Attorney general moves to shut down voting suit
A lingering legal battle poised to settle this summer, leading to a clearer pathway for tens of thousands of Tennesseans to restore their voting rights, has instead reignited into a contentious court fight with no certain outcome ahead of the next presidential election.
One in 5 Black votingage Tennesseans lacks the right to vote due to a past criminal conviction — likely the highest rate of African American disenfranchisement in the nation, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.based group that advocates for restoration of voting rights and ending extreme sentences. Overall, nearly 10% of the Tennessee electorate — 470,000 people — have lost their right to vote due to convictions.
In a lawsuit filed in
December 2020, the Tennessee Conference of the NAACP and five residents denied the right to vote alleged Tennessee officials failed to follow state laws that allow individuals to legally restore their voting rights after serving their sentences and completing parole. Instead, the state implemented inaccessible and opaque processes that impede legal pathways for restoring rights, the lawsuit claimed.
Close to settling key claims in the case over the summer — potentially ahead of high profile local elections in Nashville, Memphis and for state office — attorneys for the state abruptly broke off talks in late July, catching lawyers for the NAACP by surprise, legal filings show. Then, on Aug. 2, lawyers for the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office filed motions asking a judge to reject the claims entirely.
The state Election Division, Department of Correction and governor’s office “had the opportunity this summer to create accessible, transparent and uniform procedures to allow the over 470,000 disenfranchised Tennesseans a fair shot at getting their voting rights restored and rejoining their communities as full citizens,” Blair Bowie, an attorney representing the NAACP with the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, said Friday.
“Instead, they blew up the voting rights restoration system entirely and imposed effectively permanent disenfranchisement on July 21,” she said.
A spokesperson for Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti did not respond to emailed questions.
The breakdown in the federal case came shortly after a June 29 ruling by the Tennessee Supreme Court against Ernest Falls, who was denied the right to vote in Tennessee in 2020 after receiving clemency in Virginia for a decades-old crime.
The Supreme Court ruled Falls, also represented by the Campaign Legal Center, was required to show he had paid all outstanding court costs, restitution and child support obligations in Virginia to establish his voting rights — in addition to proof of the Virginia clemency.
Tennessee Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins then issued a memo that incorporated expanded requirements for all state residents seeking to restore their voting rights — regardless of where their conviction took place. In addition to the process of demonstrating they, too, had paid court costs and other financial obligations related to their crime, in-state residents must now show they also “have been pardoned by a governor, U.S. president or other appropriate authority of a state or have had their full rights of citizenship restored as prescribed by law.”