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.

On January 25, Texas Secretary of State Whitley issued an advisory to county registrars announcing the transmittal of a list of 95,000 people who indicated they were noncitizens when they applied for their driver licenses, and who are currently registered to vote.

Secretary Whitley suggested that these were illegal noncitizen voters. They are not.

The list used by the secretary of state’s office is stale and outdated. Driver licenses in Texas last six years. According to Homeland Security data, between 50,000 and 65,000 Texas residents become naturalized citizens each year. Since the list was released, both the secretary of state's office and county registrars have already discovered that tens of thousands of people on the list are properly registered citizens. Now, the former Secretary of State (under Governor Abbott) Carlos Cascos has called on the effort to be rescinded.

Nonetheless, Secretary Whitley transmitted the names, encouraged investigations, and encouraged a letter to be sent providing 30 days for the recipients to prove their citizenship or have their registrations cancelled.

Despite admissions from Secretary Whitley’s office that the list is “weak” and likely includes naturalized citizens, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has increased the harm of state’s announcement by intimidating naturalized citizens with potential unjustified criminal investigations.

Our partners, Texas League of United Latin American Citizens and National League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), quickly sued alleging that the program and the publicity around is was unlawful voter intimidation under the Voting Rights Act. CLC joined the lawsuit on behalf of LULAC, and an individual citizen Julie Hilberg, whose name is on the list.  

Our complaint alleges that Texas’s new voter purge program aimed at naturalized citizens is discriminatory and an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, violations of the 1st and 14th Amendments. The false allegations by Texas officials has cast a “pall of suspicion on the democratic process and stoke public fears of noncitizen voting.” Whitley’s intimidating and well-publicized statements have created a hostile environment for newly naturalized voters – largely Latino – and amounts to voter intimidation and is a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

CLC has also sent a notice letter to Secretary Whitley informing him of the National Voter Registration Act violations created by his new voter purge program.

A federal court has ruled that a nearly identical program pursued by Florida was unlawful. The court explained that this program (which the Florida Secretary of State abandoned) violated the NVRA’s requirement that list maintenance activities be uniform and nondiscriminatory. The same is true here.