Tennessee has sharply restricted the conditions under which it will restore voting rights to people who have completed prison sentences for felonies, joining a growing list of Republican-controlled states that have rolled back access to the ballot by former felons.
The state has for years permitted most people with completed felony sentences to restore their voting rights through an administrative process established in 2006 that is ostensibly automatic, but in practice almost unnavigable.
Only 3,400 people, or less than 1 percent of all disenfranchised Tennesseans, have had their voting rights restored under the program, said Blair Bowie, the director of the Restore Your Vote initiative at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting-rights advocacy group in Washington.
But in a letter sent to local election officials on Friday, the elections coordinator for Tennessee’s secretary of state said the state would now require that formerly incarcerated people also be granted clemency by the governor’s office or have their citizenship rights restored by a circuit court judge.
Persons:
Blair Bowie
Organizations:
Republican
Locations:
Tennessee, Washington