Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Voting bill in Washington killed by impasse on which felons should benefit

State capitol in Olympia, Washington

Democrats in Olympia failed to corral enough votes in time to push through their expansion of felons' voting rights.

JerryPDX/Getty Images

The cause of felon voting rights has suffered an unexpected setback in one of the nation's more progressive states.

Legislation that would allow convicted criminals in Washington to register and vote as soon as they get out of prison was killed Wednesday night in the solidly Democratic state Senate — the victim of a lack of compromise.

The measure, which was spiked on the last day it could advance under the Legislature's rules, had been perhaps the most prominent state legislative effort this year to expand the franchise for freed felons in time for the presidential election.


Doing so is a top cause of civil rights groups, who say getting back the vote amounts to a stamp of readmission into society for a group already marginalized because it's disproportionately poor and non-white. On the other side are those who argue that felons' debt to society must not be made so easy to repay. And on top of that debate is partisan politics, because those who have been incarcerated lean decidedly Democratic.

At issue in Olympia was just how speedily voting rights should be restored, and for which felons. Washington is already among the 21 states that do so for all felons after they complete their parole or probation. The legislation would have made Washington the 17th state to make the restoration automatic upon release from prison. About 10,000 people would have benefited.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Democrats abruptly halted debate, however, when it became clear the bill lacked the 25 votes necessary for passage.

That happened soon after minority Republicans succeeded, with some cross-aisle votes, in amending the bill to deny the new benefit to sex offenders on probation. After senators narrowly rejected a subsequent GOP proposal to also exempt murderers and others convicted of violent crimes, Democrats concluded the bill's passage would pose campaign season trouble.

"If you're going to go home and say 'rape a child, you can't vote, shoot a child, you get to vote,' how do you explain that to your constituents, how do you explain that to the people?" Republican Doug Ericksen had warned his colleagues.

Several states have different timetables for giving the vote back to the most serious offenders, or deny them the vote altogether. The most famous recent expansion of felon voting rights, the referendum approved by Florida voters in 2018, does not cover murderess or sex offenders, for example.

"We are extremely disappointed that the voting rights restoration bill did not pass," the ACLU of Washington said in a statement. "The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy and the time to tear down these barriers is long past due."

The prime sponsor, Democrat Patty Kuderer, who has been working to win Senate passage for three years, vowed to try again in 2021. She noted her bill was pushed by a broad coalition of 50 organizations including the association of local prosecutors, the Department of Corrections, and Democratic Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

Read More

We play a role in our political opponents growing more extreme

A pair of red and blue boxing gloves.

Getty Images / Shana Novak

We play a role in our political opponents growing more extreme

As the election dust settles, one thing remains unchanged: America is deeply divided.

Just as before the election, many are hyper-focused on the extreme ideas and actions of their opponents. Democrats are shocked that so many could overlook Trump’s extreme behavior, as they see it: his high-conflict approach to leadership, his disrespect for democratic processes. Whereas Trump’s supporters see his win as evidence supporting the view that the left has grown increasingly extreme and out-of-touch.

Keep ReadingShow less
From Fixers to Builders
Illustration by iStock/DrAfter123

From Fixers to Builders

This piece was originally published in the Stanford Innovation Review on January 9, 2025.

How do we get people of all political identities to willingly support social progress without compromising anyone’s values? In September 2024, two months before the American public voted Republicans into control of every branch of the US national government, that question was definitively answered at a private, non-political gathering of philanthropic foundation executives and their communications officers.

Keep ReadingShow less
AI is Fabricating Misinformation: A Call for AI Literacy in the Classroom

Students using computers in a classroom.

Getty Images / Tom Werner

AI is Fabricating Misinformation: A Call for AI Literacy in the Classroom

Want to learn something new? My suggestion: Don’t ask ChatGPT. While tech leaders promote generative AI tools as your new, go-to source for information, my experience as a university librarian suggests otherwise. Generative AI tools often produce “hallucinations,” in the form of fabricated misinformation that convincingly mimics actual, factual truth.

The concept of AI “hallucinations” came to my attention not long after the launch of ChatGPT. Librarians at universities and colleges throughout the country began to share a puzzling trend: students were spending time fruitlessly searching for books and articles that simply didn’t exist. It was only after questioning that students revealed their source as ChatGPT. In the tech world, these fabrications are called “hallucinations,” a term borrowed from psychiatry to describe sensory systems that become temporarily distorted. In this context, the term implies generative AI has human cognition, but it emphatically does not. The fabrications are outputs of non-human algorithms that can misinform – and too often, do.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump is gearing up to politicize the Department of Justice. Again.

President-elect Donald Trump, Wednesday, January 8, 2025.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Donald Trump is gearing up to politicize the Department of Justice. Again.

Withhis loyalists lining up for key law-enforcement roles, Trump is fixated on former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who helped lead the January 6 congressional investigation. “Liz Cheney has been exposed in the Interim Report, by Congress, of the J6 Unselect Committee as having done egregious and unthinkable acts of crime,”Trump recently said. Then he added: “She is so unpopular and disgusting, a real loser!”

This accelerates a dangerous trend in American politics: using the criminal justice system to settle political scores. Boththe Trumps and the Bidens have been entangled in numerous criminal law controversies, as have many other politicians this century, includingScooter Libbey,Ted Stevens,Robert Coughlin,William Jefferson,Jesse Jackson Jr.,David Petraeus,Michael Fylnn,Steve Bannon,Bob Menendez, andGeorge Santos.

Keep ReadingShow less