Could North Carolina’s gerrymandering rulings also help felons vote? Advocates say yes
More than 70,000 North Carolinians who are prohibited from voting right now would win back their rights if a new lawsuit is successful.
Under current state law, people who are convicted of felonies can’t vote until they’ve finished their sentences — and those sentences doesn’t necessarily end once they finish serving their time in prison. They also include any time they spend on probation or parole once they’ve rejoined society.
And since many people are only on probation or parole because they can’t afford to pay court fines and fees, advocates say, the state is essentially stopping them from voting just because they’re poor.
“Poverty, the fact that you don’t have enough money, shouldn’t infringe on your right to vote,” said Daryl Atkinson, a lawyer who is leading the lawsuit as co-director of the Durham-based group Forward Justice.
Atkinson has spent much of his legal career fighting for criminal justice reform, both in the private sector through work with groups like the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and in government, as an advisor to the Department of Justice in the Obama administration.
Next month North Carolina will become the final state in the country to stop automatically prosecuting all 16-year-olds as adults in criminal trials, under a “Raise The Age” law passed by the Republican-led General Assembly. And some conservative and liberal lawmakers alike have pushed for less harsh sentencing rules in a bill called the First Step Act, although it has not yet become law. Atkinson said that growing bipartisan support for criminal justice reform is part of the reason his group and others are filing this lawsuit now.
Another factor, he said, was the series of recent court actions that relied on a provision for “free elections” in the North Carolina constitution to strike down political districts that had been drawn to dilute the influence of some voters. One of the lawyers aiding in this lawsuit, Stanton Jones from the Arnold & Porter law firm, was also the lead lawyer in the recent lawsuits against both the state legislative maps and U.S. House map.
Atkinson said the gerrymandering lawsuits breathed new life into the state constitution. And the fact that 70,000 people on probation or parole can’t vote, despite living and working in their communities once more, is “a moral stain on our democracy,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer from the Washington, D.C.-based group Protect Democracy who came to Raleigh for the lawsuit announcement Wednesday.
Not everyone agrees. Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, told the News & Observer last summer that “North Carolina’s law is actually a strong law,” pointing to some states that make it difficult or impossible for felons to regain the right to vote.
Also last summer, Andy Jackson, an elections policy fellow with the conservative Civitas Institute, told the N&O it’s appropriate to forfeit voting rights while serving a sentence: “You’ve shown yourself as someone that does not respect the rights of other people. It is well within states’ authority and I think proper authority. Parole is just a regular part of the sentence.”
Convicted felons are not the most sympathetic group of people to fight for in court. But the right to vote is so ingrained in American society, advocates said Wednesday, that anyone who has served their time should regain that right.
Dennis Gaddy served multiple years in prison for financial crimes he committed in the 1990s, but state records show he has had a clean record for more than 20 years now. He now runs the Raleigh-based Community Success Initiative, which works with men and women in prison, or transitioning back into regular society from prison, to help them land on their feet.
He said Wednesday that the same law the advocates are challenging now kept him from voting for years after he got out of prison.
“I grew up watching my mother registering our community to vote, under the hardest of circumstances, and I understand that this right is sacred,” Gaddy said Wednesday. “For seven years, under the statute we challenge here today, I lost that sacred right even after I fully returned to society.”
And although the lawsuit is against the state, Atkinson said they’re not picking on the Republican-led legislature. This law was passed in 1971, when the legislature was under Democratic control, and is “a racist vestige of Jim Crow” that needs to be thrown out, Atkinson said.
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This story was originally published November 20, 2019 at 4:04 PM with the headline "Could North Carolina’s gerrymandering rulings also help felons vote? Advocates say yes."
