Millions of voters out West were asked explicitly this week to stick up for expanded voting rights — and in the main they did so in a series of ballot measures.
In a pair of resounding decisions, Nevadans enshrined 11 voting rights in their state Constitution and Calfornians restored voting rights to nearly 50,000 people who are on parole for felony convictions.
But statewide voters in California rejected the idea of 17-year-olds voting in primaries, while San Francisco shot down a proposal to let 16-year-olds vote in local elections.
Here are the details on each of the most important voting rights measures on Tuesday's ballots:
Felons voting
The measure was added to the ballot by the General Assembly this spring, during a period of intense national reckoning about race — especially the impact of the criminal justice system on people of color. It had the approval of 59 percent with about three quarters of the ballots tabulated Thursday morning.
The initiative's supporters included the state Democratic Party and Sen. Kamala Harris, the party's vice presidential candidate and a former California attorney general. The state Republcian Party opposed it.
Improving voting rights for ex-convicts nationwide has become a decade-long cause of civil rights groups, who say democracy is enhanced when political power is given back to people who have paid their debt to society. The campaign has resulted in more than 2 million felons, a group disproportionately Black and Latino, getting more political rights in the past decade. (Republicans, who argue that rewarding violent or repeat offenders is an injustice to their victims, have most notably succeeded in restricting newly restored rights for felons in Florida.)
The state estimates that three out of four men released from its prisons these days are Black, Latino or Asian American. "For far too long, Black and brown Californians have been excluded from our democracy," said Taina Vargas-Edmond, who ran the campaign for the referendum. "Voters definitively righted a historic wrong."
California joins 17 states that already allow felons to register upon release from prison. It was one of the first states to restore any of their political rights, allowing felons to vote since 1975 after completing probation and parole. That is too strict by today's standards, ballot measure advocates argued.
Teens voting
Californians rejected a proposal, by a margin of 10 percentage points, that would have added their state to the roster of 18 others (plus D.C.) where 17-year-olds may vote in primaries if they are going to turn 18 by Election Day.
And the adults in the state's iconic bastion of liberalism, San Francisco, narrowly rejected a proposal to allow 16-year-olds to vote in elections for mayor, Board of Supervisors and other municipal posts. The margin was just 4,000 votes out of more than 330,000 cast.
Proponents of lowering the voting age from 18 say doing so would boost civic engagement by establishing the habit of election participation at an earlier age. But opponents say the change would give too much responsibility to youngsters neither mature nor informed enough to make decisions about political issues.
Voting bill of rights
With three-quarters of the expected total vote counted in Nevada on Thursday, a voter bill of rights was garnering 63 percent support.
The state enacted a law 17 years ago guaranteeing Nevadans 11 voting rights and privileges. The ballot measure does not alter that law, but putting the measure in the Constitution makes it much tougher to alter or overturn someday.
The state Constitution will now guarantee that voters will have their ballots recorded accurately, can cast votes without intimidation or coercion, and can get answers to questions regarding voting procedures and see those procedures posted at polling places.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.