Civil rights groups are suing over a North Carolina law that prohibits convicted felons from voting until their full sentence is completed — not just their prison time.
The stakes can be considerable. Enlarging the voter pool could influence electoral outcomes in closely divided and presidential battleground states such as North Carolina. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice estimated this year that 69,386 people in North Carolina who are completing post-release supervision and probation for felonies couldn’t vote in 2017.
The lawsuit plaintiffs cite portions of the state constitution they say demand equal rights of citizens under the law, prevent the manipulation of elections and bar the poor from being denied the right to vote because they lack money. Some of these constitutional arguments were cited in September when state judges threw out dozens of legislative districts they declared were drawn with excessive partisan bias.
There have been 459 cases of potential voting by felons without restored rights that the board investigated and referred to district attorneys since 2015, according to board data. The DAs declined to prosecute slightly more than half of the cases, according to an analysis of the data, while another one-third of them were listed as under “DA review.” More than 60 cases have resulted in indictments or convictions.
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