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.
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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.