Advocates pushing to restore the voting rights of felons recently celebrated the Nebraska Supreme Court ruling that people who have completed their criminal sentences can vote, saying the decision meant that thousands more will be able to participate in the 2024 election.
Since the 2020 election, there have also been at least a dozen other laws or court decisions that have largely led to helping more felons be able to vote, particularly when they leave prison.
In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who is now Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, signed into law in 2023 a bill that would allow felons who have completed their criminal sentences to vote, resulting in an estimated 55,000 people gaining the ability to vote in the blue-leaning state.
In Tennessee, a solid red state, the left-leaning Campaign Legal Center recently celebrated a “blow” to the “felony disenfranchisement regime,” saying that a court decision this spring forced new language on Tennessee’s voter registration forms to clarify that certain felons are eligible to vote.
Alabama, another decidedly red state, expanded its list of offenses that would strip someone of the right to vote in the spring, but after the move prompted a lawsuit from the same Campaign Legal Center group, the state attorney general ruled that the change would not go into effect until after the 2024 election.
But skeptics have tempered the expectations of advocates in favor of restoring felons’ voting rights, saying that even when the movement takes steps forward, it has little, if any, effect on elections.
Nebraska’s conservative Supreme Court issued its ruling on Oct. 16, marking the latest decision in a trend in recent years, even on the part of Republicans, to either give the formerly incarcerated their voting abilities back or to better define their states’ existing laws on the matter.
Nebraska, a red state that splits its electoral votes into three districts, has one district that can sometimes be competitive for Democrats. President Joe Biden won the single electoral vote up for grabs in that district in 2020 by about 22,000 votes. If every person who left prison voted, it could, in theory, swing a close race that came within hundreds or thousands of votes. If the country’s presidential election came near an Electoral College tie, that one Nebraska district could make the difference in the election.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which helped litigate the Nebraska case, praised the court ruling, asserting repeatedly that it would allow “thousands” more people to vote.
“This is justice,” Jane Seu, counsel at the ACLU of Nebraska, said in a statement of the court decision. “Given the sheer scale of disenfranchisement that this decision corrects, there is no question that it will be remembered as one of our state’s most consequential voting rights decisions.”
Election analyst Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said he believed the focus on restoring felon voting rights was “way overblown.”
“It’s always a cause of the Left to re-enfranchise these people, but I’ve never yet seen an example where you do it and suddenly you can say, oh, because of this, it moved [a race] in a particular direction,” Olsen said. “I tend to think that the sort of person who gets themselves arrested for a felony that requires the suspension of their voting rights tends not to be the sort of person who is highly civically engaged.”
The movement toward allowing felons to vote is likely to benefit Democrats, based on the racial makeup of those currently in prison.
One study from 2023 found that more than 4 million people are ineligible to vote because of their felony convictions, while another from 2019 found that more than 6.1 million were. Both pointed out that those numbers included a disproportionate number of black would-be voters, a demographic that historically votes heavily in favor of Democratic candidates.
Exaggerated impact
State restrictions on felons voting run the gamut, but most share the policy that those who are in jail on felony convictions cannot vote while they are behind bars.
Maine and Vermont are two exceptions; they have no restrictions whatsoever on felons voting. By contrast, in some states, including Mississippi and Kentucky, certain felons are permanently banned from voting, depending on their crime. Advocates argue that allowing people to vote once they have left prison helps bring down recidivism rates.
Florida, a state former President Donald Trump won in 2020 by about 370,000 votes, has a relatively strict law on felons voting that keeps more than 1 million people from participating in Florida’s elections, according to the Sentencing Project. The group said that Florida’s law, which requires felons to have not only completed their jail sentences but also to have paid any fines they owed, was a “poverty penalty.”
About 30% of Florida’s electorate is made up of black and Hispanic voters, and a disproportionately high number of them cannot vote because of felony convictions. By 2022, 12% of black Floridians could not vote because of their felony convictions, the Sentencing Project found.
But whether these numbers have an impact on Florida’s election outcomes remains questionable.
In Virginia, voting rights groups, including the left-leaning Democracy Docket, were up in arms when Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) repealed a law in 2022 that was put in place by his Democratic predecessor that automatically restored felons’ rights to vote when they left jail.
Former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had announced the new practice in March 2021, saying that he had, right then and there, restored the voting rights of 69,000 people who had previously been incarcerated. Northam’s move did not help Democrats secure a victory that November, when Youngkin upset his Democratic opponent to win the gubernatorial election that year by about 64,000 votes. Conversely, Youngkin’s move to rein in Northam’s law in 2022 did not help Republicans, who went on to lose control of the state legislature.
“People exaggerate the impacts of these things, which is that, by and large, most people who want to vote do,” Olsen said. “Changes — liberalizing voting rules, liberalizing access — do not have significant changes in turnouts generally.”
Trump’s felony conviction
A new and unexpected question surrounding felons voting took hold on May 31, when Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
As a Florida resident and convicted felon, Trump would normally not be permitted to cast a ballot.
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But because he was convicted in another state, Florida law looks to that state’s laws to determine the convict’s eligibility.
New York lets any felon who is not in prison vote, so Trump, whose sentencing hearing will not take place until after the election, can vote in Florida.
