Nebraskans Rush to Undo Harm, After Court Rebuffs GOP Bid to Block Thousands of Voters | Bolts

Nebraska’s supreme court reversed state officials’ abrupt attempt to impose a lifetime ban on voting for people with felony convictions. But the registration deadline is just days away.

Alex Burness | October 16, 2024

Tens of thousands of Nebraskans who’d been blocked for months from registering to vote regained ballot access on Wednesday, though with little time to act before the November election.

The block was lifted by the Nebraska Supreme Court, which ordered state officials to immediately comply with two related laws—one from 2005, and another passed this spring—that allow people to regain voting rights after completing their felony sentences. The court’s ruling on Wednesday reversed the actions of Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state, Bob Evnen, and attorney general, Mike Hilgers, who together in July abruptly declared both laws unconstitutional and blocked Nebraskans with past felony convictions from voting.

The court’s decision means that nearly 100,000 Nebraskans who’d already regained voting rights over the last two decades because of the 2005 reform law, only to see their rights thrown into question this summer, are once again unambiguously eligible to cast a ballot. It also allows approximately 7,000 Nebraskans who were enfranchised by the law adopted this year to finally register to vote.

Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman, who ruled with the majority, criticized Evnen and Hilgers for attempting such a massive rollback of voting rights right before a major election. “Why now?” she wrote. “Why not take the opportunity to challenge the laws long ago with available remedies, rather than creating uncertainty at this time?”

Voting rights advocates celebrated the court’s decision but they remain outraged at Evnen and Hilgers for the confusion and delays they created. The timing of the court’s decision gives advocates little opportunity to help people who might be confused about their voting rights because of Evnen and Hilgers: It came just two days before the Oct. 18 deadline to register to vote online. The cutoff for people to register in person is next week, Oct. 25.

“The rush to get this word out is going to be intense,” Aaron Pettes, a formerly incarcerated organizer in Nebraska, told Bolts. “The challenge now is to shout about it from the rooftops.”

Pettes, 44, has never voted and says he’s thrilled that he’ll now get to. But he is also concerned that time is running out to convince others to engage in a process of voting “that essentially booted them out” less than two months ago.

“Letting people know is one thing, but getting them to reinvest, to actually cast a ballot, will be hard, but not impossible,” he said.

The Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, which comprises many nonprofit groups in the state, vowed to try. “Our teams will soon be in the field, reaching out to Nebraskans so that they can restore their vote and reclaim their voice,” the coalition said in a statement shortly after the court made its ruling.

Nebraska previously disenfranchised anyone convicted of any felony for life. But in 2005, the state passed Legislative Bill 53, which allowed Nebraskans to restore their right to vote two years after completing their sentence. The law instantly restored voting rights to some 59,000 people, according to the ACLU of Nebraska. In the nearly two decades since, the law has enabled another 38,000 people to regain their rights.

Nebraska’s GOP-run legislature decided to go further this year. With broad, bipartisan support, it passed LB 20, which removed the two-year waiting period for rights restoration and made Nebraskans eligible to vote as soon as they complete their sentence, including any post-incarceration term of probation or parole.

With that law set to go into effect on July 19, the Voting Rights Restoration Coalition and its allies spent months preparing to contact the roughly 7,000 people affected by the 2024 reform—that is, those who completed felony sentences less than two years ago—to help facilitate registration.

But on July 17, less than 48 hours before this new law was to go into effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion in which he declared that both the new legislation and the 2005 law unconstitutional. Hilgers argued that only the state’s board of pardons—a three-person body comprising Hilgers, Evnen, and Republican Governor Jim Pillen—had the power to restore voting rights.

Absent a direct pardon from this body, Hilgers said, the state constitution demands that Nebraskans with felony convictions be barred from voting for life. Only a couple of states in the U.S.—Virginia and Tennessee—enforce a system of disenfranchisement that’s comparably strict.

Evnen, the secretary of state, promptly followed Hilgers’ guidance and directed county elections officials to cease all new registrations of Nebraskans with previous felonies. Their acts also threw into question the rights of many Nebraskans with past convictions who had already registered and voted in previous elections.

The nonprofit Civic Nebraska and three disenfranchised plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU, quickly sued, and the Nebraska Supreme Court heard the case in late August.

On Wednesday, the court rebuffed Evnen and Hilgers and ordered state elections officials to follow the 2005 and 2024 laws. The ruling came on a 4 to 2 vote, with each of the justices writing a separate opinion; a seventh justice concurred with the majority only in part.

John Gale, a Republican who preceded Evnen in office and disagrees with his actions to undermine the reforms around rights restoration, told Bolts that Wednesday’s supreme court ruling was “a very clear victory.”

“The fact that the legislature has passed two statutes over 20 years, in an effort to expand the franchise to people who have successfully completed the discharge of their sentences as felons, seems clear to me to be a true, solid expression that the majority of people in Nebraska believe this is appropriate,” Gale said.

Chief Justice Michael Heavican, who joined Wednesday’s majority ruling, lamented in a concurring opinion that the court was presented this question only a few months before the November election. “Even under this expedited timeframe, there was relatively little time between the submission of the case to this court and the onset of deadlines related to the 2024 general election,” Heavican wrote.

Voting rights advocates alleged throughout this summer and fall that Hilgers and Evnen deliberately tried to suppress voter turnout. Some also faulted the court for taking so long to rule given the fast-approaching registration deadline and election. “The inaction from the Supreme Court on this issue is unacceptable,” state Senator Terrell McKinney, a Democrat, posted on X on Oct. 2, after the lawsuit had already languished for weeks.

Those who just regained their voting rights are disproportionately people of color, as a result of profound racial disparities in the state’s criminal justice system. Nebraska’s Black imprisonment rate is almost 10 times higher than that of white residents; Latino and Native American people are also imprisoned in Nebraska at high rates.

According to the Nebraska Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, a disproportionate share of the people who risked losing their right to vote live in the areas of Lincoln and Omaha, the state’s population centers and host to several pivotal elections this year.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are competing for an electoral vote in Nebraska’s swing 2nd Congressional District, which centers around Omaha; the district also features a competitive U.S. House race. Nebraskans statewide are deciding other high-stakes races, including measures on abortion rights and paid sick leave, and a heated U.S. Senate race.

Advocates had planned on spending the summer and fall spreading the word about the new state law giving back voting rights to thousands more Nebraskans. Now they only have days before the deadline for registering new voters, and they feel like Hilgers and Evnen got away with throwing people’s voting rights into turmoil ahead of a critical election.

They also worry that even Nebraskans who have already been registered since 2005 may now have second thoughts about voting, out of fear of violating state law.

“The voter suppression has worked,” Jason Witmer, a policy fellow at the ACLU of Nebraska who used to be incarcerated, said at a rally in Omaha held hours after the court ruling landed. “There are a lot of people who are not going to speak to us, who have no more interest in being a part of it this year. So, it has worked to suppress many, many people’s voices.”

Bolts has reported that some states have confusing rules about who has the right to vote, which creates a climate of fear that can discourage people from participating even if they are eligible. Several formerly incarcerated Nebraskans told Bolts over the summer that they would sit out this election regardless of how the court ruled.

“I’m that concerned about going back to prison,” Tommy Moore, who was released from prison in 2009 and who has been legally voting in Nebraska for a decade, told Bolts in August. “I never want to encounter that humiliation again, and I prefer not to vote than to take the risk.”

Reached by text this morning, Moore said that he was still digesting the ruling but that he’d changed his mind: “Right now, I think I will vote,” he wrote.

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felony disenfranchisement Nebraska State Supreme Courts