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On Wednesday, the Nebraska Supreme Court ordered Secretary of State Bob Evnen to begin following a new state law that extends voting rights to a group of people with felony convictions who were previously ineligible. Evnen had refused to comply with the law, which was passed by the state Legislature in April, claiming that it was unconstitutional.
The ruling left voter registration and civil rights advocates scrambling, as it arrived nearly on the eve of voter registration deadlines. Nebraska’s online voter registration deadline was Friday, and the in-person voter registration deadline is next week.
Even in legal defeat, Evnen and allied state officials have likely blunted the impact of a law that could have made 7,000 people newly eligible to vote, said Steve Smith, communications director for Civic Nebraska, which was among several plaintiffs that sued Evnen.
“The secretary of state and the attorney general had a loser of a legal argument but they certainly did a great job of suppressing the vote,” said Smith.
Even when people convicted of felonies are able to vote, they often don’t know it. Sometimes they receive incorrect information, even from official documents, or the existing laws aren’t well known, even by local election officials. In the latest edition of our video series “Inside Story,” you can see a characteristic example: A Tennessee woman and her attorney spend two hours in court seeking to restore her right to vote as the judge and prosecutors navigate confusion over the process. “No one really knows how this looks,” attorney Josh Spickler told The Marshall Project, speaking to the ambiguity some people face when trying to restore their voting rights after a conviction.
Fear also drives reluctance. In the face of confusing eligibility regulations, people who are trying to put a criminal conviction behind them often don’t want to risk making a mistake that could send them back to prison. In Florida, several people faced that exact possibility in 2022, after an office set up by Gov. Ron DeSantis began arresting voters who allegedly cast ballots while ineligible to do so.
With Wednesday’s ruling, Nebraska joins Colorado as two states that have taken action this year to make it easier for people caught up in the legal system to vote. In June, the Rocky Mountain State passed a law requiring local jails to offer in-person voting.
Formerly incarcerated people throughout the country frequently highlight how deeply they value regaining their voting rights after a conviction. “Part of being a citizen is your right to vote, and so the message that I was receiving was that I was less than,” Kelly Mahoney told Wisconsin NPR last week.
But as much as those rights mean, many fear making a mistake, especially as shifting, unsettled laws make restoration a moving target.
For example, in Nebraska, the bill legislators passed this year changed state law to allow anyone with a felony conviction to register to vote upon completion of their sentence. This modified a 2005 law that automatically restored voting rights for people with felony convictions but required a two-year waiting period upon completion of a sentence.
But then a non-binding opinion by Attorney General Mike Hilgers suggested that not only this year’s law but also the prior 2005 law were unconstitutional, creating a significant cloud of uncertainty for impacted people until this week’s state Supreme Court ruling.
“We were getting lots of calls from people, ‘I’m not going to bother. It worries me too much, and I’m not going to go back to prison,’” said Smith, with Civic Nebraska.
Nebraska is just one of several states to see tangled legal fights create uncertainty for eligible voters this year.
In Alabama, some felony convictions bar a person from voting for life, and others do not. Lawmakers added to this list of disenfranchising felonies this year, with an effective date of Oct. 1, just over one month from the presidential election and after the start of early voting in Alabama.
In response to a lawsuit, Alabama recently argued that this wasn’t a problem. Despite its effective date, the law can’t be enforced until after November’s election because of a state constitutional requirement that bars election law changes shortly before an election.
And in neighboring Mississippi, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last year overturned a state law that imposes a lifetime voting ban for a range of felony convictions, including shoplifting and bad check writing. But this summer, the full circuit court overturned the panel and found the law constitutional. The Marshall Project - Jackson found that this ruling leaves at least 55,000 people unable to vote in Mississippi.
But despite these many obstacles across the country, Smith described a hard push underway in Nebraska to educate eligible voters, deploying advertising, phone banking and door-to-door knocking to get the word out.
Instead of months to do this work, voting rights advocates in Nebraska ended with only about a week and a half.
“We want to get the word out,” Smith said. “You are cleared for takeoff.”
