On June 3, the Nevada legislature passed Assembly Bill 301, and today, Governor Sandoval ignored the bipartisan will of the legislature and vetoed A.B. 301. By issuing a veto for this bill, Governor Sandoval failed to seize a significant opportunity to expand voting rights and support racial justice in Nevada. The bill had aimed to make the voting rights restoration process more efficient and help Nevada move closer to a fair and fully functioning democratic system.
A.B. 301 was written to streamline and simplify Nevada’s incredibly complicated patchwork of laws governing the restoration of voting rights after a criminal sentence. The bill would have automatically restored voting rights to anyone who honorably completes a felony sentence of imprisonment, probation, or parole. The Brennan Center, along with key allies including the American Probation and Parole Association and the ACLU of Nevada, worked hard to shape and support this important voting rights bill. Brennan Center attorney Lee Rowland introduced the bill in March 2011 and again gave testimony in support of the bill in May of 2011. In the legislature, the bill had bipartisan support. As many who supported A.B. 301 testified, including the APPA, investing individuals in their democracy by giving them a vote – and a voice – is a proven way to reduce recidivism and protect public safety. Furthermore, A.B. 301 would have been consistent with substantive reform that has taken place across the country. Since 1997, 19 states have eased the restoration process to varying degrees or restored voting rights for people with criminal convictions in their past.
Governor Sandoval’s decision to veto A.B. 301 marks a missed opportunity for restoration efforts in Nevada. Disenfranchisement after criminal conviction remains the most significant barrier to voting rights. Nationally, 5.3 million American citizens are not allowed to vote because of a criminal conviction – 4 million of whom live, work, and raise families in their communities. According to current disenfranchisement law, more than 40,000 Nevadans are unable to vote due to a past criminal conviction, half of whom have completed their full sentences and are living in the community. Nearly a third of the disenfranchised individuals in Nevada are African-American. Unfortunately, Governor Sandoval failed to take advantage of a great opportunity to remove existing barriers to voting rights in Nevada.
Nevada’s voting rights restoration laws continue to be notoriously and unnecessarily complicated. Nevadans with felony convictions are permanently disenfranchised, unless the government approves individual rights restoration. Nevada’s laws governing the restoration of civil rights are among the most restrictive in the country, and are difficult to navigate for both election officials and individuals with criminal histories. A 2010 survey by the ACLU of Nevada examined widespread confusion by election officials over how Nevada’s restoration laws work, and who is entitled to cast a vote. Because of the gubernatorial veto today, the confusion and misinformation about how voting rights can be restored in Nevada persists.
Felon disenfranchisement laws are a relic of our discriminatory past – and yet they remain a barrier to civic engagement and reentry. With the veto of A.B. 301, Governor Sandoval disregarded the will of the legislature, ignored bipartisan support for the bill, and missed his chance to make the Silver State a beacon for civil rights and racial justice.
Last night, in a decisive, bipartisan victory for voting rights, the Nevada Assembly’s Committee on Legislative Operations and Elections unanimouslyvoted Assembly Bill 301 to the floor of the House. The bill will streamline and simplify Nevada’s unbelievably complicated patchwork of laws governing the restoration of the right to vote after a criminal conviction. The bill automatically restores voting rights to anyone who honorably completes a felony sentence of imprisonment, probation, or parole. The Brennan Center for Justice helped craft the bill, and I had the privilege of introducing the original bill at a meeting of the Assembly Committee early this month.
Disenfranchisement after criminal conviction remains the most significant barrier to voting rights. Nationally, 5.3 million American citizens are not allowed to vote because of a criminal conviction – 4 million of whom live, work, and raise families in our communities. Nevada’s disenfranchisement law is one of the most restrictive in the country (PDF). Under the current law, more than 40,000 Nevadans are unable to cast a vote due to a past criminal conviction, half of whom have completed their full sentences and are living in the community. Nearly a third of the disenfranchised individuals are African-American.
Those figures simply don’t paint the picture of a fair and fully functioning democratic system. Fortunately, the Nevada Legislature now has a wonderful opportunity to change that by passing AB 301.
Yesterday’s committee hearing was notable for its thoughtful discussion of the importance of restoring voting rights, with legislators from both sides of the aisle speaking in favor of the bill. One Assemblywoman told a personal story about a close friend with a 15-year old felony DUI conviction who has been trying, unsuccessfully, to navigate Nevada’s restoration laws ever since.
No one should have to pay a lawyer just to find out whether they have the right to have their voice heard in our democracy. Not only is this confusion unfair to voters, it places a huge burden on election administrators, who have a tough job determining if a Nevadan has the right to register and vote. AB 301 will fix this unhelpful administrative morass.
In addition, AB 301 will strengthen public safety. Law enforcement officials and criminal justice experts across the nation agree that restoring the right to vote after completion of a sentence strengthens community ties, which in turn supports reentry into the community and prevents recidivism. There is broad agreement: civic engagement, including voting, is a crucial part of enhancing public safety. AB 301 would restore voting rights to Nevadans who work and live in their communities but lack a full voice in our democracy.
At the end of yesterday’s hearing, legislators of all political stripes agreed that simplifying the law and enhancing public safety were a common sense solution to Nevada’s disenfranchisement problem. The committee members unanimously approved the bill, which now heads to the Assembly floor. We will continue to monitor AB 301 in hopes that it passes all the way through the Nevada Legislature – and strengthens our democracy in the process.
This summer the New York legislature took decisive action to create two important policy reforms: requiring that people in prison be allocated to their home communities for redistricting purposes; and requiring criminal justice agencies to provide voting rights information to people who are again eligible to vote after a felony conviction. While Albany has long been labeled “dysfunctional,” these particular reforms actually stand to make aspects of our state government models for democratic fairness and participation.
Both proposals are long overdue and have been introduced again and again and again, and both have garnered strong support in the legislature. Nevertheless, political wrangling repeatedly stymied their progress. This year, democracy trumped politics. Well, not quite. The legislation was pushed through in the budget revenue bill with no public hearing or debate. We will continue to criticize Albany for passing legislation behind closed doors with no opportunity for public input. But that’s for another post. Here, we hail the result.
The first reform assures that long under-represented communities have a full and fair voice in our state government. At present, incarcerated individuals are counted for federal Census purposes as residents where they are incarcerated rather than as residents of their home communities. In New York, where people are often imprisoned far from home and incarceration rates have skyrocketed in the last decade, this policy has produced increasingly harmful results. Public officials in prison districts have an incentive to build their districts on the backs of “ghost voters,” packing in prisoners who count toward the district size but who are not permitted to vote. So while officials who profit from the prison economy have an outsized voice in incarceration policy, the voting strength of the home communities – to which the vast majority of incarcerated people return – is diluted, resulting in under-representation in our state government.
The new legislation requires the Department of Correctional Services to provide the legislature with the necessary information to determine the home addresses for people in prison, and it instructs that incarcerated people should be allocated back to their home communities for redistricting purposes. This corrects a skew that has decimated the voting strength of poor and minority communities for decades, and assures that all communities in New York have equal representation and an equal voice in our government. Both Maryland and Delaware recently passed similar legislation.
The second policy reform is no less urgent. It will correct years of misinformation, promote successful reintegration and help protect public safety, while building civic participation among traditionally disenfranchised communities. Reliable information about voting rights is needed to address widespread, persistent, and well-documented misinformation in New York. Under New York law, people convicted of a felony lose the right to vote while in prison and parole. People on probation do not lose the right to vote. Once someone serves his maximum prison sentence or is discharged from parole, his right to vote is automatically restored. He need do nothing more than fill out a voter registration form like everyone else. Nevertheless, New York election officials have consistently misapplied the law and some have required people to provide unnecessary (and sometimes nonexistent) paperwork before being allowed to register. Not surprisingly, this confusion among election officials has affected the public. In 2005, researchers found that nearly 30% of people with criminal convictions surveyed in New York thought they would never be eligible to vote again.
New York’s new law is the latest in a national trend. Twenty-four other states and New York City already require certain state and local agencies to inform people when their voting rights are restored following a criminal conviction. It is a simple, workable policy that promises to have a major impact in assuring successful reintegration and reduced recidivism. Last year a retired New York parole chief testified before the New York Senate Elections Committee, “having the right to vote and learning how to exercise that right gives one a voice and a stake in the community; it promotes positive behavior and serves as a powerful conduit for making the transition from criminal to becoming a law abiding member of the community.”
The political jousting and escalating rhetoric of this seemingly endless New York budget season have been baffling, and at times excruciating. But this legislation shows that sometimes behind the shenanigans important policy reforms can be achieved. These two proposals in particular have the potential to make at least some aspects of our representative government a model for the rest of the country, and that’s not something we say lightly.
The effort to restore voting rights in New York is gaining momentum. Today, over 100 New Yorkers sent postcards to their legislators and Governor Paterson urging them to restore the right to vote to people in New York who are on parole and probation.
New York law disenfranchises individuals in prison or on parole. As we have mentioned in previous posts, this law has a stark impact on people of color. A new Brennan Center report, titled Jim Crow in New York, confirms that the current criminal disenfranchisement law traces back to a century-long effort to keep African-American citizens out of the voting booth. As a result, over 80% of those denied the right to vote in the Empire State are African-American or Latino.
And New Yorkers are finally calling on our state leaders to end this injustice.
Hopefully Albany will heed its constituents’ demands. There are several bills pending in both the Assembly and the Senate that would restore the right to vote to people with a prior criminal conviction.
Among them is legislation introduced by Assemblyman O’Donnell and Senator Thompson that restores voting rights to people on parole. The bills have been referred to the Assembly Committee on Election Law and the Senate Committee on Elections.
Senator Montgomery and Assemblyman Wright have also introduced the Voting Rights Notification and Registration Act that would help eliminate some of the confusion about who is eligible to vote. The bill would require the Department of Corrections and the Board of Parole to provide information to individuals about their voting rights once they regain eligibility. The bill passed the full Assembly in June 2009 and is currently pending in the Senate Elections Committee. (The Brennan Center testified in favor of this bill in April 2009). Similar bills have passed the Assembly twice before.
Contact us to request postcards to tell your elected officials that it is time to restore voting rights to people with prior convictions.
Just in case you had any doubt about his intentions in declaring April to be Confederate History Month, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell took a second giant step back in time this week. Not only is the Confederacy to be celebrated in Virginia, but its Jim Crow legacy is making a comeback too.
Governor McDonnell plans to require everyone seeking to have their voting rights restored following a non-violent conviction to write an essay outlining their contributions to society and the "reasons why you believe the restoration of your civil rights is justified." Applicants are thus asked to provide evidence that may - or may not - be evaluated under a completely arbitrary and ever shifting paradigm. In other words, prove the unprovable.
Virginia is one of only two states remaining (Kentucky is the other) that deny the right to vote for life to everyone with a criminal conviction, unless the individual applies for, and is granted, clemency from the governor. Virginia would also be the only state in 2010 to require a written essay.
The roots of Virginia's criminal disenfranchisement law are firmly planted in Jim Crow. During the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901-02, delegate Carter Glass (later a prominent U.S. Senator) described the criminal disenfranchisement provision as part of a plan to "eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than 5 years, so that in no single county...will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government."
The law certainly has had its intended effect. More than 300,000 people have lost the right to vote for life in Virginia. One in five African-Americans, and one in four African-American men, is permanently disenfranchised in the Commonwealth. African Americans make up one fifth of Virginia's population, but over half of those denied the right to vote are African-American.
The application to get one's right to vote back has always been onerous in Virginia, and the number of people "approved" each year is tiny. Former Governor Tim Kaine approved the most applications in history, a whopping total that amounted to less than 2 percent of the disenfranchised population.
But McDonnell's newest requirement is not just another box to check in a bureaucratic process. It introduces an entirely arbitrary and subjective standard that allows the most powerful elected official in the state to play fast and loose with one of America's most fundamental rights. This essay exam is no different than the arbitrary, unpassable tests that politicians and government officials employed for decades after Reconstruction to keep African-Americans from voting. And it is no different than the notorious literacy tests employed during the same period. If you can't read, you can't write. All of these nefarious tricks were outlawed by Congress with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Another piece of federal legislation, the Democracy Restoration Act, is now pending before Congress. That bill would restore the right to vote in federal elections to every American citizen who is out of prison, living in the community.
According to the Washington Post, McDonnell's administration said the new essay requirement is designed to "put a human face on each applicant." The thing is, each applicant already has a human face. Each one is a person. Each one is an American. Each one is a Virginian. The Confederacy lost the battle to deny the rights of citizenship to African-Americans. No celebration of Confederate History Month, and no imaginary time machine, can change that.
A new report by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights finds that nearly one-in-four African Americans has lost the right to vote in Kentucky. The report makes clear that this shockingly high rate of disenfranchisement results from a racially biased criminal justice system and Kentucky’s archaic criminal disenfranchisement law.
Kentucky is one of the last two states [see pdf map] in the country (Virginia is the other) that denies the right to vote for life to anyone with a felony conviction, unless the current Governor restores the right through his clemency powers.
The Commission on Human Rights report covers a variety of subjects impacting African Americans in Kentucky, including graduation rates, employment by public agencies, socioeconomic status, unemployment rates, hate crimes, and interactions with the criminal justice system. Although the report acknowledges the progress that Kentucky has made in improving the status of African Americans as compared to a half century ago, it reveals that there is still a long way to go to eradicate racial bias.
Perhaps most troubling, the report reveals a racial bias deeply embedded in Kentucky’s criminal justice system. African Americans are three times more likely than whites to be arrested in Kentucky. Though African Americans make up just 7.7% of Kentucky’s population, they are nearly one-third of people who are incarcerated. The incarceration rate for African Americans in Kentucky is about five times that of whites. No matter how one views the numbers, Kentucky’s criminal justice system clearly has a disparate impact on African Americans.
The entrenched racial bias in Kentucky’s criminal justice system results in the mass disenfranchisement of African Americans. In 2004, Kentucky denied the right to vote for life to almost fifty thousand of its approximately two hundred thousand African American residents. Today, the disenfranchisement rate remains practically unchanged.
Because the current disenfranchisement law vests so much power in the Governor, the rate of disenfranchisement can vary widely depending on who is in office. A 2006 study by the League of Women Voters showed that the Governor approved rights restoration applications at half the rate of the one who preceded him. The number of applications for restoration nosedived primarily because the then Governor created several additional administrative hurdles for the restoration process, including requiring three character witnesses and an essay.
When Governor Beshear came into office, he took a positive first step by removing these burdensome requirements from the process. This is commendable, but only a first step. Kentucky’s General Assembly now has the opportunity to propose a constitutional amendment that would end the state's archaic and discriminatory scheme. However, the Senate version of the bill is sitting in Committee, where it has been for over a month. The Kentucky Senate should pass this bill and put the question on the ballot. Give Kentuckians who are eligible to vote the power and the opportunity to restore the vote to their fellow Kentuckians.
As the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights notes, there has been some progress in improving the status of African Americans in Kentucky. But the progress cannot hide that one-in-four African Americans in Kentucky cannot vote. It is time for Kentucky to modernize and simplify its voting rights restoration law.
Many people don’t realize that Jim Crow laws existed in the North, perhaps most notably in New York.
Our new study of the Empire State’s constitutional history, Jim Crow in New York, traces the current criminal disenfranchisement law to a century-long effort to keep African-American citizens out of the voting booth. And as our report makes it disturbingly clear: New York’s felon voting bar has deep roots in Jim Crow.
More than 108,000 New Yorkers are currently disenfranchised under the law. And 80% of those who have lost the right to vote are people of color.
Here is the history. For about 100 years, New York lawmakers found various ways to keep African Americans from voting. First, of course, there was slavery. After emancipation, two laws continued to be especially effective: one that required blacks - and only blacks - to own a certain amount of real property in order to vote; and another that allowed counties to disenfranchise those convicted of “infamous crimes.”
African-American suffrage was the subject of much debate at the 1821 and 1846 constitutional conventions, and the transcripts contain some astounding racist rhetoric. One theme that occurs again and again is an alleged criminal propensity among African Americans as a reason to restrict the black vote. In a refrain that echoes throughout the century-long suffrage debate, Delegate Samuel Young implored in 1821: “Look to your jails and penitentiaries. By whom are they filled? By the very race whom is now proposed to cloth with the power of deciding upon your political rights.”
By 1872, New York distinguished itself as the only state in the union to make property ownership a voting requirement exclusively for African Americans. But the Fifteenth Amendment forced New York to revisit its constitution. Governor John Hoffman convened a few dozen “eminent citizens” to figure out what to do.
Governor Hoffman’s commission eliminated a few sections, and added some words here and there. The result was a Jim Crow “bait and switch” that continues to be the law today.
In 1874, four years after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified and long after the rest of the country, New York’s legislature had no choice but to accept the commission’s recommendation and eliminate the property requirements for African-American voters. However, the same commission also recommended a small and barely noticed change to the wording of the criminal disenfranchisement provision which had an enormous – and lasting – adverse impact on African-American suffrage. During slavery and the period when the property requirements were imposed on African-Americans, New York’s criminal disenfranchisement law was merely permissive: that is, the state constitution left it to the discretion of individual counties whether to disenfranchise those with criminal convictions. The same year the Fifteenth Amendment forced New York to eliminate its property requirement, the state amended the constitution from allowing counties to decide whether to disenfranchise those convicted of crimes, to requiring disenfranchisement throughout the state of anyone convicted of an “infamous crime.”
New York’s calculating constitutional amendment falls into a national pattern in which criminal disenfranchisement laws provided a useful means of circumventing the Reconstruction Amendments and suppressing black voters. Between 1865 and 1900, 19 other states passed similar laws. By 1900, 38 states had some type of criminal voting restriction. This national movement, together with New York’s long and notorious history of deliberate efforts to disenfranchise African Americans, the enduring, widespread and well-documented belief among policymakers that blacks were more likely to commit crimes, and the timing corresponding with the elimination of the black property requirements, all lead to the same conclusion: the amendment was intended to suppress the African-American vote in New York.
The same law is on the books today, and its intended effects continue. “When a law can be traced clearly to a racially discriminatory start-point, the burden of proving the absence of racial taint in the current operation of the law should fall on those who seek to justify its continued existence,” Charles J. Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard, wrote in the introduction to the report.
There is a broadening consensus across the country that restoring the right to vote to people living in the community is not just important for our democracy, but that giving people a voice in the community makes them stakeholders and less likely to commit future crimes.
"When people with criminal convictions re-enter society after periods of incarceration, although often jobless, isolated, and broken, they must begin to re-connect and re-engage with their communities. We have a stake in whether they succeed," Professor Ogletree wrote.
Today, New York’s election law disenfranchises people while in prison and on parole.
There are currently several bills pending in the New York State Assembly and Senate that would restore the voting rights to those on parole.
In 2009, Senator Montgomery and Assemblyman Wright introduced the Voting Rights Notification and Registration Act. The bill would require the Department of Corrections and the Board of Parole to provide individuals information about their voting rights once they regained eligibility. The bill passed the full Assembly in June 2009 and is currently pending in the Senate Elections Committee. In April 2009, the Brennan Center testified in favor of this bill.
Also in 2009, Assemblyman O’Donnell and Senator Thompson introduced a bill to restore the voting rights to people on parole. The bills have been referred to the Assembly Committee on Election Law and the Senate Committee on Elections.
The Democracy Restoration Act, introduced in July, is federal legislation that seeks to restore voting rights in federal elections to the nearly 4 million disenfranchised Americans who are out of prison and living in the community. The bill was introduced by Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) and Representative John Conyers (D-MI).
At the 2009 Annual Brennan Legacy Awards, Emmy Award-winning actor Alan Alda, read from a few of the stories featured in My First Vote -- a compilation of stories from people across the country who voted for the first time in November 2008 after having lost, and then regained, their right to vote following a criminal conviction.
More information on our work to restore voting right to people with criminal histories.
Kentucky is one of the last two states [
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