Governor Matt Bevin issued an executive order Tuesday suspending former governor Steve Beshear’s restoration of voting rights to non-violent felony offenders. “Today, I took action to uphold several commitments I made during my campaign so that we can implement real solutions that will help the people of Kentucky,” said Governor Bevin.
Weeks before he leaves office, the governor of Kentucky on Tuesday issued an executive order that immediately granted the right to vote to about 140,000 nonviolent felons who have completed their sentences. The order by Gov. Steven L. Beshear, a Democrat, was cheered by advocates for criminal justice reform and civil rights, who said it would place Kentucky’s policy more in line with others across the nation and was consistent with a trend toward easing voting restrictions on former inmates. Kentucky had been one of just three states imposing a lifetime voting ban on felons unless they received a special exemption from the governor. Florida and Iowa still carry the lifetime ban.
If you are a convicted felon in Florida, you have a long wait and an uphill climb to persuade Florida’s highest elected officials to restore your right to vote — even if you have paid your debt to society in full. On Monday, Public Defender Larry Eger and Michael Barfield, vice president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, urged about 40 people at a League of Women Voters of Manatee County forum to support a proposed constitutional amendment that will automatically restore a felon’s voting rights once “all terms of sentence including parole or probation” are completed.
When Republican Gov. Larry Hogan vetoed a Maryland bill that expanded voting rights, he angered a group of people who were never able to vote for him in the first place: felons still serving prison time, probation or parole. Maryland — like every state but Maine and Vermont — restricts the voting rights of felons. Some states bar felony inmates from voting, others extend the prohibition to offenders who are on parole or probation. Several states withhold voting rights from people who have been out of the criminal justice system for years. More states are considering restoring the right to vote to felons, with supporters saying that once their debt to society is paid they should be allowed to exercise a fundamental right. This year, 18 states considered legislation to ease voting restrictions on felons; Wyoming was the only state to pass such a bill. That’s up from 13 states that considered bills last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Gov. Larry Hogan took out his veto pen Friday, rejecting a bill that would allow felons to vote as soon as they leave prison rather than waiting to finish parole or probation. The veto, one of several announced by the governor’s office, quickly drew a pledge from the legislation’s sponsor to find the votes to override. “I just think Maryland should be more progressive,” said Sen. Joan Carter Conway, a Baltimore Democrat. She said she needs to line up only a handful of additional votes in each chamber to override Hogan’s veto when the General Assembly returns in January. In a letter to legislative leaders, Hogan said current law that makes felons wait to vote until completing all aspects of their sentence “achieves the proper balance between repayment of obligations to society for a felony conviction and the restoration of the various restricted rights.” The Republican governor was not available for interviews Friday, aides said.
When Dexter Stanton got out of prison in 2009 after serving time for a felony drunk-driving conviction, he wanted to get involved in the community in a positive way. He volunteered for political campaigns, worked a phone bank, canvassed neighborhoods and was even elected caucus chairman for the local DFL party. What he couldn’t do, however, was vote. “I was a part of the community, and yet I was separate,” Stanton said. “I wasn’t a community member.” Stanton said it doesn’t seem right for someone to be working and paying taxes in the community, but not have a say in decisions. For someone from a family long active in politics, “it was really frustrating,” he said.
Marilyn Watkins of McComb was convicted of shoplifting in 1999 and sentenced to three years of probation. She never had been charged with a crime prior to the shoplifting conviction and hasn’t been accused of any criminal activity since. The one thing her shoplifting conviction cost her is the right to vote. Last week, restoring the right to vote to Watkins was one of four such bills the House Judiciary B Committee voted to send to the full House. “It will mean everything to me to be able to vote again,” Watkins said in a phone interview. “I drive people to the polls to vote, and it hurts that I can’t vote myself. It has been weighing on my shoulders for a long time.”
A widely-supported bipartisan measure to restore voting rights to Minnesota felons once they have been freed from prison has failed to gain traction in the House, leading to protest from supporters and lawmakers who want to know why. The bill, which has cleared committees and made it to the Senate floor, has yet to receive its first hearing in the House Public Safety and Crime Prevention Committee, despite the fact that committee chair Rep. Tony Cornish is chief author of the bill. The bill has until a Friday deadline to receive a hearing. Cornish, R-Vernon Center, said last week only that he hoped the bill would receive a hearing.
A coalition of groups working to restore the voting rights of convicted felons is growing concerned about the prospect of passing a bill this session. Legislation allowing felons to vote once they’re out of jail, rather than waiting until they’re off probation, is poised for a floor vote in the Minnesota Senate. But it does not yet have a scheduled hearing in the House. The committee deadline is Friday. During a news conference Wednesday, Jason Adkins, executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference said the bill enjoys broad bipartisan support.
Lawmakers introduced a bill Wednesday that would restore voting rights in federal elections to nearly 4.4 million U.S. citizens with criminal convictions after their release from prison. The Democracy Restoration Act was introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. Similar versions of the bill have been introduced in past congressional sessions. “Millions of American citizens are without a political voice in federal elections because the current patchwork of laws that disfranchise people with criminal records has created an inconsistent and unfair electoral process,” Deborah J. Vagins, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a press release issued Wednesday. She urged Congress to pass the bill, arguing that many criminal disfranchisement laws stemmed from the Jim Crow era, with the intent of keeping African-Americans from voting.
A bill is moving forward in the General Assembly that would restore an ex-felon’s voting rights while he is on parole or probation. Senators debated the bill for an hour on Thursday, weighing the appropriate time for the restoration of someone’s voting rights. Current law states that someone in Maryland convicted of a felony is unable to register to vote for the length of their punishment, including prison time, probation and parole.
The 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and a re-enactment in Knoxville on Sunday did more than honor a noteworthy event. Both ceremonies emphasized what the right to vote means to many Americans and what it should mean to all. The event in Selma helped gain passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and now is a vital part of this nation’s legacy. Voting is a right mentioned several times in the Constitution and subsequent amendments; it is more than a privilege. Significantly, no one participating in the observances in Selma or in Knoxville last week believed that the 1965 legislation or its remembrance marked the end of the quest. Pernicious state laws requiring photo identification to vote and Supreme Court decisions weakening the 1965 law open the way to expand discrimination.
In a shift from the “tough on crime” rhetoric of years past, some Maryland lawmakers are questioning whether the state has gone overboard in punishing ex-offenders long after they have paid their dues and returned to the street. “Restorative justice is the movement we’re hearing about,” said Del. Brett R. Wilson, a prosecutor and Western Maryland Republican who supports some efforts to help ex-offenders get jobs. “It’s gained momentum over the years. There’s no doubt about that.” The General Assembly is considering bills that would make it easier for some former offenders to have their records expunged or to at least shield records from potential employers and landlords. Another measure would restore voting rights to felons much sooner than under current law.
A freshman delegate in the Maryland General Assembly is championing a cause that has deep personal meaning for him: the restoration of full voting rights for ex-offenders. Del. Cory V. McCray (D-Baltimore), who was arrested on the streets of East Baltimore more times than he can remember, recognizes that he could easily have been among the estimated 40,000 ex-offenders in Maryland who face obstacles to voting. The former teenage drug dealer is the lead House sponsor of a bill that promotes voting rights for former felons who have been prohibited from casting a ballot in Maryland. Nationally, an estimated 5.85 million Americans are unable to vote because of felony convictions, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit criminal justice think tank.
A Senate committee Thursday passed a bill that would restore voting rights to former felony offenders in Minnesota as soon as they’re released from incarceration. Currently an estimated 47,000 Minnesotans who’ve been released from jails or prisons aren’t allowed to vote because they’re on probation. Some went straight to probation and lost their voting privileges for long periods of time. “How can you explain to people that they pay their taxes and they can’t vote?” asked Demetria, one of many who lined up outside the hearing room at the State Capitol.
In 2013, Kelli Griffin went to vote in a local election in Montrose, Iowa. She had been through some hard times — a survivor of domestic abuse who had suffered from drug addiction, she was convicted in 2008 of a drug-related crime, and served five years probation. But now Griffin was turning her life around, and voting was a rite of passage. She even took her four kids to the polls to teach them about the democratic process. “I felt good,” said Griffin, 41. “I mean, it’s one of the steps to being back into society, to fulfilling that I am just like everybody else. I mean, I’ve overcome a lot.” But what happened next would make clear that in the eyes of the law, Griffin wasn’t at all like everybody else. It would set this shy stay-at-home mom who never graduated college on a path to challenging her state’s highest officials. And it would help spark the latest step in a growing push-back against a set of laws that, five decades after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, still disenfranchise millions of Americans.
Five prefiled bills in the Kentucky General Assembly propose restoring voting rights for many of the state’s convicted felons, and advocates say they hope reform can be enacted in a state with a high rate of disenfranchisement. The different acts of legislation are sponsored by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers. State Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, prefiled the first bill in the 2015 legislative session to call for an amendment to the state constitution to allow convicted felons to vote. Subsequent bills were filed by Rep. Darryl Owens, D- Louisville, Sen. Tom Buford, R-Nicholasville, and Rep. Jeff Hoover, R-Jamestown.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe plans to announce today that he will shrink the time violent felons must wait to seek reinstatement of their voting rights and will remove some offenses from that list. The policy slated to take effect April 21 comes on top of years of work to streamline the process, and aims to make the system easier to understand and to allow more felons to petition the state more quickly. In a series of changes to the state’s restoration of rights process, McAuliffe plans to collapse the application waiting period from five to three years for people convicted of violent felonies and others that require a waiting period, and to remove drug offenses from that list. In Virginia, only the governor can restore civil rights to felons, and attempts over the years to change the Virginia Constitution to allow for automatic restoration have failed.
Hundreds of thousands of Floridians who have served time in prison are unable to vote because of what some are calling the most restrictive rights restoration policy in the nation. But multiple efforts are underway to change the system. The restoration of civil rights includes the right to vote, serve on a jury, or hold public office. It does not included the right to own a firearm. Legislation pending in Congress could require the state to allow former felons to vote in federal elections. About 50 black-shirted protesters showed up at the quarterly Clemency Board meeting, angry over what some call the most restrictive clemency system in the nation. Over the course of four years, those getting their rights back has fallen from 30,000 to under 1,000 last year. Applicants must wait at least five years before even applying. And a single speeding ticket can disqualify someone.
A coalition of groups in Florida are preparing to try to get a constitutional amendment on the 2016 ballot in Florida that would restore the voting rights of most individuals with past felony convictions upon completion of their sentence. These groups include the ACLU of Florida, the League of Women Voters, Faith in Florida and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. The proposed constitutional amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense. The state’s current policy regarding ex-felons was an issue that Charlie Crist occasionally discussed during the recent gubernatorial campaign. When he took office after being elected in 2007, the then Republican governor was able to persuade a majority of the Florida Cabinet to change the policy to provide ex-offenders convicted of less serious offenses the right to regain their rights without a hearing, while those convicted of crimes such as murder required a more thorough investigation and a hearing. But that was repealed in 2011, when newly elected Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the process was too easy for released felons. Shortly after she made those comments, she and the rest of the Cabinet scrapped the process and set a minimum of a five-year waiting period.
Eligible voters in Iowa had the opportunity to exercise a privilege of democracy when the polls opened on Election Day, Nov. 4. Some of them chose not to participate, but thousands of others were denied the right to participate by a disputed provision in the Iowa Constitution. That provision excludes otherwise eligible voters who have been convicted of “any infamous crime,” which has generally been interpreted to mean felonies. Which also means that literally tens of thousands of people who have served their time and paid their debt to society are denied one of the fundamental rights of citizenship in a democracy. The latest effort to end this denial of a fundamental right came in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa three days after the election. The lawsuit on behalf of a woman with a felony record from a drug conviction seeks have her voting rights restored by a Polk County District Court judge. She argues that her criminal conviction does not meet the definition of an “infamous” crime. Beyond that, the lawsuit asks the district court to specifically define which felonies fall under the broad definition of infamous crimes for voting rights purposes.
The Palm Beach Post has done well to inform local residents that one in 10 of their fellow Floridians is barred from the voting booth by a felony conviction. What remains less known is how broken the system for restoring voting rights has become. In Florida, both serious crimes and less serious ones, like altering a lottery card or molesting a stone crab trap, take away your voting rights for life. We are one of a very few states with this provision in our constitution, and we’re the state with by far the greatest number of felons disfranchised — 1.5 million. Our constitution does provide a way to get your voting rights back — executive clemency — but this system is overburdened. As a result of policy changes put in place in 2011, felons now have to wait five to seven years before they can apply to have their rights restored, and that’s after they have completed their sentence, their terms of supervision and any restitution requirements. When they do apply, however, many are going to have to wait a very, very long time.
Convicts who served their time shouldn’t be shut out of Florida voting booths, according to Palm Beach County voting rights advocates who favor more forgiving voting rules for felons. They want to change a state policy, imposed under Gov. Rick Scott in 2011, that requires 5- to 7-year waiting periods followed by applications to the governor and state Cabinet for felons to try to have their voting rights restored. Most other states restore voting rights automatically when felons complete their sentences. The League of Women Voters of Palm Beach County, the Voting Rights Coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union are among the groups gathering in Boca Raton Sunday at a forum to raise awareness about what organizers call a state policy that is “undermining democracy.”
Robert Stewart hasn’t been able to vote since 2006, a right he lost because there’s a felony on his record. But for the past several years, the third-year sociology graduate student has been fighting to regain his voting rights. “It’s encouraged me to be involved,” he said, “because I have no other way to be involved in the political process, other than through advocacy.” While a bill to restore voting eligibility to many Minnesotans with criminal records when they leave prison made headway in the last legislative session, the measure failed to make it onto the floor of either chamber. Now, some University of Minnesota students are working to further the rights of those with criminal backgrounds. “I think [people with criminal records] should be welcomed back into the community,” said associate sociology professor Joshua Page. He said he believes the public should strive to integrate former convicts back into society, rather than exclude them.
Felons won’t let up on state lawmakers in Kentucky until they get the right to vote. After getting a powerful ally in U.S. Sen. Rand Paul this year, the supporters of the automatic restoration of voting rights for most felons hope the next session of the Kentucky General Assembly in January will give felons the same rights they have in most other states. Already, three bills, two by Democrats and one by a Republican, have been filed that would automatically restore upon completion of the sentence and probation the voting rights for felons not convicted of sex offenses, homicide, treason and bribery. All three are Constitutional amendments that require the support of 60 percent of legislators and ratification by voters.
For Chris Page of Bowling Green, having his voting rights restored after serving prison time for a felony conviction was a way of reclaiming visibility and a voice in the electoral process. “I think it’s significant for me because it makes you feel like you’re part of the American dream,” he said. While many people think of the American dream as a home and a white picket fence, Page said that, for him, voting is part of that picture. Page said he will vote for the first time in November since his incarceration. He is trying to learn about candidates who will be on the ballot to prepare himself. “It’s kind of going to be a welcome-home party as far as a personal journey of mine,” he said.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced today that his administration has restored the voting rights of more than 2,500 non-violent felons who have served their time.
“Virginians who have served their time deserve a second chance to become productive members of society again,” said McAuliffe said in a statement. “I am proud of the reforms my administration has undertaken to expand and expedite the rights restoration process and the work my team has done restoring Virginians’ voting rights so former offenders can lead successful, productive lives here in the commonwealth,” he said.
Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin teamed up with an unlikely political ally on Tuesday — Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — in pushing for federal legislation to allow millions of Americans with felony convictions to regain their right to vote. Paul, a conservative Republican who many believe is eying a presidential run in 2016, joined Cardin, a Democrat, at a forum on Capitol Hill to call attention to the issue. Despite different political ideologies, the two have introduced similar bills to restore voting rights for felons who have served their sentences. “We’ve had some differences over the years, but we have joined forces in recognizing that there’s an important policy that we can advance in helping people reenter into our society,” Cardin said. “This is one of the Jim Crow laws of our time.” If either measure is approved it would replace a patchwork of state laws that vary widely on when a felon may vote.
Wyoming lawmakers are considering setting up an automatic process to allow some felons to regain their voting rights after they serve their time. The bill would to set up a process to restore voting rights for nonviolent, first-time offenders once they finish serving their sentences, including any probation or parole. Currently, offenders must apply to the state parole board for restoration of voting rights. The Legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee is set to consider the issue next week in Newcastle. Bob Lampert, director of the Wyoming Department of Corrections, is set to testify to the committee next week. He said Wednesday he’ll be prepared to answer questions without taking a position on what lawmakers should do.
When right meets left over the issue of access to the voting booth, it gets our attention. Case in point is GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s support for a long-sought objective of some congressional Democrats — restoring the right to vote to convicted felons. It’s a good objective that has parallels with the growing bipartisan questions about the nation’s 40-year-old war on drugs. As drug convictions caused state prisons to quadruple in population through those decades, and federal prisons swelled by 800 percent, the number of disenfranchised citizens spiked as well. Today, about 5.85 million people nationwide have lost the right to vote because of felonies. Some of them are disenfranchised permanently, depending on the state laws where they live.