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A closer look at North Carolina's disenfranchisement of voters with felony convictions

Diana Ejaita
/
The Marshall Project

North Carolina, like some other southern states, has laws that disenfranchise people with felonies from voting and other 'citizen rights,' like running for office and serving on a jury. Advocates say these laws come from a history of discrimination — and data shows they disproportionately impact Black voters. The recent election, with a convicted felon on the ballot, has shown attitudes toward restoring these citizen rights can be complicated.

North Carolina has a long history of disenfranchising felons from their citizen rights.

In our state, a person loses their right to vote, sit on a jury, and run for public office until the end of their felony sentence, including post-incarceration parole or probation (despite attempts to re-enfranchise people after they leave prison).

In April, a North Carolina judge struck down a law that dates back to 1877, criminalizing people serving felony sentences for voting — even if they didn't know it was against the law, a common occurrence for people who were no longer physically incarcerated but still serving out a term of probation, parole, or post-release supervision.

The law, which pre-dates the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, was seemingly being corrected 126 years later. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs, who is overseeing the case, stated that the law was intentionally discriminatory and continues to disproportionately impact Black voters. As of November, the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) and the state's elected district attorneys are urging the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse that decision — calling the ruling erroneous and the plaintiff’s claims moot.

However, a new law took effect at the beginning of this year and, according to NCSBE, it's not impacted by the federal court ruling. Like the old statute, the new law makes it illegal to vote while serving a felony sentence — but only if the person knows they are not permitted to vote, a higher burden of proof than the old law.

For some, the state's history of disenfranchising felons and its role as a key battleground state that voted Donald Trump, a convicted felon, into the White House, posed a contradiction. When it comes to voting rights, Florida law defers to the state of the conviction; in New York, where Trump was convicted, voters aren't disenfranchised as long as they're not incarcerated. Still, the contrast in North Carolina, between felons who can't vote, and a felon who was able to successfully run for the highest office in that nation, has drawn out some conflicting views on voting rights.

And, as Biggs wrote about North Carolina's 1877 law, a lot of that has to do with race.

Racial Implications

Black Americans make up almost 13% of the U.S. population, but one-third of Black men have at least one felony.

NC CRED, a nonpartisan organization that works to reduce racial disparities in the state’s juvenile and criminal justice system, found that Black North Carolinians account for nearly 53% of the state’s prison population, but only make up 21.5% of North Carolina’s adult population.

In fact, NC CRED states in their report that, “if African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%.”

Ariel White, an associate professor of political science at MIT, said felony disenfranchisement policies disproportionately impact people of color.

“The ways that states end up with their felony disenfranchisement laws at any point on that spectrum really varies across state histories, you mentioned the South, there are some places where you see a lot of these laws being adopted right in the wake of the Civil War, where you see often legislators speaking pretty explicitly about the ways that they think they can use these tools to disenfranchise black voters specifically,” White said.

Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Minnesota, Chris Uggen, said “a lot of those restrictions came in before we even really invented probation or parole.”

States’ Voting Rights Restrictions

Each state handles voting rights for those serving time in prison or on parole for felonies in their own way, said White. But, she says more states are leaning toward broader voting restoration efforts.

“There's a whole range of state laws across the US. In some cases, on the far end, you've got Maine, you've got Vermont, you've got Washington DC, where people are allowed to vote while they are serving prison time for a felony,” White said.

“Then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got states where people lose the right to vote even after they have finished a sentence, including, you know, being done with things like supervision,” she added.

White said to her knowledge some places in the U.S., like Vermont and Maine, have never had these laws; Washington D.C. recently added a disenfranchisement law.

Table I: Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States
Table I: Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States

“I would note that in a lot of states in recent years, we've seen changes in felony disenfranchisement laws to make them a little more liberal,” she said. “So not necessarily that people are voting from prison, but sometimes people are regaining the right to vote while they're on supervision, while they're serving probation or parole terms, or states are sometimes removing really long disenfranchisement practices after people finish their sentences. And those policies have been happening both in what we might term red states and blue states.”

Even so, Uggen said the South is ‘a bit of an outlier’ when it comes to felony disenfranchisement laws.

“The rest of the nation has really moved to restore the vote to people who are on supervision. Where, you know, 48 states you can't vote while you're currently serving a prison sentence, but in about half the states, you can now vote while you're on probation and parole. And so North Carolina is one that [you can’t vote] throughout the period of supervision.”

Uggen said some people face years-long probation sentencing, sometimes up to 20-to-30 years; and depending on the life expectancy of that person, they may never get to vote again.

“In places like North Carolina where you get out and then you are expected to work and take care of your family and be active in the community, and yet you don't have a say-so in what happens, you can't vote on the school board where your children go to school, I think that is a real loss,” Uggen said.

The fight to Forward Justice 

Daryl Atkinson, is a civil rights attorney and the co-director of the North Carolina nonprofit Forward Justice, dedicated to creating equitable justice in the South through systemic policy change.

Atkinson is also a formerly incarcerated (or his preferred term: justice-impacted) citizen, who served four years in prison for a first-time, non-violent drug crime. He now advocates for others who are impacted by the justice system, along with other organizations such as the North Carolina Second Chance Alliance.

“We've successfully litigated, for a while, a case (CSI v Moore) which gave the right to vote to people who are currently under supervision, on probation and parole. It was ultimately overturned at the Supreme Court in 2023 when the court made a hard rightward shift," he said.

Atkinson said it is no surprise to him that North Carolina continues to backtrack on reforms for disenfranchised voters.

(As is currently the case with NCSBE’s filing to overturn Biggs’ decision, arguing that since punishment only applies to those who vote with the knowledge that their sentence is ongoing, then the plaintiff’s claims — that the law impeded their efforts to increase voter participation — was no longer an applicable argument.)

He argued these disenfranchisement laws are ultimately about those in leadership maintaining their power, adding that “public policy change without the civic engagement [of those who would benefit from it] is begging.”

“It isn't about changing hearts and minds, and getting people to love you, it's about power,” Atkinson said. “Once people who've been convicted of felonies decide, ‘you know what, we're going to be our own political power source. And any Democrat, Republican or independent that doesn't have a second chance agenda — that isn't about restoring the right to vote to people, even if they've been convicted of a felony — they won't get voted in office.’ When that happens, things change.”

Uggen said there is plenty of research that supports the correlation between the civic engagement of people who are formerly incarcerated and a reduction in recidivism rates.

“What I think voting is doing is it's picking up a desire to participate as a law-abiding citizen in one's community, and there's no evidence certainly, that voting will make you more criminal. It all points in the other direction,” Uggen said.

Atkinson agreed about the relationship between voting and the social fabric.

“If we want those folks to remain a fabric and see themselves as part of the community, we should not exclude them,” Atkinson said. “No other westernized democracy does this. I've been to both Germany and Norway, and visited their prison systems. They don't disenfranchise people who've been convicted of felonies. America does this because of its tortured racial history, and we won't acknowledge it, and we won't move past it.”

Both Uggen and Atkinson agree that reinstating the right to vote is not the end all cure for crime, but when people who have been convicted of a felony are encouraged to lead in a civil capacity, it improves the overall quality of life for that demographic, and marginalized communities as a whole.

Misconceptions about incarcerated voters 

Atkinson, Uggen, and White say lawmakers are often under the assumption that if restrictions on incarcerated voting are lifted then the results of various elections would lean in favor of the left, but studies have shown that this is not necessarily the case.

In October, The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization, published its findings from a survey identifying the political leanings of incarcerated people across the nation. They're complex, but showed strong support for Trump, even though at the state level Republicans have sought to roll back voting rights for people with felony convictions.

Here’s what the organization published on what incarcerated individuals in North Carolina thought about the candidates before Election Day:

Trump’s golden opportunity

Seemingly Uggen and other advocates’ work stems from this thesis: in the efforts to protect American democracy by barring the right to vote for individuals serving a felony sentence, are southern states (including North Carolina) driving a deeper divide in our union?

“When President Trump was convicted of a felony, you heard people on the left saying, ‘Ah, he's a convicted felon! He's the worst of the worst!’ So I think we're all a little bit hypocritical on this, regardless of where we're coming from,” Uggen said. “I think it is a reminder that these restrictions hit people in all walks of life, and they hit a lot of hard-working, tax-paying citizens who are trying to do right by their families and communities.”

Uggen also said that Trump’s re-election presents an opportunity to lead the way on this reform, adding that Republicans have made meaningful gestures to reform the criminal justice system in the past:

“Going back to George W. Bush, The Second Chance Act was established under his presidency, and it wasn't a lot of money attached to that, but, but there was a heartfelt commitment to helping people reintegrate after prison. And I think in the first Trump administration, we saw that First Step Act that didn't necessarily reverse mass incarceration, but it was a meaningful effort to get criminal justice reform. So one thing that gives me hope is that I think President Trump will have, let's say, the political cover to be a little more progressive on crime, where nobody's going to say he's soft on this or that, where a Democratic president often runs into that problem.”

Uggen continued: “It's also important to know that if you leave 4 million people out of the political calculus for the major parties, that systematically biases the sort of policy platforms you get. And so I think we would be hearing more about economic justice. And so leaving them out of the conversation really does weaken democracy overall. And, importantly, it dilutes the vote of any group that's over-represented among the people with criminal records. So [it] dilutes the vote of African American communities, dilutes the vote of American Indian communities, dilutes the vote of men relative to women, because men are overrepresented. So for all of these reasons, you know, I'm generally in favor of restoring the vote to people with records.”

Once a person is convicted of a felony, they lose the right to vote, but according to North Carolina state law that right is automatically regained upon completion of their sentence.

Those incarcerated for a misdemeanor do not lose their right to vote, but it is suggested that anyone with such charges check on their registration status. You can find more on registering to vote as someone involved in the criminal justice system here.

Aaleah McConnell is a Report for America corps member and a recent North Carolina implant from Atlanta, Georgia. They report on the criminal justice system in New Hanover County and surrounding areas. Before joining WHQR, they completed a fellowship with the States Newsroom, as a General Assignment Reporter for the Georgia Recorder. Aaleah graduated from Kennesaw State University with a degree in journalism and minored in African and African-American Diaspora studies. In their free time, Aaleah loves roller-skating and enjoys long walks with their dog Kai. You can reach them at amcconnell@whqr.org.