State after state has eased restrictions on voting for former felons in recent years. But Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s reversal suggests growing wariness on the right.
WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, states around the country have steadily chipped away at one of the biggest roadblocks to voting in the United States — laws on the books that bar former felons from casting a ballot.
But there are now signs that trend could be reversing.
Last month, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican who took office a year ago, revealed that he had rescinded a policy of automatically restoring voting rights to residents who have completed felony sentences.
In a February hearing, North Carolina’s Supreme Court, which has a 5-2 Republican majority, appeared deeply skeptical that a lower court had constitutional authority when it restored voting rights last year to people who had completed their sentences. A ruling is expected soon.
And then there’s Florida — whose Republican-dominated Legislature effectively nullified a citizen ballot initiative granting voting rights to a huge number of former felons in 2020. That left all three states on a path toward rolling back state policies on restoring voting rights for former felons close to where they were 50 and even 100 years ago.
Experts say that Virginia’s reversal, which does not affect people who have had their rights already restored, is unlikely to represent a dramatic change in the long-term trend among states toward loosening restrictions on voting by people with felony records. Such restrictions still deny the vote to some 4.6 million voting-age Americans — one in 50 potential voters. But that number is down nearly 25 percent since 2016.
Last month, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat, signed legislation expanding voting rights for former felons in the state, and the New Mexico State Legislature, also Democratic, enacted a law doing the same.
What is clear, though, is that a shaky bipartisan consensus — that those who have paid their debts to society should be able to cast a ballot — has eroded, as political polarization has risen.
The action by Mr. Youngkin is especially notable because it leaves Virginia as the only state in the nation that disenfranchises everyone who commits a felony. Under the State Constitution, a former felon’s rights can be restored only with the governor’s authorization.
“We’d reached a point for the first time in recent memory, maybe ever, where there was not a single state in the country that disenfranchised everyone,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “It is disappointing that on an issue in Virginia that had gotten support from both sides of the aisle, they do seem to be taking a step backwards.”
The backtracking spotlights the often-overlooked significance — legally and also politically — of a practice that has likely had a far greater impact on access to the ballot than more notorious voter suppression measures have.
Voting rights battles are usually fought over cogs in the election machinery — ID requirements, drop boxes, absentee ballots — that can make it easy or hard to vote, depending on how much sand is tossed into them. The extent to which those battles shrink or expand the pool of voters is often impossible to measure.
Not so with restoring the vote to former felons: Minnesota’s new law gives about 56,000 people access to the ballot; the North Carolina court ruling last year made another 56,000 eligible. The law awaiting the signature of New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, would add another 11,000 to the list.
The rollbacks, however, are significant. In 2020, Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a law that effectively negated a 2018 citizen ballot initiative that restored voting rights to perhaps 934,000 residents, according to the latest estimate. The law limits the vote only to former felons who pay all court costs, restitution and other fees, a yearslong task for many, made surpassingly difficult by the state’s jumbled record-keeping on court cases.
That legislative change not only halted the nation’s largest rights-restoration effort but also led to the arrest — in what Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, billed as a crackdown on fraud — of 20 former felons who had registered or voted illegally — many, if not all, out of confusion over their eligibility.
In Virginia, governors have used their constitutional powers to restore the vote to more than 300,000 former felons since Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, first made restoration automatic for some in 2013. Two Democratic governors, Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, expanded that policy to include anyone freed from prison.
By the time Mr. Northam left office in January 2022, a huge backlog of people eligible for restoration had been wiped out, said Kelly Thomasson, the official who handled rights restoration during Mr. Northam’s tenure as governor, in an interview. She said that roughly 1,000 to 2,000 newly eligible felons were being released from prison each month.
After succeeding Mr. Northam, Mr. Youngkin initially restored voting rights to nearly 3,500 people in just his first four months in office. But that pace slowed dramatically to just 800 others in the next five months.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Youngkin, Macaulay Porter, said in a statement that the governor “firmly believes in the importance of second chances for Virginians who have made mistakes,” and that he judges individual cases based on the law and the “unique elements of each situation.”
She did not respond to requests to explain why new grants dropped sharply, or whether Republican resistance to restoring voting played a role in that decline.
Although a Republican state legislator had once led Minnesota’s effort to give the vote to former felons, the policy became law this year with only a handful of Republican votes. In 2020, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, used her executive power to implement an automatic restoration policy much like the one Virginia had in place before Mr. Youngkin changed it.
But Iowa, Virginia and Kentucky, another Republican state whose governors’ executive orders have loosened restrictive restoration policies temporarily, have been unable to win legislators’ support for amendments to state constitutions that would make those orders permanent.
Some experts say that the resistance stems in part from the common but questionable belief among Republican partisans that allowing former felons to vote would boost Democratic turnout.
Although an outsize share of those who complete felony sentences are members of minority groups that broadly tend to vote Democratic, most felons are white, and those with their demographic characteristics — below-average income and education, to name two — increasingly skew Republican.
Disenfranchisement has complex legal roots, including the 14th Amendment, which, in addition to granting citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to formerly enslaved people, forbids withholding the right to vote “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime.”
In Virginia, there are also antecedents that reflect the state’s history of suppressing the African American vote. The policy on rights restoration that Mr. Youngkin revived is rooted in a 1902 Virginia constitutional convention in which keeping Black residents from voting was an overriding priority.
Experts say the potentially fleeting nature of executive actions like those in Kentucky — where Gov. Andy Beshear now automatically restores voting rights to former felons who had committed nonviolent crimes — and in Virginia sows confusion about voting rights. Critics say that bestowing a basic civic privilege becomes subject to the political whim of whoever is governor.
Virginians who complete their prison sentences this year may wonder why those who left prison in 2021 are more entitled to cast a ballot than they are, said Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota sociologist and an expert on the disenfranchisement of former felons.
“It harkens to an era when the king can give a thumbs up or thumbs down,” he said. “We wouldn’t necessarily accept this if it were happening in another area.”
Kirsten Noyes provided research.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
