North Carolina, like all Southern states, makes convicted felons have to jump through various hoops to have their voting rights restored once they have served their time, and most Southern states make those hoops so onerous that getting the right to vote back is nearly impossible. Republicans have long used the tactic to harm Black voters in order to keep them off the voter rolls for life after serving prison time for a felony.
That is, until Monday's state court ruling that struck down the state's provisions as unconstitutional.
Judges have restored voting rights to an estimated 55,000 North Carolinians on parole or probation for a felony, according to a lawyer for the people who challenged the law that has kept them from voting.
GOP state lawmakers, who were defending the law in court, plan to appeal Monday’s ruling to a higher court. But if the ruling is upheld on appeal, then people convicted of felonies in North Carolina will regain their right to vote once they leave prison.
“Everyone on felony probation, parole or post-supervision release can now register and vote, starting today,” the challengers’ lawyer, Stanton Jones, said in a text message Monday morning after the ruling came down.
Most U.S. states allow people with felony records to regain their voting rights at some point after leaving prison, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. Some have the same rules North Carolina had until Monday’s ruling, requiring people to first finish their probation or parole. But a larger number have the rules that the judges have now switched North Carolina to, with people regaining their rights as soon as they leave prison.
It’s the biggest expansion of voting rights in North Carolina since the 1960s, said Daryl Atkinson, co-director of Durham civil rights group Forward Justice and a lawyer for the challengers in this case.
“Our biggest quarrels in this state have been over what groups of people have a voice at the ballot box to be included in ‘We the People,’” Atkinson said at a press conference Monday, later adding: “Today, we enlarged the ‘we’ in ‘We the people’.”
The law’s challengers argued that felon disenfranchisement laws were explicitly created to stop Black people from voting in the years after the Civil War and coincided with a widespread campaign to accuse newly freed Black people of felonies — troubling trends, they said, which have continued into the current day.
Jones said in his opening arguments in the trial last week, The News & Observer reported, that while Black people make up 21% of North Carolina’s voting-age population, they are 42% of the people whose voting rights have been taken away because of this law — “which is no surprise because that’s exactly what it was designed to do,” he said.
Now, if Monday’s ruling survives on appeal, North Carolina will be the only state in the South to automatically restore voting rights to people after they leave prison.
The challengers who won the case had said that once people are out of prison, they’ve rejoined society and should have a say in how it’s run. Even if they’re on probation they still can pay taxes and send their kids to school — and thus should be able to vote on the people in charge of spending their taxes or running the schools, said Dennis Gaddy, who founded Community Success Initiative, a Raleigh group that helps former prison inmates rejoin society.
“They can’t advocate for themselves” without being able to vote, he said. “They can’t advocate for their communities. They can’t advocate for their families.”
In other words, the ruling from the NC judges are that there's no compelling reason to force felons who have served their time to keep them from being able to register to vote, and that doing so is a denial of the 14th Amendment. Republicans of course say they will have the ruling blocked awaiting appeal.
Republicans want as few Americans to vote as possible.
What does that say about their ideas of "democracy"?
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