Elections
Some, but not all, felons win back the right to vote in NC 2020 elections
A new judicial ruling will open the door for some felons on probation or parole to vote in North Carolina’s elections this fall.
The ruling isn’t final, so it’s possible that it could still change between now and November. But on Friday, a panel of three judges from different areas of the state ruled that part of the state’s felon disenfranchisement law appears to be unconstitutional. The judges issued a 2-1 ruling stopping the state from enforcing that part of the law, at least temporarily.
They wrote that the people who challenged it — calling it essentially a poll tax and a relic of the Jim Crow era — appear to have a winning argument.
“It’s time to eradicate this vestige of Jim Crow,” said Daniel Jacobson, a lawyer for the challengers, last month when the judges heard the arguments from both sides.
Some states let felons regain the right to vote once they leave prison, but not North Carolina. People here don’t get back their rights until they have finished their entire sentence, including probation or parole.
The judges didn’t extend voting rights to everyone on probation or parole for a felony, as the challengers including Durham’s Community Success Initiative had asked. But they did rule in favor of people who would have already finished their time under supervision, except for not paying court costs and fees.
The judges wrote that “our Constitution is clear: no property qualification shall affect the right to vote.”
So preventing people from getting back their right to vote simply because of an inability to pay a certain monetary amount, the judges ruled, appears to be a violation of the state constitution. They said that if they hadn’t struck down the law, the challengers would have suffered “substantial and irreparable” harm by not being able to vote this year.
One member of the three-judge panel, Superior Court Judge John Dunlow of Franklin, Granville, Person, Vance, and Warren counties, dissented from that part of the ruling by Mecklenburg County Superior Court Judge Lisa Bell and Wake County Superior Court Judge Keith Gregory. Dunlow wrote that he would have denied all of the challengers’ claims.
The Republican leaders of the N.C. General Assembly, who are defending the law in court, came away with some victories in Friday’s ruling, too.
The judges stopped enforcement only of part of the law, not the whole thing. The challengers had originally said that if they were to win this lawsuit, it would open up voting rights to around 60,000 North Carolinians.
However, with this more limited ruling, it wasn’t immediately clear how many people with felony records would get back their voting rights.
“This ruling is a major victory for the thousands of North Carolinians who have been denied access to the ballot due to an inability to pay financial obligations,” the executive director of Community Success Initiative, Dennis Gaddy, said in a statement.
“We are thrilled that the judges took this important step in the right direction in the continued fight for voting rights and equality in our state. Our fight continues for the full expansion of voting rights for all of those who have been convicted of a felony and live in our communities, who deserve an equal say in our democracy.”
NC Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley reacted to the ruling by calling for election of more conservative judges.
“It is outrageous for these judges to change the rules for an election when absentee ballots have already started going out and voting has begun,” Whatley said in a statement.
‘Poll tax’ and racist history
Some states, particularly in the South, used to have “poll taxes,” which were payments required to vote — but which most white people were legally exempted from having to pay. They were one of many barriers put in place to keep Black people from voting for generations after the Civil War.
Poll taxes themselves were struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966. But many, like the challengers in this lawsuit, have argued that politicians have since found other ways to continue those same goals.
Last month, the challengers argued that the state’s felon disenfranchisement is violating people’s rights in several different ways.
In addition to the argument about court fees and fines serving a double function as a poll tax, they also argued for a more sweeping ruling against the state’s felony disenfranchisement laws.
For one, they said, people who are on probation or parole are, by definition, out of prison and back to living in and contributing to larger society. They’re paying taxes and potentially sending their kids to school and deserve to have a say in the decisions that get made that affect their and their families’ lives, the lawsuit claimed.
They also said the rules disproportionately harm Black people and are rooted in an explicitly racist history.
The lawsuit raised numerous allegations that felon disenfrachisement laws are racist.
North Carolina’s first felon disenfrachisement law was passed right after the Civil War, according to historians, explicitly as a way to stop newly freed slaves from actually being able to vote. And evidence shows that even now, 150 years later, the criminal justice system still disproportionately harms Black Americans.
Compared to white people facing the same crimes and potential punishments, studies show, Black people are both more likely to be charged and are also given harsher punishments if convicted.
However, the judges weren’t willing to go as far as to completely overturn the disenfranchisement laws — just ruling for the challengers on the one issue of payments. They kept the rest of the law intact, at least for now, saying lawmakers should get the chance to make more detailed arguments at trial.
On those other claims, the judges wrote, the challengers do have “persuasive, historical evidence” in their favor. But the legislators, they added, “have also put forward numerous state interests supporting” the felon disenfrachisement laws overall.
Absentee voting lawsuit failed
Friday’s ruling wasn’t the first to focus on liberals’ efforts to expand ballot access leading up to the 2020 elections.
The same lawyers who helped argue the felon voting rights lawsuit also successfully argued last year’s gerrymandering cases, which ended with the General Assembly having to redraw the state’s political maps to be less slanted toward Republicans for the 2020 elections.
And earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union lost a separate lawsuit, challenging North Carolina’s law requiring people who vote by mail to have a witness sign their ballot.
Not all states have such a requirement, that lawsuit argued, and it could potentially lead to public health problems — or to people choosing not to vote at all — because of coronavirus this year.
But on Thursday a different three-judge panel shot those arguments down, keeping North Carolina’s one-witness requirement in place for this year. It’s normally two witnesses, but earlier this summer Democrats and Republicans in the legislature passed a bipartisan bill focused on coronavirus and the election, lowering the requirement to just one witness.
“The judges were right to reject this dangerous attempt to eliminate basic protections against fraudulent activity that took place in the most recent federal election, and I hope they do the same with the multiple other lawsuits filed by Washington Democrats this year,” said Sen. Ralph Hise, a Spruce Pine Republican who chairs the state Senate’s election law committee.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
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