becoming sheriff in 2002 despite Wake County trending Democratic. 

Harrison lost by 10 points to Gerald Baker, a former deputy who pledged to withdraw Wake County from 287(g) and made good on his word after taking office. Harrison wasn’t alone in defeat. Six of North Carolina’s most populous counties—also, Mecklenburg (Charlotte), Guilford (Greensboro), Forsyth (Winston-Salem), Buncombe (Asheville), and Durham—elected new Black Democratic sheriffs who vowed to restrict collaboration with ICE. 

Four years later, Harrison wants his job back and he is on the ballot in November’s sheriff election. During the Republican primary, he reiterated his support for 287(g). After he won the nomination in May, the immigrant-rights activists who helped oust him in 2018 geared up for another fight—this time in a very different environment. There was no blue wave on the horizon, and immigration no longer drove headlines. Baker, meanwhile, lost the Democratic primary amid allegations of mismanagement, cronyism, low morale, and criticism of his aggressive but ineffective response to the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder. Harrison’s new opponent, former deputy Willie Rowe, lost to Harrison by 18 points in the 2014 sheriff’s race. Even in a county Trump lost twice by double digits, advocates feared that if 287(g) flew under the radar, Harrison could stage a comeback.  

But on Aug. 17, Harrison’s campaign made an abrupt reversal. In a statement provided to Bolts, Harrison said that if elected, he would no longer participate in 287(g) or honor ICE detainers—requests that sheriffs continue detaining someone beyond their scheduled release time in order to give ICE time to pick them up. A consultant for Harrison’s campaign also said he would recognize Community Action IDs—alternative identification cards for immigrants who cannot obtain state IDs—which he’d previously rejected but Baker began recognizing earlier this year.

“Mr. Harrison fully understands the concern many residents and citizens have about the 287(g) program targeting specific races and nationalities,” Brad Crone, the consultant, told Bolts in an email. “There are better ways to address public safety concerns by extending criminal checks for all people who are processed into the detention center.”

Immigrant-rights advocates are skeptical about Harrison’s change of heart. “Because of the administration that he ran before, I don’t quite believe it,” Arriaga said. “It feels like there’s gonna be something else, and I’m scared of what that something else would be.”

“I’ve certainly heard of candidates positioning themselves in a certain way in primaries and then shifting to the center for the general election, thinking they need to appeal to a broader constituency,” Echeverría added. “I have never seen it this dramatically in a local election in Wake County. This is a huge about-face.” 

Harrison might be attempting to neutralize a contentious issue as he seeks to win back the sheriff’s office—Rowe has already promised not to rejoin 287(g). But Echeverría says his record of pushing immigration enforcement while dismissing the community’s concerns about ICE collaboration speaks volumes. 

“Any reporter looking into his record can see that he consistently renewed the 287(g) agreement when he was sheriff,” she said. “He was not persuaded at all by community members whose lives were upended by the program and whose families were separated. So it’s just—I mean, I guess people have short memories.”

Harrison was always an immigration hardliner. He was the first sheriff in North Carolina to enroll in Secure Communities, in which local police run the fingerprints of every person they arrest through a national database to determine their immigration status. Harrison said the program would help his office “find more criminals or criminal aliens who otherwise could have slipped through the cracks.” In its first two years, nearly two-thirds of Secure Communities deportees from Wake County hadn’t been convicted of a crime. (President Joe Biden halted Secure Communities after taking office.)    

In November 2007, the Wake County Board of Commissioners agreed to hire 12 deputies to implement 287(g), which cost about $539,000 a year to operate. By 2009, eight North Carolina counties and the city of Durham had entered into 287(g) agreements as well, with sheriffs falsely blaming immigrants for rising property and violent crime rates. 

Sometimes, overt racism bubbled to the surface. One sheriff complained about “trashy” Mexicans “breeding like rabbits.” Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson told his deputies to “go out there and get me some of those taco eaters.” (In 2012, the U.S. Justice Department sued Alamance County for targeting Latinos. Its sheriff’s office was forced to withdraw from 287(g), though Alamance joined the program again during the Trump administration.)Harrison’s participation in 287(g) didn’t create roadblocks to reelection in 2010 and 2014. Echeverría says El Pueblo and other immigrant advocacy groups didn’t coalesce into a political force until 2015, when Republican Governor Pat McCrory signed a law that prohibited sanctuary cities and banned government agencies from using consular or embassy documents to verify a person’s identity.

Trump’s immigration policies further moved the issue at the forefront of the nation’s preoccupations, especially in urban counties like Wake, which voted for Hillary Clinton by more than 20 points. Harrison nevertheless argued that his close ties with the least popular federal agency made the county safe. “If I turn a child molester or a bank robber loose, or whatever on the street, and I turn him loose because I didn’t know who he was and he went down the street and robbed a bank or molested a child, who’s going to be blamed for it?” Harrison said in 2018.

A study of North Carolina from the libertarian Cato Institute found “no statistically significant impact of 287(g) program participation on either violent or property crime rates.” In addition, most people ensnared by 287(g) were sitting in jail pretrial and over misdemeanor charges, including minor offenses such as driving without a license or with a broken taillight.

Baker made 287(g) central to his 2018 campaign, promising to leave the program “for the sake of humanity.” The issue drew national attention and financial investments. The ACLU ran ads in Wake County that highlighted 287(g) and criticized Harrison’s support for a deputy who was involved in an assault on an unarmed Black man. 

Echeverría says that when Baker severed ties with ICE, many in the Latino community were “very excited that there’s an elected official who said he was going to do something positive for the community and actually did it.” When Baker began recognizing Community Action IDs earlier this year, “that probably made it more tangible and more real.”

Ending 287(g) was “a local issue that’s tied to a national issue,” Echeverría said. “And the national apparatus was horrific at that time. So it couldn’t fully give the relief that community members would want. But it definitely made a difference.”

Activists notched a victory “at a time when, honestly, a lot of the policy advocacy on the state level and on the federal level was going nowhere,” she added. 

But ICE pushed back. After Baker and other new North Carolina sheriffs terminated 287(g) and stopped honoring detainer requests, ICE retaliated by conducting a wave of raids in North Carolina, which it called the “direct result of some of the dangerous policies that some of our county sheriffs have put into place.” 

Under Trump, ICE also tried to expand its reach, though participation in 287(g) remains rare: Fewer than 150 of the nation’s roughly 3,000 counties have joined, including just 14 of North Carolina’s 100 sheriffs. (All state sheriffs are up this year.) Of them, 13 hail from rural counties Trump won handily. The exception is Nash County, which narrowly backed Biden. There, GOP Sheriff Keith Stone, who signed onto 287(g), faces Democrat David Brake in November. (Brake did not respond to Bolts’s request for comment.)

These 14 counties’ combined population is far smaller than those of Wake and Mecklenburg (Charlotte), which quit 287(g) after the 2018 midterms. Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary McFadden is running unopposed for reelection in November. 

Those 2018 results reflected a new political reality: In many urban areas in North Carolina and across the country, partnering with ICE is untenable. 

That hasn’t sat well with Republican-led legislatures. Florida passed laws requiring local law enforcement to honor ICE detainers and participate in 287(g) by 2023. Texas and Tennessee required local police to honor detainers in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Arkansas and Mississippi banned so-called sanctuary cities. Twice in the last four years, North Carolina Republicans passed bills mandating that law enforcement honor ICE detainer requests. Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed both. But in November, the GOP hopes to pick up enough legislative seats to claim supermajorities that can override Cooper’s vetoes.

“I assure you I can come in and in a short amount of time put things back on track,” Harrison told a candidate forum in April, three weeks before the primary. The sheriff’s office had a critical staffing shortage, he said. Fentanyl was epidemic. Gun violence was rampant. Harrison promised to make the county safe. 

That included working with ICE. Asked point-blank during the forum if he would reinstate 287(g), Harrison responded, “Yes. I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.” 

“I can tell you, 287(g), people don’t understand it, didn’t understand it,” the former sheriff continued. “I don’t have time to tell you now other than the fact that if you get arrested and you come to the jail, then they found out that you were illegal, or you were not legal, then they can take over as far as what will happen after that. I would not want a sex offender living in my neighborhood. And I can tell you this, the people that I talk to like the 287(g).”

But he also said he didn’t think 287(g) would exist by the time the new sheriff takes office in December. Crone, Harrison’s consultant, told Bolts that a key factor in Harrison’s reversal on 287(g) was his belief that Biden plans to kill the program by the end of the year. 

It’s not clear where that idea came from. While Biden promised during the presidential campaign to end 287(g) agreements forged during the Trump administration, his administration has made few moves in that direction—to the chagrin of his allies. 

Another factor appears to be political necessity. No Republican has won a countywide contest since 2014, the last year Harrison won the sheriff’s office. In 2018, he outperformed every other Wake Republican but still lost by double digits. Harrison entered the general election this year with big advantages in money and name recognition over Willie Rowe, Harrison’s Democratic opponent. But Wake County’s blue lean still makes him an underdog, says Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and an expert on the state’s voting patterns.

“You can put up the best Republican ideal candidate, and I think voter loyalty and behavior is still going to matter when it comes to this kind of dynamic,” Bitzer said.

Harrison couldn’t afford to let the election become a referendum on 287(g). “He wants to win,” said Rowe. “That’s the motivating factor. The numbers aren’t there to support that kind of policy.”

Even so, Harrison’s campaign didn’t equivocate about his new positions. Crone said that Harrison would not rejoin 287(g) even if the next president pushes to expand the program. He does not believe it’s necessary, Crone said. Everyone entering the jail will be screened to verify their identity and to look for outstanding warrants or see if they are wanted in another jurisdiction. 

Harrison’s new stance on detainer requests—he won’t honor one without “a warrant signed by a magistrate or judge,” Crone said—is also arguably more categorical than Rowe’s. 

Rowe told Bolts that he believes detainers violate the Fourth Amendment. However, he said that he would honor them as a “last resort” to keep people accused of violent crimes behind bars, but only after first asking the DA and courts to raise their bonds. “That’s the legal way to do it,” Rowe said.

Some critics question whether Harrison’s election-year conversion is genuine. “You can say anything to get the vote,” Rowe said. “But the proof in the pudding is when it comes time to put it into practice—what are any loopholes to get around? I can say, every time I work with immigrants, ‘Well, they’re a threat.’ And that word is used so much in dealing with so many people. You just say, “They’re a threat, and this is why I’m taking this course of action.’”

Iliana Santillán, the current director of El Pueblo, remained skeptical but said she’s “hopeful he’d maintain his promise if elected but am reminded once again of the hundreds of families separated during his time as Wake County Sheriff from 2002 to 2018.”

*This story was updated with comments from Santillán.

The post The Winding Road to Ending ICE Collaboration in Raleigh appeared first on Bolts.

This guide walks you through how concretely the 2022 midterms will shape abortion access. 

We identify nine questions that touch on reproductive rights that state and local elections will decide, and the critical battles that will help answer them. The guide successively covers the meaning of state constitutions, the viability of new laws, and matters of law enforcement.

This guide is just one small slice. The elections mentioned, which cover 21 states, are by no means exhaustive: There are many other races playing out along similar lines for offices that will wield power over these issues for years to come. Still, we hope to give you a taste of the enormous range of powers held by state and local officials, and some of the ways that candidates on all sides are getting creative in how they’d use these in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

What are the candidates running for prosecutor saying in your county, if there’s an election? What about those running for sheriff and attorney general, governor and judge? The very need to ask these questions underscores the magnitude of the loss of federal protections, though local and state conflicts over the issue are by no means new; and that means many candidates already have long histories and some ideas when it comes to how they will approach abortion access.

1. Will voters affirm or reject state constitutional protections for abortion access?

Never have there been more referendums on abortion than this year. In six states, voters will weigh in directly on the issue, and more indirectly in a seventh, and the results could establish new bulwarks against the right’s efforts—or else open the door to new restrictions.

These stakes are clear in: Kansas’s August referendum… 

In a landmark ruling that’s now styming Kansas conservatives, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state constitution’s equal protection clause protects access to abortion. But voters will soon decide whether to adopt a constitutional amendment, championed by Republicans, that would overturn that ruling and lift its protections; the election is scheduled for the lower-turnout August primary. 

… and a likely Michigan referendum in November.

Pro-choice organizers in Michigan this week submitted more than 700,000 signatures on behalf of a constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion rights, far more than the amount needed to get the measure on November’s ballot. If enough signatures are verified, voters will decide the fate of the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban. A progressive win here would be one of Election Night’s defining stories since it would protect access to abortion in a populous swing state, one where governance has long been out of reach for Democrats due to GOP gerrymanders. (That may change this year too.)

Also keep an eye on:

California and Vermont already enable access to abortions, but this fall they could become the first states to explicitly codify the right to abortion and contraception in their state constitutions. 

Inversely, Kentucky conservatives are championing an amendment that would say that the state constitution provides no protections for abortion. Kentucky courts have not affirmed such a right, so this referendum would not overturn existing protections. Still, pro-choice groups have asked judges to do so; that door would all but close if the amendment passed. In Montana, voters may decide that a fetus born alive counts as a legal person. Finally, and more indirectly, Alaska holds a referendum, as it does every ten years, on whether to hold a constitutional convention that may change the state constitution; this matters because the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution’s privacy clause protects abortion access, and some conservatives who favor an abortion ban in Alaska hope for a ‘yes’ win to overturn that precedent.

2. Will new state judges affirm abortion rights, or strike down abortion protections?

State supreme courts are critical battlegrounds for reproductive rights. Nearly a dozen have established that their state constitutions recognize abortion rights. But that landscape is in flux as progressive and conservative litigators aim for new rulings. Upcoming judicial elections will tip the scales in many states; most states elect supreme court justices this year.

These stakes are clear in: Michigan’s supreme court elections…

Governor Gretchen Whitmer and pro-choice organizations want Michigan courts to strike down the state’s pre-Roe ban and find a right to access abortions in the state constitution; the state’s supreme court has yet to rule, and its makeup is a question mark. Democrats enjoy a 4-3 majority on the court, but one justice from each party (Richard Bernstein, a Democrat, and Brian Zahra, a Republican) is up for re-election. Republicans must carry both seats to flip the court.

… and a supreme court election in Montana.

Montana’s supreme court, unlike Michigan’s, has already affirmed that the state constitution protects abortion. But conservatives are asking the high court to overturn that ruling—at the same time as they’re working to push the bench further right. In a heated judicial election this fall, they are backing Jim Brown, a former counsel for the state’s Republican Party, over Justice Ingrid Gayle Gustafson, an incumbent who was appointed by a Democratic governor. 

Also keep an eye on:

The partisan majority of supreme courts is on the line in three other states—Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio—with a combined seven elections between them. These races may be decisive in future cases that touch on abortion rights. Of the three, North Carolina stands out: Abortion remains legal there but the situation could rapidly shift if the GOP makes further gains (see below), making it critical for Democrats to maintain their supreme court majority.

In Kentucky, pro-choice advocates hope to get courts to affirm a right to abortion in the state constitution but a fervently anti-abortion lawmaker is running for a seat on the supreme court. Similarly, conservatives hope to oust a moderate supreme court justice in Arkansas. Finally, eleven justices face retention elections (meaning a yes-or-no vote on whether they should stay in office) in Florida and Kansas, where state jurisprudence is especially fragile right now.

See also: Your State-By-State Guide to the 2022 Supreme Court Elections

3. Will states elect governors who will veto new abortion restrictions?

In some places where abortion remains legal, all that’s standing between virulently anti-abortion legislatures and new restrictions is the veto pen of a pro-choice governor. But for how long?

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania’s governor race.

Abortion rights have survived in this state despite Roe’s fall because the GOP legislature has to deal with the veto power of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat who supports abortion rights. But this status-quo is precarious: Wolf is term-limited and Republicans have nominated far-right lawmaker Doug Mastriano, who has long fought access to abortion, to replace him. The contrast is stark between Mastriano and the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who has opposed new abortion restrictions for decades.

Also keep an eye on:

The Democratic governors of Kansas and Michigan, Laura Kelly and Whitmer, have each used their veto pen to block anti-abortion bills passed by GOP lawmakers. But that shield could soon disappear: Each is up for re-election this fall. That said, each state’s situation is complex: Michigan already has a ban on the books, but Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants state courts to strike it down; in Kansas, the right to an abortion is protected by a court ruling that voters may overturn this summer.

Inversely, Democrats could break the GOP’s control of Arizona and Iowa by flipping these state’s governorships. Arizona’s legal landscape on abortion is in flux, while Iowa’s high court overturned abortion protections in June, opening the door to new restrictions. In New York, where Republican Lee Zeldin would be the first governor opposed to abortion rights in at least 50 years, access would remain broadly protected but Zeldin has signaled he’ll look for ways to chip away.

4. Will states elect legislatures that want to restrict or protect abortion?

Governors are only one part of the puzzle when it comes to new laws; legislative control is just as fundamental. Simply put, will each chamber be favorable or hostile to abortion rights—and if they disagree with their governor, will lawmakers have the votes to override a veto?

These stakes are clear in: North Carolina’s legislative elections.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, is sure to be in office through 2024. At the moment Republicans, who control the legislature but lack veto-proof majorities, cannot get restrictions past him. Will that change this fall? If November is very rough for Democrats, the GOP could make enough gains to sideline Cooper.

Also keep an eye on: 

Republicans have failed to override Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of anti-abortion bills, but even if Kelly wins a second term, they may have an easier time next year if they grow their legislative majorities. Republicans also have outside shots at seizing control of Nevada, New Mexico, and Minnesota state governments if they manage to flip both the governorship and legislature. In the first two states, abortion is currently legal but not protected by state courts; in the third, a court ruling protects abortion but the GOP may still push for some new restrictions.

Inversely, legislative gains by Democrats could protect abortion in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the party has a stronger shot than it has in decades thanks to fairer maps. Finally, keep an eye on Democratic primaries in Maryland and Rhode Island, where progressive groups like Pro-Choice Maryland are targeting Democrats who oppose abortion. This can matter even where Democrats have supermajorities (as in Maryland) if they need to override a Republican governor’s veto.

5. Will cities and counties empower law enforcement to enforce bans or investigate pregnancy outcomes?

Besides changing state constitutions and laws, proponents of reproductive rights face a vast host of challenges having to do with how to mitigate the harms of existing bans, and that includes the threat of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. First up are the sheriffs and police chiefs in charge of arresting and investigating people. A few police chiefs and sheriffs in blue-leaning areas like New Orleans have said they would not enforce abortion bans. How might this play out in the midterms? Police chiefs are typically appointed by city governments (which often have more leeway to direct police practices than they utilize), while sheriffs are directly elected.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s sheriff elections.

The sheriff of Dane County (Madison) put the question of abortion enforcement at the center of Wisconsin’s sheriff elections when he said he would not enforce the state’s 1849 ban on abortion. “Our sheriff’s office has a very strict budget with regards to our time and where we decide to put things,” Kalvin Barrett, a Democrat, told Bolts. He is now running for re-election against Republican Anthony Hamilton, who did not respond to Bolts‘s questions about his position on the issue. Bolts reached out to other candidates running for sheriff in the state. In Milwaukee, the state’s most populous county, all three candidates echoed Barrett’s stance and said they would not use the department’s resources to investigate abortion cases. (All are Democrats.)

In Eau Claire County, where three candidates are running, only Democrat Kevin Otto told Bolts that he would follow Barrett’s footsteps. “I would not enforce the laws on abortion because of the lack of resources and interference into a person’s health matters,” he said. Otto’s Democratic opponent David Riewestahl said it was too early to definitively answer the question, while Republican candidate Don Henning replied he would “investigate complaints as they arise.” 

Also keep an eye on:

Many cities in states with severe abortion restrictions (or that risk having them soon) will elect their municipal governments this year, and the role that their local police departments play in enforcing abortion bans should be central issues. Those cities include Little Rock, Arkansas, Tallahassee, Florida, and Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky.

6. Will counties elect prosecutors who have pledged not to charge abortion cases?

Prosecutors have historically enjoyed vast discretion over what cases to charge, which has made them a highly visible line of defense against the criminal consequences of bans. Already, dozens of prosecutors have said they won’t press charges in cases that involve abortions. As a result, reproductive rights are a major fault line in a host of upcoming elections that pit candidates who say they would enforce restrictions—and candidates who say they’ll decline cases. 

These issues were already present before Dobbs, as zealous prosecutors investigated pregnancy outcomes, as Bolts reported in June. Just last month, a conservative California district attorney lost his re-election bid after prosecuting two women who had experienced stillbirths.

The stakes are clear in: Maricopa County’s prosecutor race (Phoenix)…

Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Rachel Mitchell is now the chief prosecutor of Maricopa County in Arizona, home to 4.5 million people. If courts greenlight the state’s new restrictions on abortion, Mitchell has said she would enforce them. But Maricopa is holding a special election this year, which adds further uncertainty since presumptive Democratic Julie Gunnigle has ruled out pressing criminal charges, as Bolts reported in May in partnership with The Appeal. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” Gunnigle said. “Not now, not ever.”

… and in the prosecutor’s race in Florida’s Pasco-Pinellas (St. Petersburg) counties… 

Florida’s Pasco and Pinellas counties, which share a state attorney, have not had a contested election for prosecutor in 30 years despite being home to a combined 1.5 million residents. And what a time to have one: Their judicial district hosts a special election, much like Maricopa, and the two contenders are at odds on whether to enforce the state’s existing ban on abortions after 15-weeks. (Florida laws may soon get harsher still.) Democrat Allison Miller, a local public defender, says she will not prosecute people providing or obtaining an abortion, unlike Republican incumbent Bruce Bartlett, appointed to the job by Governor Ron DeSantis.

… and in the Texas DA elections.

A group of Texas DAs issued a joint statement this spring vowing to not prosecute abortion. And though just a portion of Texas counties vote for a DA this year, November’s elections will shape whether that group grows or shrinks. Democratic DAs who signed that statement are running for re-election in Bexar and Dallas counties. And in two populous counties that have trended bluer, Democrats are hoping to flip the DA offices. “I will not allow the persecution of our neighbors by cynical politicians bent on establishing a theocracy in Texas,” Kelly Higgins, the Democratic nominee in Hays County, wrote on Facebook after the Dobbs decision. In Tarrant County, where a staunchly punitive incumbent is retiring and former President Trump has gotten involved on behalf of the GOP nominee, Democratic nominee Tiffany Burks told Bolts she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever.”

Importantly, the discretion of Texas DAs may be strongly tested by conservatives going forward, as lawmakers and the attorney general are working out ways to kneecap these local officials.

Also keep a eye on:

Iowa’s most populous county (Polk, home to Des Moines) is sure to have a new prosecutor come next year, and Democratic nominee Kimberly Graham told Bolts in June she would not prosecute cases linked to abortion; the state supreme court in Iowa struck down abortion protections in June, plunging reproductive rights in the state in greater vulnerability. In Shelby County (Memphis), one of the few staunchly blue counties in Tennessee, Republican DA Amy Weirich has pointedly rejected the idea of issuing a blanket policy on not enforcing abortion ban; Steve Mulroy, her Democratic opponent in the August election, has said prosecutions “should be extremely low priorities” and he has assailed Weirich for lobbying for a harsher law.

See also: Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors in 2022?

7. Will states elect attorneys general who want to interfere with local prosecutors?

Prosecutors are imperfect bulwarks since any policy they set is at the mercy of the next election, but also because conservatives have mechanisms at their disposal to supersede DAs—and they are plotting to set up more. Chief among them: Attorneys general. In some states, they have the authority to bring criminal charges on their own, and if not to bury providers under civil lawsuits. 

But this authority can cut both ways. Pro-choice candidates are signaling how they too would try to use the powers of this office for the opposite end, namely to stop the prosecution of abortions. When the conservative DA of California’s Kings County prosecuted two women over stillbirths, for instance, Attorney General Roy Bonta blew up the cases through media appearances and convinced a judge to reopen a case.

The stakes are clear in: Michigan’s attorney general election…

While a series of Michigan prosecutors have ruled out prosecuting abortion, they face a major obstacle: The Michigan attorney general’s latitude to step in is greater than in many other states. Democratic incumbent Dana Nessel has ruled out doing so, but she’s up for re-election and her likely general election opponent, Matt DePerno, has indicated he is in favor of enforcing bans.

… and the Arizona attorney general election.

Kris Mayes, Democrats’ likely nominee for Arizona attorney general, wants to go a step further: She is not just ruling out prosecuting people herself, but she also proposes stopping others from doing so. She says she would use her office’s supervisory authority over all local prosecutors, an authority that is broader in Arizona than elsewhere, to direct all of Arizona’s county attorneys to not enforce bans on abortion. But the Republican candidates in this race largely oppose abortion rights; were they to win, they may flex their power and try to supercede Democratic prosecutors who are refusing to bring criminal charges. Either way, legal questions about the extent of the attorney general’s authority will remain, likely leading to more clashes.

Also keep an eye on: 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, is among the country’s most militant officials in restricting abortion and has vowed to help local prosecutors enforce the state’s harsh laws; he may also bring ruinous civil lawsuits against providers. His opponent Rochelle Garza could not be more different. She has worked on defending access to abortion as an attorney and says she would set up a reproductive rights unit in the office if she wins, which is always a tough proposition for a Texas Democrat—though Paxton’s own criminal indictments may give her an additional opening. In Georgia and Ohio, two states that are looking to implement severe restrictions, Democratic nominees Jen Jordan and Jeffrey Crossman are also speaking on the issue; Jordan says she would issue legal opinions to undercut local prosecutors who are bringing criminal charges, for instance, and Crossman refuses to defend the law in court. Their Republican opponents, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (who responded skeptically to a 10 year-old rape victim who sought an abortion), are currently defending abortion restrictions in court.

8. Will states elect governors who promise clemency?

In states that have already banned or severely restricted abortion, a pro-choice governor, on their own, won’t shield people from arrest and prosecution. But some governors may at least have the authority—by themselves or through appointees to a board, depending on state rules—to issue clemencies for people who are convicted of violating criminal codes.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s governor race.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers has said he would grant clemency to anyone convicted under the state’s 1847 ban on abortions. But Evers is up for re-election this fall, and his GOP opponents have made it clear they support enforcing the ban. 

Also keep an eye on: 

Wisconsin governors have broader discretion than most to grant clemency; many other states dilute that power considerably. 

Still, at least one other state is electing a governor who will have somewhat direct authority to issue pardons: Ohio. Republican Governor Mike DeWine faces Nan Whaley, Dayton’s Democratic mayor, who is an abortion rights supporter and says she would veto new restrictions. She did not respond to a request for comment on clemency powers. The issue has also come up in Arizona, where the governor shares power with a clemency board. Democrat Marco Lopez has said he would support pardoning people convicted over abortions; Katie Hobbs, the other Democrat in the race, supports abortion rights but did not reply to a request for comment on clemency. 

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, who has broad authority over pardons and is only up for re-election in 2023, has not said how he would use his own clemency powers.

9. Will new judges bless gerrymanders that would lock in anti-abortion majorities?

Before overturning Roe v. Wade, this conservative U.S. Supreme Court also refused to rein in partisan gerrymandering. And there’s a direct connection to abortion rights: The GOP in many states has drawn maps that lock in legislative control, making it extraordinarily difficult for pro-choice majorities to emerge even if most residents vote for them. A few state courts have guarded against this dynamic—but their judgements are now on the line.

The stakes are clear in: North Carolina and Ohio’s supreme court elections.

These two states’ supreme courts have each struck down GOP gerrymanders, though Ohio lawmakers have for now circumvented those rulings. But new court majorities may emerge in November—five justices will be elected across the two states—and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering, as Bolts reported in March. Friendlier courts could enable the GOP to draw maps that last the full decade and enshrine anti-abortion majorities. (Note that, while North Carolina is sure to have new congressional maps by 2024, it will be tricky for Republicans to justify drawing new legislative maps before the end of the decade due to legal idiosyncrasies, but they may try if they think they’ve secured a high court would rubber stamp their maneuver.)

And there will be no rest for the weary. Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin indicated that he may push for severe restrictions if the legislature were favorable to it, which has already marked the state’s elections for the state Assembly and Senate in the fall of 2023 as critical for abortion.

The post Your Guide to Local Elections Where Abortion Is on the Line This Year appeared first on Bolts.