In the latest court ruling with 2024 election implications, thousands of Nebraskans who have completed their felony sentences can now vote in the red state. That’s after the state’s top court on Wednesday ordered election officials to permit such voting over Republican objection.
Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed legislation to let people with felony convictions vote after they have finished their sentences. That built on a 2005 law that made people wait two years.
But just before the law took effect, Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers, a Republican, said that both laws were unconstitutional, arguing that only the state pardons board had the authority to restore voting rights. On that board sit Hilgers, Republican Secretary of State Bob Evnen and the state’s Republican governor, Jim Pillen, who didn’t veto the new law but expressed constitutional concerns and encouraged Hilgers and Evnen to “promptly” look into it. Backed by Hilgers’ legal opinion, Evnen told election officials not to register people with felony convictions if they hadn’t been pardoned.
Yet the Republicans couldn’t convince enough justices on the state top court. “Because the requisite number of judges have not found that the statutory amendments are unconstitutional, we issue a peremptory writ of mandamus directing the Secretary and the election commissioners to implement the statutory amendments immediately,” the court said.
As for possible national implications, I noted when the case was argued that, like Maine, Nebraska doesn’t use a winner-take-all system for its Electoral College votes:
Rather, the winner of the popular vote gets two [electors] and then the other three are split among its congressional districts. That led Joe Biden to pick up one of them in 2020, from the competitive Omaha-area district, which Barack Obama also won in 2008.
After the ruling, Evnen said he’s ordering election officials to comply with the decision and that the registration deadline is next Friday, Oct. 25. NBC News reported that that’s the in-person deadline; the online registration deadline is this Friday.An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer praised the ruling but said the state should extend the deadline, because “[t]housands of Nebraskans have lost months to register due to the secretary’s unlawful directive, and they should be allowed sufficient time to register to vote ahead of the November election.”
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