A new judicial ruling will open the door for some felons on probation or parole to vote in North Carolina’s elections this fall.
The ruling isn’t final, so it’s possible that it could still change between now and November. But on Friday, a panel of three judges from different areas of the state ruled that part of the state’s felon disenfranchisement law appears to be unconstitutional. The judges issued a 2-1 ruling stopping the state from enforcing that part of the law, at least temporarily.
They wrote that the people who challenged it — calling it essentially a poll tax and a relic of the Jim Crow era — appear to have a winning argument.
— Daniel Jacobson, attorney for the challengers“It’s time to eradicate this vestige of Jim Crow.”
Some states let felons regain the right to vote once they leave prison, but not North Carolina. People here don’t get back their rights until they have finished their entire sentence, including probation or parole.
The judges didn’t extend voting rights to everyone on probation or parole for a felony, as the challengers including Durham’s Community Success Initiative had asked. But they did rule in favor of people who would have already finished their time under supervision, except for not paying court costs and fees.
The judges wrote that “our Constitution is clear: no property qualification shall affect the right to vote.”
So preventing people from getting back their right to vote simply because of an inability to pay a certain monetary amount, the judges ruled, appears to be a violation of the state constitution. They said that if they hadn’t struck down the law, the challengers would have suffered “substantial and irreparable” harm by not being able to vote this year.
One member of the three-judge panel, Superior Court Judge John Dunlow of Franklin, Granville, Person, Vance, and Warren counties, dissented from that part of the ruling by Mecklenburg County Superior Court Judge Lisa Bell and Wake County Superior Court Judge Keith Gregory. Dunlow wrote that he would have denied all of the challengers’ claims.
The Republican leaders of the N.C. General Assembly, who are defending the law in court, came away with some victories in Friday’s ruling, too.
The judges stopped enforcement only of part of the law, not the whole thing. The challengers had originally said that if they were to win this lawsuit, it would open up voting rights to around 60,000 North Carolinians.
However, with this more limited ruling, it wasn’t immediately clear how many people with felony records would get back their voting rights.
“This ruling is a major victory for the thousands of North Carolinians who have been denied access to the ballot due to an inability to pay financial obligations,” the executive director of Community Success Initiative, Dennis Gaddy, said in a statement.
‘Poll tax’ and racist history
Some states, particularly in the South, used to have “poll taxes,” which were payments required to vote — but which most white people were legally exempted from having to pay. They were one of many barriers put in place to keep Black people from voting for generations after the Civil War.
Poll taxes themselves were struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966. But many, like the challengers in this lawsuit, have argued that politicians have since found other ways to continue those same goals.
Last month, the challengers argued that the state’s felon disenfranchisement is violating people’s rights in several different ways.
In addition to the argument about court fees and fines serving a double function as a poll tax, they also argued for a more sweeping ruling against the state’s felony disenfranchisement laws.
For one, they said, people who are on probation or parole are, by definition, out of prison and back to living in and contributing to larger society. They’re paying taxes and potentially sending their kids to school and deserve to have a say in the decisions that get made that affect their and their families’ lives, the lawsuit claimed.
They also said the rules disproportionately harm Black people and are rooted in an explicitly racist history.
