Starting on July 1, 2019, Nevada voting rights will be restored to people with felony convictions upon completion of any prison term. A new law passed in May 2019 will restore voting rights to more than 77,000 Nevadans. Previous Nevada law was one of the most complicated to navigate in the country. With this change, Nevada will join the growing number of states that are restoring the right to vote to people with convictions.

Prior to the law change, whether a person could vote depended on how many felony convictions they have, the category of the conviction(s), and in what year they completed their sentence. For some, their voting rights were restored once they completed their sentence. Others who were eligible to get their right to vote back after a conviction were required to petition the court to restore their rights – a process that many did not know about.

As a result, many Nevadans with past convictions who are eligible to vote simply do not know that they can participate. There are nearly 90,000 people in Nevada who have lost their voting right because of a conviction but over two-thirds of them are post-sentence, meaning they can apply to restore their voting rights. Yet only 281 people used the court petition process to restore their rights from 1990-2011 – an average of only 13 per year.

But a little bit of education and outreach will go a long way to assisting people to exercise their fundamental right to vote. In fall 2018, we sent Restore Your Vote organizers to Las Vegas and Reno to assist individuals with past convictions, train voter registration and re-entry organizations on the law, and support and build sustainable networks of assistance. The organizers helped hundreds of people start on the path to rights restoration and trained hundreds of community leaders and canvassers to be able to help others.

We continue to work with individuals and organizations in Nevada to smooth out the rights restoration process and make it accessible to everyone.

If you are trying to determine whether you can vote in Nevada, please access our online tool here.

In Arizona, whether a person can vote depends on how many felony convictions they have, whether they are able to pay their fines and fees, and whether they have completed their sentence(s). Moreover, some people (but not all) who are eligible to get their right to vote back after a conviction are required to file a request to restore their right – a process that many do not know about. As a result, many Arizonans with past convictions who are eligible to vote simply do not know that they can participate.

If you are trying to determine whether you can vote in Arizona, please access our online tool here.

But a little bit of education and outreach will go a long way to assisting people to exercise their fundamental right to vote. In fall 2018, we sent Restore Your Vote organizers to Phoenix and Tucson to assist individuals with past convictions, train voter registration and re-entry organizations on the law, and support and build sustainable networks of assistance. The organizers helped hundreds of people start on the path to rights restoration and trained hundreds of community leaders and canvassers to be able to help others.

We continue with individuals and organizations in Arizona to make sure that there are resources for voting rights restoration across the state and that people know how to access them. If you are looking for additional assistance to restore your vote, please feel free to reach out to us.

If you or your organization want to help people with felony convictions through the rights restoration process please feel free to reach out or use our Activist Manual and the included materials.

In 2017, Alabama passed a new law, for the first time in more than a century, that created a definitive list of which convictions will take away a person’s right to vote. The law could re-enfranchise tens of thousands who were denied the right to vote but do not have a disqualifying conviction. Yet the state of Alabama has refused to spend any resources informing these citizens that they can vote. Recent polling showed that nearly 72% of Alabamians with felony convictions who are not registered to vote still do not know that the law has changed, much less whether it has restored their voting rights.

In 2018, Campaign Legal Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center launched the Alabama Voting Rights Project (AVRP) employing three full-time Re-Enfranchisement Fellows across the state. We individually assisted over 2,600 Alabamians with past convictions and trained more than 2,900 community leaders and activists on the rights restoration process.

CLC is continuing to assist Alabamians through the voting rights process and provide support to organizations engaged in rights restoration. We can help push back against systemic barriers that keep Alabamians front voting.

To get in touch, contact [email protected].

If you are an Alabama resident who wants to understand your voting rights, click here to access our tool.

Learn more about our work for voting rights in Alabama:

Millions of Americans have lost their right to vote because of a past felony conviction. Progress is being made across the country to reform these laws, but the problem is even larger than the 5 million people who are legally disenfranchised. Across the country, there are an estimated 23 million people with felony convictions. Because of complicated laws, misinformation, and poor administration, a huge portion of the 17 million Americans with felony convictions who are not directly disenfranchised remain de facto disenfranchised.  

The Restore Your Vote campaign aims to tackle that problem by developing and executing scalable models for rights restoration services, community leader training, and broad public education to combat de facto disenfranchisement.

•We’ve provided direct rights restoration services to thousands of individuals;

•We’ve trained thousands of community leaders in the rights restoration process of their state;

•Tens of thousands of people have used our online toolkit, RestoreYourVote.org;

•We’ve earned dozens of local and national media hits telling the stories of people we’ve assisted and spreading the word that just because you have a felony conviction, it does not necessarily mean that you cannot vote

RestoreYourVote.org

We’ve built a user-friendly online tool that allows people with convictions in all fifty states, DC, and Puerto Rico to determine whether they can vote or how to restore their voting rights by answering a series of mostly yes or no questions.

Read the account of Dennis Eckhoff, an Arizona resident who found answers about his voting rights on RestoreYourVote.org that he had been seeking for over twelve years.

What’s Happening in Your State?

• Alabama
• Arizona
• Iowa
• Nevada
• Tennessee

Citizens across ideological lines are tired of politicians redrawing the lines of their own electoral maps – and picking their own voters. They are tired of politicians distorting the political process to hold onto power for their own party. The effort by partisan politicians to marginalize voters has gone on for far too long, and is aided by sophisticated computer modeling that has taken this undemocratic practice to new extremes.

Citizens are tired of waiting for the courts to act and do not believe that politicians will ever fix the problem of gerrymandering. IRCs are a way to put gerrymandering on the ballot. They are a check on the redistricting process, and are created differently depending on many unique local factors, as explained in a report released by CLC in July 2018 –  which armed legislators, good government advocates, and activists – with the knowledge they need to design IRCs that are right for their state.

In January 2019, CLC released a poll that finds strong opposition to gerrymandering among likely 2020 general election voters and broad, bipartisan support for the creation of independent redistricting commissions, which voters supported in all five states where it was put to a vote in the 2018 cycle. Removing partisanship from the redistricting process will help ensure that every voice is heard in our democracy. At least 60 percent of Democrats, Independents and Republicans support the creation of IRCs. When asked to choose whether boundaries for legislative and congressional districts should be drawn by state legislatures or by IRC, voters favor the latter by a nearly three-to-one margin.

In the 2018 midterm election cycle, IRCs passed in Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Missouri and Ohio. After grassroots organizations supported by CLC in both Michigan and Colorado successfully placed IRCs on the November 2018 ballot, the right of citizens to put these ballot initiatives up to a vote were challenged in court. CLC successfully helped defend the rights of citizens in both states to take democracy into their own hands.

Now, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, and several other states are moving towards similar initiatives to form IRCs. Additionally, bipartisan coalitions of lawmakers and activists are seeking to reform redistricting through constitutional amendments beginning in the legislatures of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois. Pennsylvania legislators have introduced a bill that, if passed and ratified by the people, would also establish a redistricting commission.

Attention to IRCs will only increase in the coming months. 2020 is a pivotal year because the census will be taken, after which eevery state will be drawing new district lines. A fair districting process is critical to ensuring that voters’ interests are accurately represented by both state and federal government.

CLC ROLE

Campaign Legal Center’s (CLC) role has been to attend planning sessions for IRCs in the major cities that spearhead these initiatives, help in the development of language and ensure that the initiatives survive legal challenges, and support the placement of the initiatives on the ballot. CLC’s communications team has also led public education campaigns.

With the 2020 redistricting cycle looming and public attention focused on gerrymandering like never before, there is no better time for groups like CLC to enact reforms that permanently improve democracy in the states. Well-designed IRCs offer the best option to help ensure that the map drawing process is more transparent, all Americans’ voices are counted fairly and politicians are accountable and responsive to constituents.