Recently, Tennessee implemented harsher voting restrictions for people with felony convictions.^[1] An estimated 4.6 million Americans, or 2% of the voting population, are disenfranchised due to their felony conviction.^[2] In Tennessee, more than 1-in-10 Black adults are disenfranchised due to prior felony convictions.^[3] Moreover, Tennessee denies the fundamental right to vote to 21% of all Black citizens of voting-age.^[4]

Following a decision by the state supreme court, Tennessee has added to the already burdensome and convoluted restoration process.^[5] To restore their voting rights, individuals with felony convictions must clear these three hurdles:

1. Pay all debts (court costs, form filing fees, restitution to the victim, and/or outstanding child support obligations),
2. Successfully receive a pardon from the Tennessee governor or have a court restore their citizenship, and
3. Have a government official (or an employee at that pertinent government office) sign off on a form called a Certificate of Restoration (COR).^[6]

The confusing system is also highly decentralized.  To restore one’s right to vote they must go to several offices, made further challenging by the isolated nature of these offices which increases the probability of mistakes occurring. This isolation stems from a lack of shared databases and little to no communication between the offices.^[7] Take, for example, Pamela Moses, a Black woman in Shelby County, Tennessee, who was wrongly convicted of election fraud because a lack of communications between the Department of Corrections and the probation office caused a manager within the probation office to fill out her voter restoration form incorrectly.^[8] Furthermore, the workers at these offices are often unfamiliar with the voter restoration process themselves and are unable to instruct the disenfranchised on how to go through the process, leaving them on their own to navigate this onerous system. Altogether, this leads frustration and futility, and ultimately to fewer Black people voting due to factors outside of their control.

There is a direct connection between voter disenfranchisement and an exception in the 14^th Amendment. The Tennessee Constitution provides that the state legislature may deny people convicted of “infamous” crimes the right to vote.^[9] Section 2 of the 14^th Amendment states, in part, that:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State … But when the right to vote at any election … is denied … except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion … to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.^[10]

The 14^th Amendment contains the caveat that enables state governments to deprive Black people of their constitutional right to vote. As a result, the state has no incentive to restore voting rights to convicted felons because its representation in Congress is not diminished via disenfranchisement of that population. In other words, states like Tennessee can take away the voting rights of people who committed a felony, a population disproportionately made up of Black men, with impunity. For more information on how to stop this injustice, please contact the Campaign Legal Center at (202) 736-2200 or visit their website.^[11]

[1] Sam Levine and Kira Lerner, Tennessee toughens voting rules for people with felony convictions, The Guardian (Jul. 22, 2023, 8:05 AM), https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/22/tennessee-toughens-voting-rules-for-people-with-felony-convictions.

[2] Christopher Uggen, Ryan Larson, Sarah Shannon, & Robert Stewart, Locked out 2022: Estimates of people denied voting rights due to a felony conviction, The Sentencing Project (2022), https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/locked-out-2022-estimates-of-people-denied-voting-rights/.

[3] Uggen, et al., supra note 2.

[4] Whitney Threadcraft and Kristen M. Budd, Tennessee Denies Voting Rights to Over 470,000 Citizens, The Sentencing Project (2023), https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2023/01/Tennessee-Voting-Rights-for-People-with-Felony-Convictions.pdf.

[5] Falls v. Goins, 673 S.W.3d 173, 2023 WL 4243961 (Tenn. 2023).

[6] Goins Memo. 1:10–17, Jul. 21, 2023, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23884628/20230721-restoration-of-voting-rights.pdf.

[7] Blair Bowie, Director for the Restore Your Vote project, Campaign Legal Center, Guest Lecture at Georgetown University Law Center for Law & Social Change class (Sept. 6, 2023).

[8] Sam Levine, The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting, The Guardian (Dec. 27, 2022, 2:00 AM), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/27/pamela-moses-voting-rights-mistake-jail.

[9] Tre Hargett, Restoration of Voting Rights, Tennessee Secretary of State (Last updated Jul. 2023), https://sos.tn.gov/elections/guides/restoration-of-voting-rights#:~:text=Article%204%2C%20§2%20of,from%20the%20right%20of%20suffrage; T.N. Const. art. IV, § 2.

[10] U.S. Const. Amend. 14, § 2 (emphasis added).

[11] https://campaignlegal.org/contact-us.