Why North Carolina should allow people on probation to vote
Last month, I wrote about Lanisha Jones, the woman who ended up in a years-long court battle because she voted while on parole in 2016, not knowing it was illegal in North Carolina. It happened after a “get out the vote” event at her family’s church, where no one explained to her that it was something she couldn’t do.
Her story isn’t an anomaly. In 2016, the majority of ineligible votes cast in North Carolina came from people serving on parole or probation for a felony. That’s why, on Monday, it seemed like the state was making improvements when a panel of judges decided that people on probation and parole should have the right to vote because the current law, written in 1973, disproportionately keeps Black people from voting.
The victory was short lived: on Wednesday, the N.C. State Board of Elections released a statement saying it would be asking the courts for clarification on the new procedure before the primary elections, leaving current applications pending. The Republican-led legislature has already announced its plan to appeal the ruling. It also potentially conflicts with a September 2021 state Supreme Court ruling from the same case.
So who are these people on parole, the ones we seem scared to let vote?
They are a group of 56,000 people under supervision by the state, according to evidence presented in the case. A sizable chunk of this population was charged with drug-related crimes, and several thousand have already served time in prison for the things they did. They are disproportionately Black, about twice the percentage of Black people living in North Carolina. In Jones’s story, as well as a 2018 series of voting-related charges in Alamance County, the majority of the people charged were Black.
Even within this population, only a few hundred voted. And for those hundreds, the repercussions depended on your district attorney: while the voters in Alamance and Hoke County had the book thrown at them, 72 people living in the Triangle did not. In those cases, it was assumed that, like Jones, the person on parole made an honest mistake, and the ballot was simply discarded. One man even checked his registration status before going to vote, and the state had him listed as “active.” The mistake is even more understandable when you realize that most poll workers and probation officers do not inform these North Carolinians that they are now ineligible, and that people on probation or parole for misdemeanors are allowed to vote.
The tens of thousands of voters who could be eligible are a small part of North Carolina’s population, but half of the counties in the state are smaller than this voting bloc. Some of these counties also house our 55 state prisons, whose people are counted on the census and therefore counted when the state’s districts are redrawn, even though the people in these prisons do not have the right to vote.
What the trial court ruled isn’t some outrageous overstep or moment of activism: it brings the state in line with the 23 other states where your right to vote only goes away when you’re incarcerated. It would, however, make us the first state in the South to allow people on parole or probation to vote, allowing us to stand against a law that has roots in post-Reconstruction efforts to disenfranchise Black voters.
We trust the people on parole and probation to become productive members of our communities once they’re out, even while they’re on probation or parole. Voting is one of the easiest ways to do that.
Correction: A previous online version of this article incorrectly said the State Board of Elections asked the court to not allow this law to go into effect. They instead are asking for clarity from the court as soon as possible, and any current registrations from those on probation or parole are pending.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 9:29 AM.
