Tennessee, already one of the strictest and most complicated states in the country for voting rights restoration, has enacted a new policy that makes it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to regain their right to vote.
Tennessee has one of the highest rates of disenfranchisement in the United States. More than 9% of the voting age population, or about 471,600 Tennesseans, cannot vote because of a felony conviction, according to a 2022 estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. More than 21% of Black adults are disenfranchised.
The vast majority of people who can’t vote have completed their criminal sentences but have outstanding court debt, including unpaid child support payments.
Previously, someone with a felony who wished to vote again had to pay all debts and then get government officials to sign off on a form – called a certificate of restoration – affirming their eligibility to vote. The process was burdensome, especially compared with the automatic restoration that occurs in a majority of states upon release from prison or after a period of probation or parole.
But on Friday, the state’s division of elections added another hurdle. It said that someone with a felony had to first successfully receive a pardon from the governor or have a court restore their full rights of citizenship. Once that is done, the person must then complete the certificate of restoration process to get their rights restored.
Mark Goins, the state’s director of elections, said in a Friday memo the change was necessary because of a recent state supreme court decision in a case called Falls v Goins. In that decision, the state supreme court ruled that a man who had been convicted of a felony decades ago in Virginia and had his voting rights restored there still had to go through Tennessee’s process for restoring voting rights.
The court read two different portions of Tennessee law, one from the 1980s and one from 2006, to say that there was a two-step process for those with out-of-state convictions to become eligible to vote: first they had to receive clemency from the state where the conviction was, and then they had to go through the Tennessee process. The court made it clear that its ruling was narrow. “We limit the scope of our analysis to these facts and these facts only,” it said. But Goins interpreted the decision broadly, saying it applied to anyone with a felony conviction in Tennessee, even though the case did not address that issue.
A representative for the secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It’s very hard to get your restoration of citizenship - even harder than getting a certificate of restoration,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who has been involved in a number of lawsuits challenging Tennessee’s rules around felon disenfranchisement, including the Falls case.
“The new process is more difficult than the procedures that existed before the legislature created certificates of restoration in 2006 and it puts Tennessee in the bottom of the barrel on rights restoration as one of the only states with a fully discretionary process, alongside Mississippi and Virginia.”
In Virginia, anyone convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting unless the governor restores their voting rights. In Mississippi, those with certain felony convictions must have an individualized bill approved by a supermajority of both chambers of the legislature and the governor before they can vote again. Very few people have successfully made it through that process, and Mississippi is the only state that disenfranchises more of its citizens than Tennessee.
Tennessee’s confusing process for restoring voting rights has already come under considerable scrutiny. In 2022, a Memphis woman named Pamela Moses was sentenced to six years in prison for submitting a certificate of restoration when she was ineligible to vote. Moses said she believed she was eligible and a probation officer who filled out her form made a mistake and said she had completed her sentence.
A judge overseeing the case overturned her conviction after the Guardian published documents that had not been turned over to Moses in which probation officials acknowledged the errors.
