Minnesota, which takes pride in posting the biggest turnout numbers year after year, is now the newest home for the debate over a more hot-button aspect of elections: voting rights for convicted felons.
The law is the same in Minnesota as 20 other states: The franchise is automatically restored to felons once they finish probation or parole. But the American Civil Liberties Union maintains such a waiting period violates the state constitution. A judge this summer dismissed the group's lawsuit, and on Monday the ACLU asked the state Court of Appeals to revive its claim.
Bolstering the political power of ex-convicts, who are disproportionately Black and Latino, has become a major goal of civil rights groups. The number of felons at issue in Minnesota is 53,000, an estimated three in eight of them Black men in a state with a 6 percent Black population.
Voting rights for about 2 million felons nationwide have been eased in the past decade through a mix of litigation, legislation, ballot measures and gubernatorial decrees. Californians voted last month to make their state the 17th where felons can register as soon as they get out of prison, which is what the ACLU is suing to achieve in Minnesota.
Proponents say democracy is enhanced, and a bit of racial justice achieved, when political power is given back to people who have paid their debt to society. Opponents say rewarding criminals too soon is an injustice to their victims. The fault lines generally fall along party lines, since the felon vote is reliably Democratic.
The Minnesota appeal says the state's rules violate the due process and equal protection guarantees of the state Constitution. The suit was filed in October 2019 after the Legislature deadlocked on bills that would have allowed felons to vote right after their incarceration ended.
The lawsuit argues the waiting period is unfair because probationary periods vary widely. One plaintiff is on probation for 40 years for a drug possession conviction that led to a year in county jail, while another is on probation for just eight years after serving 17 years for murder. (Since the suit was filed the state has capped most future probationary periods at five years.)
Judge Laura Nelson dismissed the suit in August, ruling the plaintiffs had not shown that convicts have a fundamental right to vote and that the racial and regional disparities in sentencing were something to be addressed by the Legislature, which will be the only one in the country with divided control next year — Democrats in charge of the House and the GOP of the Senate.
Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both Democrats, have backed a change in the rules.
The switch could propel turnout statewide even higher. It was 80 percent of eligible voters this fall, No. 1 in the country for the fifth consecutive presidential contest.
The Sentencing Project estimates that of the 5 million Americans without voting rights due to felony convictions, three-quarters have done their time.
The attorneys general of 14 states and the District of Columbia have urged the appeals court to rule in favor of the ACLU. "The disproportionate impact of felon disenfranchisement laws on voters of color raises serious state constitutional and democratic concerns," their brief said, adding that Minnesota's law "is out of step with these important interests."
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.