And this, kids, is why it’s so important to vote blue up and down the line. Because Republican AGs around the country are working hard to deprive citizens of their voting rights, like this asshole in Nebraska who put a screeching halt to the right of past felons to vote. Via Bolts Magazine:
That’s because two Republican elected officials in Nebraska—Attorney General Mike Hilgers and Secretary of State Bob Evnen—halted implementation of the new law, shutting down new registrations for people with past felonies and throwing into question the voting rights of tens of thousands of other Nebraskans who, until last month, were legally, unambiguously eligible to vote.
Nebraska voting rights advocates maintain hope that the actions of Hilgers and Evnen will be reversed soon, but they also worry that profound, lasting damage will have already been done: this registration shut-down has prompted so much confusion and fear, they say, that it could cause many people to disengage entirely with the democratic process.
On July 17, less than 48 hours before LB 20 was to take effect, Hilgers issued an advisory opinion stating that the new law was unconstitutional. But Hilgers didn’t stop there; he also declared unconstitutional a 2005 reform law ending lifetime disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of any felony; the 2005 law, Legislative Bill 53, allowed Nebraskans to vote two years after completing their sentences, a waiting period that LB 20 was set to eliminate.
In his opinion, Hilgers wrote that the state Board of Pardons—a three-member body composed of him, Evnen, and Republican Governor Jim Pillen—has sole discretion over whether to restore someone’s voting rights. Right after Hilgers issued his opinion, Evnen, the state’s top elections official, emailed county-level elections offices, ordering that, based on the AG’s stance, “we will not be implementing LB 20 and will no longer register individuals convicted of felonies.”
…
LB 53, the 2005 law, ended a Nebraska policy dating to 1875 that imposed blanket, lifetime felony disenfranchisement—a practice that as of 2005 was unusually harsh, and one which only persists today formally in Virginia, functionally in Tennessee, and hardly anywhere else in the world.
This will lose in a real court, but these activists are right. The damage is already done. And these Republican AGs are of course doing anything they can think of to cause chaos in the voting booths this year. Because voting rights are just too good for Democrats.
