In November 2018, an estimated one in three Black men in Kentucky was unable to vote because of a felony record, the legacy of a “tough on crime” era that disproportionately policed and penalized Black communities.But the landscape of voting in Kentucky—and many other states—will be vastly different by the 2020 election. In December, Kentucky’s new governor, Andy Beshear, signed an executive order that will restore voting rights to more than 140,000 Kentuckians who have completed sentences for nonviolent felonies.That same week, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law restoring voting rights for around 80,000 people on probation or parole in the state, which has the highest rate of racial disparities in the nation among its prison population.
Nationwide, 6.1 million Americans could not vote in the 2016 presidential election because of felony convictions.And the statistic is even grimmer when it is broken down by race: one in 13 Black Americans was ineligible to vote in 2019 because of a criminal record; compared to one in 56 Americans of all other races combined.But that is changing: although Iowa failed to pass legislation in 2019 that would have re-enfranchised people with felony convictions, it is now the last state in the nation with a blanket ban on voting for those who have served felony sentences.(Iowa restored voting rights to people who completed felony sentences via executive order in 2005, but the order was rescinded in 2011.)
Whether by order or legislation, thousands of people with conviction histories found themselves eligible to vote in 2019—some for the first time. In March, Louisiana’s 2018 reforms went into effect, allowing 36,000 people—thousands more than had been initially estimated—to register to vote.In Nevada, some 77,000 people who had been released from prison or discharged from parole or probation had their voting rights restored in May.Going forward, Nevadans convicted of felonies will now have their right to vote restored automatically on release rather than having to petition a court.In Illinois, legislation that failed in 2018 finally passed in August; the new laws provide education to incarcerated people about their voting rights and require counties with at least three million people to make voting by mail accessible in their jails.In Colorado, bipartisan efforts delivered a major reform package in May as the legislative session came to a close.Among its provisions: the state will allow people serving parole to vote.And as of July, incarcerated people in Washington State will be notified of their voting rights before release.
But there were also setbacks. Florida made the news in 2018 when a supermajority of voters approved Amendment 4 to the state constitution, which restored voting rights to as many as 1.4 million people with prior felony convictions.But in 2019, the state legislature pulled back from the voter-approved initiative, imposing conditions that limited the right to vote to people who had not only been released from imprisonment, but who also were not under any ordered supervision, had made full payment of any ordered restitution, and had paid any court-ordered fines, fees, or costs.The governor and advocates for the initiative have taken the battle to court over the provision requiring all fines and fees to be paid before voting, a condition that advocates estimate would disenfranchise 80 percent of the people intended to benefit from the new law.In December, the court modified an earlier ruling, allowing people with outstanding fines and fees to register to vote.But in January 2020, the state Supreme Court, in response to a request from Governor DeSantis, issued an advisory opinion stating that the drafters of Amendment 4 had intended that people must pay their fines and fees before voting.While state court—even state supreme court—opinions do not always affect federal cases, a federal court such as the one overseeing the Amendment 4 litigation will often use those opinions as the basis for interpreting state laws.
But the battle for voting rights in Florida is far from over, and it's being fought at the county level. Even if it turns out that people must pay off fines and fees before registering to vote, the new law contains a waiver provision allowing them to request relief from those fees from the court.Some counties, such as Miami-Dade and Broward, have already implemented a waiver hearing process which enables people to have their fines and fees cleared.But in the vast majority of counties, no similar process has been initiated. Without help from the counties, potential voters are left to wait for a court decision which is likely to be issued beyond the voter registration deadline for 2020 and perhaps even past the 2020 election.