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New felon rights win: Californians will decide on letting parolees vote
Jul 01 2020
Another big moment for efforts to expand the voting rights of former prisoners will come in November, when Californians decide whether almost 50,000 parolees should be given access to the ballot box.
Sponsors of the referendum, which last week won final legislative approval for a spot on the ballot, say they're confident the vote will go their way. That would add the nation's most populous state to the roster of 16 that permit felons to vote as soon as they get out of prison.
Restoring the franchise to ex-convicts has become a top 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 gained additional momentum this summer from the nationwide protests against police violence and systemic racism.
<p>Resistance to the idea comes mainly from Republicans, who say the ability to vote should not be granted too easily to violent or repeat offenders. But there's also clearly partisan politics at work. About 56 percent of the nation's prison population is Black or Latino — double the share of the population overall — and they vote decidedly Democratic.</p><p>Still, more than 2 million felons have seen their voting rights expanded in the past decade thanks to actions by state legislatures and gubernatorial orders. In the last year, for example, laws enacted in Nevada and Colorado did what the California measure would accomplish and allowed a combined 87,000 people on parole to vote again.</p><p>Iowa is the only state left where felons lose the right to cast a ballot for life, unless the governor steps in, and last month Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds promised to sign an executive order before the election restoring the right to vote to about 60,000 people with felony convictions.</p><p>In the most important referendum on the topic so far, Floridians voted overwhelmingly in 2018 to allow 1.4 million criminals to cast ballots after completing both parole and probation — the law in almost half the states now, including California.</p><p>Thousands are now registering in the presidential battleground while GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis appeals a federal judge's May ruling that struck down a state law, enacted a year ago, requiring felons to pay all their court-ordered financial obligations before voting.</p><p>California was one of the first states to restore any sort of political rights to the formerly incarcerated, adopting a referendum in 1974 allowing felons to vote after both probation and parole were complete. That is too strict by today's standards, sponsors of the ballot measure say. </p><p>The referendum "gives Californians the chance to right a wrong and restore voting rights for a marginalized community and people of color," said Democratic state Rep. Kevin McCarty, whose bill passed the House easily last fall and cleared the Senate by a lopsided 28-9 last week. "This is good for democracy and good for public safety."</p><p>Republican state Sen. Jim Nielsen called the proposal a "criminal injustice" policy because former criminals should be "subject to consequences for their behavior."</p>
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Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
The Exposition Center was the only polling place in Louisville on Tuesday.
Voting rights groups watch warily as Kentucky votes pretty easily
Jun 23 2020
Kentucky was poised to join the roster of states with calamitous primaries after deciding to shutter 95 percent of its in-person polling locations Tuesday. With only four hours until the polls close, though, there is little visible downside to that aggressive response to favor mail-in-voting because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Kentuckians who didn't receive absentee ballots in time or otherwise decided to vote in person braced for long lines and confusion at the fewer than 200 available locations. But even in the state's biggest population centers — Louisville and Lexington, each of which opened just one place to vote — waiting times were reported as manageable.
And there were minimal complaints about stressed equipment or overwhelmed poll workers, the other problems that sullied Georgia's primary two weeks ago and raised nationwide alarm bells about pandemonium in November.
<p>Even with the reduced options for in-person voting options, Kentucky was on track to see the highest rate of primary turnout in a dozen years, mainly because the state encouraged everyone to vote by mail and the Democratic ballot featured an intense and late-developing contest for the right to challenge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the fall.</p><p>While long lines didn't seem to be materializing, voting rights groups asserted it was still less than ideal to have only one in-person location in most counties.</p><p>They had denounced the arrangements as an act of voter suppression, but their lawsuit hoping to make them open more sites was dismissed last week, a federal judge saying it was too close to the election to change the plans.</p><p>The venues in the big cities — a convention center in Louisville and the University of Kentucky's football stadium in Lexington — were large enough to permit poll workers to space out voting booths to adhere with social distancing protocols and cut down wait times.</p><p>Still, the arrangement may have made the ballot box inaccessible for some voters — especially those without access to transportation, in the view of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has run election trouble hotline on each primary day this year. In a briefing for reporters Tuesday afternoon, the group's president did concede, however, that a free shuttle bus service was available in Louisville and the ride-sharing company Lyft offered free rides to the polls in both cities.</p><p>"Preparedness across the board is key," said President Kristen Clarke. "Getting vote-by-mail right is critical and will alleviate some of the burden on poll workers on election day."</p><p>In response to critiques of how the election was handled, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams pointed to their bipartisan support of mail-in voting — most importantly, their agreement to suspend for the primary the state's usual strict excuse requirements for voting absentee.</p><p>As of Monday, more than half of the nearly 1 million Kentuckians who opted to vote absentee had already returned their ballots, representing 27 percent of registered voters. In a typical primary, only about 51,000 voters, less than 2 percent, cast their ballots by mail.</p><p>The Southern Poverty Law Center said it was not mollified by the absence of a catastrophe. "The trend of consolidating and closing polling locations, especially in areas where communities of color are concentrated, increased after the disastrous Supreme Court decision" that eliminated the heart of the Voting Right Act seven years ago and "has accelerated to new levels during the Covid-19 pandemic. That's unacceptable and a recipe for potential Election Day disaster." </p><p>The main draw was the contest between moderate Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, and progressive Charles Booker, a state legislator representing a Black-majority district in Louisville, to contest the re-election of the longest-serving Republican leader in Senate history.</p><p>The day also featured another mostly by-mail primary in New York — like the one in Kentucky, delayed from the spring because of the pandemic — a few congressional contests in Virginia and runoffs in Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina.</p><p>More than 1.7 million absentee ballots were requested in New York — a tenfold increase after the state also dropped its usually strict rules for mail voting because of the pandemic. The Lawyers' Committee hotline reported scattered complaints of poorly trained poll workers and subway-delayed polling place opening in New York City.</p>
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Webinar rewind: Preparing for potential election crises
Jun 10 2020
A pandemic. Battles over millions of mailed-in ballots. The Supreme Court deciding an Electoral College dispute. The accelerated undoing of democratic norms. Dozens of legal battles over election administration and voting rights. Each would be enough to create unprecedented challenges to an election. But all are present this year, positioning Election Day 2020 and the days after to face challenges rarely as intense before. As Nov. 3 approaches, voters, government officials, candidates and the media may become overwhelmed by the many storylines, the shifting landscape and the potential outcomes. Preparation needs to start now.
The Fulcrum convened an expert panel to discuss these issues and more on June 9. Editor-in-Chief David Hawkings moderated the webinar, which also included:
- Bryan Monroe, associate professor of practice at Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication. Before joining Temple, Bryan was editor of CNNPolitics and Washington opinion editor for CNN; president of the National Association of Black Journalists; and editor-in-chief of Ebony & Jet magazines.
- Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center. Trevor is a past chairman of the Federal Election Commission and was general counsel to John McCain's 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns.
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Joshua Lott/Getty Images
Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds favors a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to felons.
Iowa Legislature advances felon voting rights, but with expensive caveat
Jun 08 2020
The long-running effort to end Iowa's status as the only state permanently stripping voting rights from convicted felons has taken some crucial turns in recent days.
A proposal to ask voters to restore the franchise to convicts who have completed their sentences has been embraced by the same state Senate committee that killed the idea a year ago.
But that endorsement got delivered Friday at what advocates for restoring voting rights view as an improperly high price: Gov. Kim Reynolds signing legislation, produced by her fellow Republicans in charge of the General Assembly, that would require felons to pay fines and restitution if they are ever permitted to register and vote again.
<p>Iowa is considered to have the most restrictive rules about convicted felons and voting of any state, permanently disenfranchising them unless they go through a complicated restoration process and get approval from the governor.<br/></p><p>Floridians voted two years ago to abandon similar rules and restore voting rights for felons who had completed their sentences, but the state's GOP Legislature added the condition that all fines and fees have to be repaid first — a measure similar to the new Iowa statute. </p><p>A federal judge struck down Florida's law two weeks ago on the grounds it created an unconstitutional "pay to vote" requirement, and a federal appeals court had earlier taken a similar view, suggesting Iowa's new statute could face significant challenges if it's ever applied.</p><p>Iowa has about 60,000 people who are barred from voting for life under the current system.</p><p>Reynolds has been pushing for the restoration of felon voting rights since she was elected in 2018. But Republican senators in Des Moines had made clear they would not support the idea without the repayment bill being approved. </p><p>Even then, some continued to dissent; the vote in the Judiciary Committee was 10-4. But that should pave the way for passage by the full Senate and the state House, which voted overwhelmingly for the idea last year.</p><p>The cart-before-the-horse restitution law would not come into play, and be subject to lawsuits, before 2023 at the earliest. That's because the General Assembly would have to endorse the state constitutional amendment not only this year but once again in its 2021-22 session — at which point the measure would be put to a statewide vote for its ultimate test of approval. </p><p>A March poll by the Des Moines Register and Mediacom found 63 percent of Iowans favored the referendum and 45 percent favored requiring restitution be paid to crime victims before voting rights are restored.</p><p>The topic has taken on added urgency because of the nationwide protests, including in Des Moines, over the death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer put a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes.</p><p>A study four years ago by the Sentencing Project found that nearly 10 percent of black adults in the state are barred from voting because of a felony conviction. </p>
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