OMAHA, Neb.– Thousands of Nebraskans with criminal records will learn Wednesday whether they can vote in next month’s hotly contested elections after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on a lawsuit seeking to restore their voting rights.
The state Supreme Court heard arguments in August on a lawsuit challenging a decision by the state’s top election officials to ignore a new state law that restores the voting rights of those convicted of a crime.
The decision comes just days before states’ deadlines to register to vote in the Nov. 5 general election.
Brad Christian-Sallis, executive director of the nonprofit civic engagement organization Nebraska Table, said he heard from people with criminal records who were looking forward to voting not only in the presidential race, but also in state and local races that affect their neighborhoods. and influence schools.
“It’s definitely caused a lot of anxiety and frustration,” he said.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Bob Evnen provincial election officials ordered to not register those with felony convictions for the November election, after Attorney General Mike Hilgers said in July that the new law was unconstitutional. Evnen had asked Hilgers for that opinion.
The American Union for Civil Liberties indicted on behalf of several Nebraska residents who would be denied the right to vote under Evnen’s directive. Because Evnen’s move came just weeks before the November election, the ACLU asked to take the lawsuit directly to the Nebraska Supreme Court, and the high court agreed.
Evnen’s order could prevent more than 7,000 Nebraskans from voting in the upcoming election, the ACLU said. Many of them live in the 2nd Congressional District, which is in central Omaha, Nebraska, where both race for the presidency and Congress could play a role. In an otherwise reliably Republican state, the district has twice awarded electoral votes to Democratic presidential candidates — once to Barack Obama in 2008 and again to Joe Biden in 2020.
Civic Nebraska, an advocacy group that focuses on voting rights, among other things, is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit that seeks to force government officials to implement the new law.
“When the decision comes, we have a plan to organize registration drives and increase awareness,” the group’s voting rights restoration coordinator Noah Rhoades said in an open letter to voters last week.
The new law, which was passed by the Nebraska Legislature earlier this year and is often referred to by its bill number, LB20immediately restores the right to vote to people who have successfully completed the terms of their crime.
The attorney general said the new law violates the state constitution’s separation of powers because he believes only the Nebraska Board of Pardons has the authority to restore a person’s voting rights through a pardon.
Pardons are difficult to obtain in Nebraska, requiring those convicted of crimes to wait ten years into their term before even applying for a pardon, and they are rarely granted. The Pardons Board consists of three members: Evnen, Hilgers and Governor Jim Pillen. All three are Republicans who have been vocal about their opposition to restoring the voting rights of people with criminal records.
Hilgers also argued that a 2005 state law that restored the voting rights of people with felony convictions two years after they had served the terms of their sentences was unconstitutional. If that law is upheld as unconstitutional, it could disenfranchise tens of thousands of Nebraskans who have been eligible to vote for the past 19 years.
Evnen has said he has not taken steps to remove from the voter list those with felony convictions who had legally registered to vote under the 2005 law. But that has done little to address the concerns of people who have been able to vote legally for years, Christian-Sallis says.
“I spend a lot of time on the doorstep talking to voters and just talking to the community in general, and I’m hearing from a lot of people who would qualify for the LB20 and are now confused about whether they should apply or were not allowed to register to vote,” he said.
Their concerns are not unfounded. Republican-led states have historically made it difficult for those convicted of a crime to vote, and even in states where laws have restored some of those rights, some Republican leaders have sown confusion — and fear — about who can vote. and cannot vote.
In Florida, voters in 2018 approved a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions. But three years later, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis created him a unit that focuses on “election crimes” who arrested twenty people for crimes who had tried to vote. The action highlighted the baffling process Florida uses to determine whether people convicted of felonies can vote, and several defendants said they were. confused by the arrests because election officials had allowed them to register to vote.
A report published last week by The Sentencing Project found that 4 million Americans will not be able to vote on November 5 due to disenfranchisement laws.
Christian-Sallis hopes the Nebraska Supreme Court will follow the example of 20 other states that have taken the step to restore voting rights to people with criminal records.
“What it really means at the end of the day is the opportunity to participate in our democracy and really connect with their communities again in a way that they couldn’t before,” he said.