The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights in order to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and well-being of all persons.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter.
Tennessee's requirements for felons to regain their voting rights are unconstitutionally complicated, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.
Civil rights groups have returned to the cause of criminals' political rights for the second time this week — this time in Tennessee, which has some of the strictest and most complex rules in the nation.
A federal lawsuit the NAACP filed Thursday alleges the constitutional rights of perhaps 350,000 Tennesseans have been violated by the "unequal, inaccessible, opaque and error-ridden implementation" of the law permitting felons to apply to vote again after completing their sentences.
The state stands out in a nation where such rules have a disproportionate effect on people of color, which critics see as an affront to both racial justice and an engaged electorate. The Campaign Legal Center, which drafted the suit, says one in five Black adults in Tennessee can't vote because of their convictions, the second highest disenfranchisement rate after Wyoming, which has a tiny Black population. The same is true for 10 percent of Latinos, a higher share than anywhere else.
Indiana is the ninth state to extend the deadline for accepting mailed ballots since the outbreak of the coronavirus.
A federal judge extended the deadline Tuesday for mail-in ballots to arrive at the election offices in reliably red Indiana, while an appeals court upheld a similar extension in battleground Wisconsin.
Judge Sarah Evans Barker of Indianapolis ordered a 10-day extension for absentee ballots, meaning as long as they are postmarked by Election Day they will still be tabulated if they arrive by Nov. 13.
That ruling makes Indiana the ninth state where the window for accepting mailed ballots this year has been extended, either by the state voluntarily or as a result of a court order. The longer deadlines, which have become one of the more frequent easements for the record surge of voting by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, mean results of close contests up and down many ballots may not be reliably clear for many days after Nov. 3.
Inmates at Illinois' Cook County Jail cast ballots in the March primary. A county ordnance requires more access to voting in jails.
The vast majority of states allow those serving misdemeanor sentences in jails to vote. And the Supreme Court ruled back in 1974 that eligible voters being held in jails — those who have been arrested but not yet convicted — could not be denied their right to vote because they were incarcerated.
On any given day, the number of eligible voters locked up by cities and counties ranges from half a million to 700,000, numbers big enough to tip the outcome of close legislative or congressional contests — or even a presidential battleground state.
But in a year in which the coronavirus pandemic has made everything about elections more difficult, this particularly hard-to-reach segment of the electorate is even tougher to reach.
Mississippi is facing a lawsuit challenging its restrictive law governing who can vote by mail and who must go to the polls, like this 2018 voter in Ridgeland.
A lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court challenges the requirements governing voting by absentee ballot in Mississippi — among the most restrictive of any state.
The suit takes issue with the rule that people have an excuse in order to vote by mail, that absentee ballots must be notarized, and that the state has no provision for notifying people if an absentee ballot has been rejected so voters can fix the problem.
Mississippi is one of just seven states that requires an excuse for people to receive an absentee ballot for the November election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A majority of states already have "no excuse" absentee voting and several more are making an exception for the 2020 general election because of the coronavirus pandemic.
