The Greene County Democrat

Tag: voting rights

  • A sense of history: Why this Black Belt county has Alabama’s highest voter turnout

    A sense of history: Why this Black Belt county has Alabama’s highest voter turnout

    By Drew Taylor, Alabama Reflector

    EUTAW — In the town square of Eutaw, the modern world hems in a relic of an older one that no longer exists.

    The Eutaw Hotel is long gone. Even among older locals, the V.J. Elmore’s Five & Dime is nothing but a faint memory. Places like Mills Pharmacy or Main Street Diner get the foot traffic these days. But inside the square, the old Greene County Courthouse still stands, along with a towering oak tree just yards away.

    The tree was much shorter when Earlean Isaac, then 15 years old, marched with others to the courthouse for voting rights in 1965. It was where Isaac, who would go on to become the first Black female probate judge in the county, was beaten by a police officer.

    “He hit me with his Billy club,” Isaac said.

    By 1969, with a newly ordered election mandated by the Supreme Court to recognize the National Democratic Party of Alabama, voters would elect four Black candidates– Harry Means, Franchie Burton, Vassie Knott and Levi Morrow Sr.—to the Greene County Commission and put two new Black members, Robert Hines and James Posey, on the Greene County School Board. These six men put Greene County on the map as the first county across the country since Reconstruction to put a majority-Black government in office.

    A year later, outside the very courthouse where Isaac was beaten, Thomas Gilmore, a minister who had returned to Greene County from Los Angeles a few years prior, was sworn in as the first Black sheriff in Greene County, going on to get the nickname of “The Sheriff Without a Gun.”

    Today, across the street from the old courthouse sits the new one, named after William McKinley Branch, the first Black probate judge in Greene County. It’s a history that plays a crucial part in the area’s voter turnout, often among the highest across Alabama in any given year.

    Leading the vote in Alabama

    During the primary election in May, Greene County had a 51% voter turnout, compared with the 23.11% turnout statewide. Countywide, there are 6,332 registered voters.

    “Usually, our voter turnout depends on who’s on the ballot that will really drive the votes out,” Isaac said.

    There were several big local races in Greene County this spring, including races for a district judge and sheriff. But Greene County consistently outpaces the rest of the state for turnout. In the 2022 primary, 44.5% of the county’s eligible voters cast ballots. In 2020, Greene County’s turnout for the presidential election was 68.3%, compared to 62.8% statewide. In 2024, while the state as a whole posted its lowest voter turnout for a presidential election in over 30 years with 58.5%, nearly 61.7% of Greene County’s registered voters turned out to the polls.  

    This comes despite Greene County being Alabama’s smallest county by population. Just 7,730 people lived there in 2020, according to the U.S. Census. Recent estimates have that number closer to 7,000 as of last July. Greene County also ranks as among the oldest, with a median age close to 44, and one of the poorest, with a median household income of about $29,200, compared to $63,999 statewide.

    Richard Fording, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, said that because of these obstacles, trying to explain this surge of voters in both Greene County, as well as the Black Belt as a whole, is complicated.

    “These are counties where the demographic disadvantages are pretty extreme,” Fording said. “It’s more interesting for that region.”

    However, for people from Greene County, one thing it has never lacked is political involvement. Rep. Curtis Travis, D-Tuscaloosa, who remembers meeting both Gilmore and Branch as a boy at his father’s garage in Eutaw, credits his home county with putting him in the Alabama Legislature in the first place.

    “Greene County was the one that got me over,” said Travis, who beat Ralph Anthony Howard by 500 votes in Greene County to win the Democratic primary in 2022.

    For Travis, one aspect of Greene County’s high voter turnout, as well as much of the Black Belt’s, is a recognition of the past and how Black people were able to make change with the vote.

    “That empowerment is something that is shared with pride,” Travis said. “They keep it alive, and they know where they come from.”

    Community centers are one way the community tries to keep that tradition alive, often hosting candidate forums with locals. However, Travis said these forums are anything but easy for anyone looking for votes.

    “There was one candidate who came out to speak to the seniors at the Boligee Community Center and it was like he was on trial,” Travis said. “They like to get their questions out there.”

    Hattie Samuel, mayor of Bolligee, said the town’s community center, located in the former Greene County Training School, has always been a good place for people to talk about politics and engage with the political system.

    “What we do is when a candidate qualifies to run, we like to study that person,” Samuel said. “A lot of people at the center can’t get around for the campaign, so having these candidates come here has been great.”

    Severe Strode, a 93-year-old woman who lives in Boligee, is a regular at the Boligee Community Center and one of those in Greene County who tried to keep that empowerment alive, getting out to vote in the last primary.

    “This election, I feel more people felt a need for change in Greene County,” Strode said. “I also vote because it is one of my civil rights.”

     In “There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975,” author Jason Sokol wrote that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a crucial change in momentum for Black Alabamians in Greene County.

    “As Blacks made up more than 75% of the population, they quickly surpassed whites on the voting rolls,” Sokol wrote. “Suddenly a political minority, few Greene whites knew exactly what had hit them.”

    The shift played out in dramatic fashion in Eutaw’s town square, where in 1966 Black and white Alabamians gathered to watch as the vote counts were rolling in for the sheriff’s race. Bill Lee, a former tackle for the Green Bay Packers, had already been sheriff for 10 years, but the office had been held by his father and brothers going back as early as the 1930s. 

    Challenging Lee was Gilmore, had come back home to Greene County just a few years before from Los Angeles. In the time since he had come back, Gilmore led many protests in Eutaw, often coming face to face with Lee.

    Gilmore ultimately came up short, getting only 1,949 votes to Lee’s 2,246.

    Despite court challenges to the results, Lee would hold onto office. But in an interview with Marshall Frady of Newsweek, the former sheriff seemed to predict what was about to come.

    “But you know — I don’t understand a bit of it,” Lee said of the civil rights movement, as recounted in Frady’s “Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey.” “This thing’s so massive. I mean, you just can’t expect 1,500 hundred people to be able to keep beating off 2,700. It just stands to reason they bound to win something eventually.”

    Today, Black Alabamians make up almost 80% of the population.

    Protecting that legacy may also help mobilize voters this year. Fording, whose area of focus is voter turnout, said that with the Supreme Court giving the Republican-led Alabama Legislature permission to redraw its congressional map, all but wiping out a predominantly Black Congressional district, there has been a sense of urgency for Black voters, especially those in marginalized areas like the Black Belt, to make their voices heard and vote.

    “That has sent shockwaves into that community,” Fording said.

    Like Fording, Isaac believes the redrawn Congressional lines in Alabama will continue to bring out people to the ballot box.

    “Our voice is being diminished,” she said. “The little voice we do have is being taken away from us.”

    Spiver Gordon lives less than a mile from the old Greene County Courthouse, yet only yards from the place he keeps history alive.

    Next to his home on Greensboro Street, Gordon keeps up the Magnolia House, part of the Alabama Civil Rights Freedom Farm Museum that holds hundreds of artifacts from the civil rights era, from photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. to an article by the Montgomery Advertiser announcing Isaac’s swearing in as probate judge back in 1989.

    As Gordon walks into each room, another table of framed photos appear every time he flicks on the lights. Even the bathroom has different rows of photos he’s been trying to restore.

    “I have their stories here,” said Gordon.

    Gordon worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference before becoming the first Black member of the Eutaw City Council in 1984. He has had his ups and downs in politics, but said that Greene County has always had a vibrant political history.

    “It’s been a continued process,” Gordon said.

    Isaac, who served as probate judge until 2016, remembers how people took election years pretty seriously, especially precinct leaders in places like West Greene or Boligee.

    “In Boligee, they would celebrate how they toppled Forkland in a particular race by getting more votes,” she said.

    Fording said that in places with older populations in the Black Belt, where some still remember a time before the Voting Rights Act, casting a ballot is taken as a kind of civic responsibility.

    “As a region, the strong sense of group identity is in the fact that the voting rights struggle is still very salient in those communities,” he said. “Any surge happening now is how current events are triggering those memories.”

    Despite the challenges facing Greene County, Isaac still loves the area and knows that better things are in store for it.

    “I travel a lot, but after a couple of days, I always want to come back to Greene County,” she said. “This is home.”

    As Gordon looks out onto Greensboro Street, a stack of bricks sits next to the Magnolia House. At 86 years old, Gordon has plans to add onto the building, adding more rooms, more pictures, and more memories. For him, and for Greene County, the work isn’t done yet.

    Read the original article on the Alabama Reflector’s website here

    Featured Image: Spiver Gordon stands inside Magnolia House, a civil rights museum in Eutaw, Alabama, U.S., on Friday, June 5th, 2026 (Andi Rice /Alabama Reflector)

  • Newswire: Congressional Black Caucus presses companies in the US to oppose Republican redistricting push

    Newswire: Congressional Black Caucus presses companies in the US to oppose Republican redistricting push

    by Matt Brown, AP News

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Congressional Black Caucus on Tuesday called on major corporations across the U.S., including those that previously expressed support for voting rights and racial justice, to oppose redistricting efforts by Republican-led states that seek to eliminate majority-Black U.S. House districts.

    In a letter sent to more than 250 companies, members of the Black Caucus urge them to condemn the redistricting efforts, which the lawmakers describe as “coordinated efforts to silence Black voices at the ballot box.” Some of the companies had cosigned their own message to Congress five years ago urging lawmakers to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a Democratic proposal to restore and update the Voting Rights Act.

    That 2021 coalition, Business for Voting Rights, was backed by many of the country’s most valuable and influential companies, including Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Salesforce, Target, PayPal, Intel and Starbucks.

    Tuesday’s letter is the latest effort by the Congressional Black Caucus and its allies to gather support for preventing more Republican-led states from redrawing their legislative maps in ways that would dilute Black political representation. Several states have moved to eliminate congressional districts represented by Black Democratic lawmakers after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that severely weakened a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

    “Corporations that have profited from Black consumers, relied on Black workers, and amassed wealth in part from Black communities cannot look away while Black political power is dismantled in plain sight,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, chair of the Black Caucus, said in an interview.

    A woman wearing an orange patterned jacket holds a decorative fan and a document labeled 'U.S. House of Representatives' outside the Capitol building, with a crowd in the background.
    Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, prepares for a news conference at the Capitol (AP Photo by J. Scott Applewhite)

    Clarke described the letter as “putting corporate America on notice,” but she said the caucus was not seeking an adversarial relationship with corporations. Among those receiving Tuesday’s letter were companies based overseas that have a significant presence in the U.S.

    The caucus last week called for Black athletes to boycott public universities in states that are gerrymandering their congressional maps to eliminate districts held by Black lawmakers. The 59-member Congressional Black Caucus consists entirely of Democrats, including more than a third from Southern states.

    Some lawmakers have said mass protests and federal legislation might be necessary to undo the efforts underway in Republican-led states. Any new federal voting rights law would almost certainly require Democrats to secure majorities in both chambers of Congress and win the presidency.

    It is unclear how companies will respond to the demands. One firm, the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, said that it had received the caucus’ letter and endorsed its message. 

    “A healthy business depends on a healthy democracy,” said Corley Kenna, an executive at Patagonia. “Patagonia stands with those who work to increase representation and defend free and fair elections.”

    The Associated Press reached out for comment to dozens of companies that were sent a letter by the caucus, but did not receive a response from most firms. Microsoft declined to comment.

    “Many companies that previously issued statements after the murder of George Floyd, pledged billions toward racial equity initiatives, and spoke forcefully in defense of democracy following January 6 now face a defining test of whether those commitments were rooted in principle or convenience,” the caucus’ letter states.

    It also represents the latest instance of the caucus expressing frustrations with corporate America. A 2024 Black Caucus report noted that lawmakers were “troubled that some corporations that made pledges in 2020 have taken several steps in the opposite direction,” such as rolling back or failing to follow through on pledges to diversify their workforces.

    “We understand who the occupant in the White House is and the reality of Republicans being in charge,” Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada said of the caucus’ message. “But what corporate America also understands is that there will be a shift at some point.”

    The letter calls on companies to publicly condemn the redistricting plans, meet with Black Caucus members to discuss corporate America’s role in protecting voting rights and disclose their political donations to Republican politicians in states that are redistricting their congressional maps.

    President Donald Trump last year kicked off the unusual mid-decade round of congressional redistricting when he pushed Texas lawmakers to redraw their maps in a way that would add Republican seats. Democratic-led California responded, but it has been mostly Republican states redrawing their lines since as the party tries to maintain its majority in the U.S. House during this year’s midterm elections.

    The effort was supercharged by the Supreme Court decision, which allowed even more Republican states to redraw congressional maps that previously had protected minority communities.

     

    Horsford, who chaired the Black Caucus during President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, said the caucus is demanding that companies “stand on the side of democracy, fairness and equal representation.” 

    “This is about power, who holds it and what it’s used for,” he said. “And when you’re diluting Black economic and political power, we need to know where these companies stand in this moment, and what side of history they’re on.”

    Featured Image: Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., center, is surrounded by members of the Congressional Black Caucus as they speak to reporters in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling to strike down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, April 29, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
  • Newswire: Former NBA Star Derrick Coleman Rejects Alabama Honors Over Redistricting

    Newswire: Former NBA Star Derrick Coleman Rejects Alabama Honors Over Redistricting

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  • Newswire: Supreme Court’s Alabama redistricting ruling marks brazen reversal of its previous stance

    Newswire: Supreme Court’s Alabama redistricting ruling marks brazen reversal of its previous stance

    by Jim Saksa, Democracy Docket

    The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority erased all doubts about the sweeping nature of its recent voting rights jurisprudence Tuesday night with a shadow docket ruling that effectively reverses the Court’s own decision in the same matter just three years ago.

    The unsigned emergency order in Allen v. Milligan goes beyond the court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision, which merely nullified the Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) prohibition on unintentional racial discrimination, to also make it all but impossible for judges to strike down a map as intentionally discriminatory. 

    It does so by essentially flipping its own 2023 ruling in the same case. 

    In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated that decision to go down the “path” that “disregards both democratic values and the rule of law, leading to “a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

    Sotomayor noted that Tuesday’s decision was the third time Alabama’s congressional map had found its way before the high bench, lamenting that “[e]ach turn reveals just how unconscionable the Court’s action is today.”

    It was the Supreme Court’s surprising decision to uphold Section 2 of the VRA in Milligan just three years ago that gave civil rights groups and voting advocates some glimmer of hope that it might truly preserve the law again in Callais.

    Immediately after Callais came out in late April, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to vacate the lower court’s injunction blocking it from using the congressional map it enacted in 2023 — the map the Supreme Court ultimately rejected in Milligan as VRA violation.

    The court granted that wish and remanded the case down to the district court, which then entered another injunction, saying the map was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.” 

    But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court vacated again, saying the lower court failed to “heed the presumption of legislative good faith… because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus.”

    The Supreme Court explained that the plaintiffs failed to show that their alternative map performed “‘just as well’ with respect to all of the State’s constitutionally permissible redistricting criteria,” as required by Callais. 

    “Yet, the District Court found a violation even though the plaintiffs’ alternative map would not perform just as well as to the State’s constitutionally permissible criteria of keeping together the Gulf Coast community of interest and avoiding the pairing of incumbents,” the majority held.

    But, as the Guardian’s Sam Levine noted on social media Tuesday night, the court came to the exact opposite conclusion in the very same dispute just three years ago.

    “Alabama argues that the Gulf Coast region in the southwest of the State is such a community of interest, and that plaintiffs’ maps erred by separating it into two different districts,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority in 2023. “We do not find the State’s argument persuasive.”

    That inconsistency belies Justice Samuel Alito’s claim in Callais that the Court was not striking down Section 2 of the VRA, but instead merely “properly constru[ing]” it, as UCLA Law professor Rick Hasen noted. 

    “[T]here’s now practically an unrebuttable presumption that a legislature is acting in good faith and therefore is not acting in a racially discriminatory way so long as the state can assert some pretextual nonracial reason for enacting its plan,” Hasen wrote after the decision’s publication. “So in these cases, plaintiffs will need to meet an impossible standard to prove effect, just as in a post-Callais Section 2 case, a standard which simply ignores the fact that when (white) Republicans discriminate against Democrats in the south, they are discriminating against Black voters.”

    “More and more, this Court shows itself to be little more than a partisan tool engaged in results-oriented jurisprudence, despite protestations to the contrary,” he added.

    Sotomayor’s dissent, which the court’s other two Democratic appointees joined, highlighted the majority’s hypocrisy and the chaos it unleashed.

    “Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos.”

    In December, the Supreme Court set aside a district court’s finding that Texas intentionally used race to redraw its congressional maps last year, emphasizing that, consistent with its shadow docket order in Purcell v. Gonzalez, “that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

    But now, seven months later, the majority decided to do just that, Sotomayor noted, saying it has unleashed “havoc,” and “tramples on that principle of restraint,” established in Purcell. 

    “To switch to the 2023 Redistricting Plan now, however, county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the State to new congressional districts,” Sotomayor wrote. “Three of Alabama’s counties will be particularly hard hit because they are split across two congressional districts. These counties have about 600,000 registered voters between them (roughly 15% of the State’s total number of registered voters).”

    In the order, the majority seems to suggest that Purcell only applies to lower courts, not the Supreme Court, by emphasizing “lower” federal courts, rather than just federal courts. 

    But, as Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene noted, Justice Kavanaugh said otherwise in 2022’s Moore v. Harper, where he agreed with denying plaintiff’s request for “an order from this Court requiring North Carolina to change its existing congressional election districts for the upcoming 2022 primary and general elections.”

    “It is too late for the federal courts to order that the district lines be changed for the 2022 primary and general elections,” Kavanaugh wrote. 

    Kavanaugh went on to cite his recent concurrence in Merrill v. Allen — the first time Alabama’s congressional map appeared before the court. In that order, issued in February 2022, the Supreme Court vacated the lower court’s injunction of the map’s use, saying it was too close to the election. 

    “In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” Sotomayor wrote. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

    Ashley Cleaves contributed to this report.

    Featured image: All Roads Lead to the South National Day of Action Participants (Melissa Bender/NurPhoto via AP)

  • Newswire: The NAACP is Calling for Athletes to Help Fight for Voting Rights

    Newswire: The NAACP is Calling for Athletes to Help Fight for Voting Rights

    by Caleb Pugh, Our Weekly

    The NAACP is calling on athletes to hold Southern states accountable for their radicalization of state maps, as many disfranchise black voters and leaders. While this has been an ongoing problem in various Southern states over the years, Louisiana recently made headlines after redrawing its congressional map, eliminating two predominantly Black districts by splitting them and forcing former district leaders, Tony Carter and Castro Fields, to compete against each other for one district. They also limited the importance of the Black vote, as now predominantly Black communities are overshadowed by the majority of white voters in those districts.

    The campaign, according to the release, focuses on flagship public universities that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue in eight Southern states: Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia. This would include Ole Miss and Mississippi State University.

    “This generation of Black athletes understands something that those who came before them were never afforded the chance to say so plainly: your talent is yours, and so is your community’s political power,” stated Tylik McMillan, the national director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division, in the release. “The state that is working to erase your grandmother’s congressional district is the same state whose governor will stand on the field and celebrate your touchdown or game-winning shot.”

    While it’s seldom that players have spoken up about the racial messages on their school campus, as Kylin Hill, a former running back for Mississippi State, posted on social media in 2020, politicians need to “change the flag or I won’t be representing this state anymore.” That year, the state changed its Confederate-themed flag to the current magnolia version.

    “For generations, Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable industries in American life,” the caucus said in a statement. “Yet at the very moment those same communities face coordinated attacks on their democratic representation, too many leaders across college athletics have chosen silence.”

    The campaign also asks fans, alumni, and donors to stop buying tickets, merchandise, and licensed apparel from targeted programs and divert those funds to historically Black colleges and universities and related organizations.

    Featured Image: U.S. Supreme Court Building (iStockphoto / NNPA)

  • Supreme Court lets Alabama speed adoption of congressional map eliminating a majority-Black district

    Supreme Court lets Alabama speed adoption of congressional map eliminating a majority-Black district

    by Lawrence Hurley, NBC News

    WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday removed an obstacle to Alabama’s using a new congressional map in this year’s election that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts.

    The court, over the objection of its liberal members, sent litigation over the Republican-drawn map back to the lower court, which could speed up the state’s effort to use its map.

    The state has been battling civil rights plaintiffs over its congressional map for years, with a focus on whether a second majority-Black district was required to comply with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

    The latest flurry of court filings came in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on April 29 in a case from Louisiana that undermined a key provision of the law, making it much easier for states to draw districts that dilute minority voting rights.

    The court fast-tracked the Alabama case a week after a similar decision in the Louisiana dispute. Both decisions are a boon to Republicans, who are locked in a redistricting war with Democrats triggered by President Donald Trump, with control of the House at stake.

    In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court action was “inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”

    The Alabama litigation includes a claim that the state’s favored map intentionally discriminates against Black voters, a finding that may not be affected by the Louisiana ruling, Sotomayor added.

    Alabama’s appeal of the lower court ruling that invalidated its map was on hold at the Supreme Court while it decided the Louisiana case. As soon as the ruling was issued, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the justices to act quickly on its appeal so the state can move forward with using its preferred map.

    The Legislature has already passed legislation, signed into law by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, that would push back the state’s primary elections, which were originally due to take place May 19.

    The Alabama litigation dates to the map the state drew immediately after the 2020 census, which included one majority-Black district. The state, which has a population that is more than a quarter Black, has seven congressional districts.

    Civil rights plaintiffs successfully challenged that map, winning a surprising ruling at the Supreme Court in June 2023.

    The state then sought to try again, drawing a new map — the one the state currently wants to use — that still included one majority-Black district, but the Supreme Court rejected that effort, too, in September 2023. 

    That led to a court-drawn map with two majority-Black districts’ being used in the 2024 election. Democrats won both races.

  • Virginia Governor restores voting rights to felons

    By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ERIK ECKHOLM

    VA Governor Terry McAuliffe

    Gov. Terry McAuliffe held up the signed executive order at a ceremony outside the state capitol in Richmond, Va., on Friday. CHET STRANGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

     

    WASHINGTON — Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia used his executive power on Friday to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 convicted felons, circumventing the Republican-run legislature. The action effectively overturns a Civil War-era provision in the state’s Constitution aimed, he said, at disenfranchising African-Americans. The sweeping order, in a swing state that could play a role in deciding the November presidential election, will enable all felons who have served their prison time and finished parole or probation to register to vote. Most are African-Americans, a core constituency of Democrats, Mr. McAuliffe’s political party. Amid intensifying national attention over harsh sentencing policies that have disproportionately affected African-Americans, governors and legislatures around the nation have been debating — and often fighting over — moves to restore voting rights for convicted felons. Virginia imposes especially harsh restrictions, barring felons from voting for life. In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin, a newly elected Republican, recently overturned an order enacted by his Democratic predecessor that was similar to the one Mr. McAuliffe signed Friday. In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, vetoed a measure to restore voting rights to convicted felons, but Democrats in the state legislature overrode him in February and an estimated 44,000 former prisoners who are on probation can now register to vote. “There’s no question that we’ve had a horrible history in voting rights as relates to African-Americans — we should remedy it,” Mr. McAuliffe said in an interview Thursday, previewing the announcement he made on the steps of Virginia’s Capitol, just yards from where President Abraham Lincoln once addressed freed slaves. “We should do it as soon as we possibly can.” Republicans in the Virginia Legislature have resisted measures to expand voting rights for convicted felons, and Mr. McAuliffe’s action, which he said was justified under an expansive legal interpretation of his executive clemency authority, provoked an immediate backlash. Virginia Republicans issued a statement Friday accusing the governor of “political opportunism” and “a transparent effort to win votes.” “Those who have paid their debts to society should be allowed full participation in society,” said the statement from the Republican party chairman, John Whitbeck. “But there are limits.” He said Mr. McAuliffe was wrong to issue a blanket restoration of rights, even to those who “committed heinous acts of violence.” The order includes those convicted of violent crimes, including murder and rape. There is no way to know how many of the newly eligible voters in Virginia will register. “My message is going to be that I have now done my part,” Mr. McAuliffe said. Nationally, an estimated 5.85 million Americans are denied the right to vote because of felony convictions, according to The Sentencing Project, a Washington research organizations, which says one in five African-Americans in Virginia cannot vote. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, have no voting restrictions on felons; Virginia is among four – the others are Kentucky, Florida and Iowa – that have the harshest restrictions. Friday’s shift in Virginia is part of a national trend toward restoring voter rights to felons, based in part on the hope that it will aid former prisoners’ re-entry into society. Over the last two decades about 20 states have acted to ease their restrictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Previous governors in Florida and Iowa took executive action to ease their lifetime bans, but in each case, a subsequent governor restored the tough rules. Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, said Mr. McAuliffe’s decision would have lasting consequences because it will remain in effect at least until January 2018, when the governor leaves office. “This will be the single most significant action on disenfranchisement that we’ve ever seen from a governor,” Mr. Mauer said, “and it’s noteworthy that it’s coming in the middle of this term, not the day before he leaves office. So there may be some political heat but clearly he’s willing to take that on, which is quite admirable.” Myrna Pérez, director of a voting rights project at the Brennan Center, said Mr. McAuliffe’s move was particularly important because Virginia has had such restrictive laws on voting by felons. Still, she said,“Compared to the rest of the country, this is a very middle of the road policy.’’ Ms. Pérez said a number of states already had less restrictive policies than the one announced by Mr. McAuliffe. Fourteen states allow felons to vote after their prison terms are completed even while they remain on parole or probation.

  • Supreme Court blocks challenge to ‘one person, one vote’ in key voting rights case

    Written By Desire Thompson, NBC News

    The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that districts will continue to use total population instead of voter population to determine legislative redistricting in Texas, maintaining fair voting rights for the state’s large Latino population. According to NBC News, the decision was made Monday after Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger argued that only eligible voters should be counted, which can harm large urban communities consisting of non-voters and children, but benefit large districts with conservative and rural voters.
    The ruling, signed with an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was supported by Justices John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas concurred but drew their own notes on the ‘one person, one vote’ law.
    “In a concurring opinion, one of the Supreme Court’s conservatives, Justice Alito, said Monday’s decision holds only that states are not required to count total population. The ruling does not bar states from instead counting the voting population, which he called “an important and sensitive question that we can consider if and when” such a case comes before the court.”
    The historic “one person, one vote” view has been seen as a clear way to treat voters equally across districts. If the argument was supported, large states like Texas, New York, California, New Jersey, Arizona and Nevada would have seen the largest changes in voting rights.
    The ruling is also a win for liberals who have supported total population voting. Ginsburg explained that those not eligible to vote need representation and the 14th amendment is permitted as a foundation for drawing districts.
    “Nonvoters have an important stake in many policy debates—children, their parents, even their grandparents, for example, have a stake in a strong public-education system—and in receiving constituent services, such as help navigating public-benefits bureaucracies,” Ginsburg wrote, “By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation.”
    “Adopting voter-eligible apportionment as constitutional command would upset a well-functioning approach to districting that all 50 States and countless local jurisdictions have followed for decades, even centuries,” Ginsburg wrote. “Appellants have shown no reason for the Court to disturb this longstanding use of total population.”