Republicans’ ongoing voter suppression campaign made headlines this week after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the state must immediately restore voting rights to former felons. While the court’s ruling is a major civil rights victory, it’s also a drop in the bucket compared to the GOP’s professionalized, nationwide efforts to keep certain Americans away from the ballot box.
Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen’s plan to strip voting rights from over 7,000 Nebraskans is a slap in the face to democracy. It’s also a shockingly common form of election interference. Republicans have spent decades and millions of dollars crafting state laws designed to ensure permanent GOP majorities, even if that means overriding their own citizens’ wishes and steamrolling legally binding ballot measures. So far, they’ve faced almost no legal resistance.
The end result is a broken system that prevents nearly 6 million Americans from casting a ballot, while millions more are subjected to the equivalent of an unconstitutional poll tax. That’s just fine with Republicans—and things will get even worse if GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump wins a second term in November.
Republican efforts to keep former felons from voting are aided by a patchwork of laws that make the process of restoring voting rights confusing, costly, or even impossible. Take Virginia, where in 2021 Gov. Ralph Northam signed an executive order automatically restoring voting rights to all nonincarcerated Virginians. Not even a year later, newly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin quietly reversed that order, instead requiring former felons to submit a request for voting rights restoration to the state.
The result was widespread confusion and a near-total dropoff in former felons regaining their voting rights. Midway through Youngkin’s first year in office, only about 800 Virginians had regained their voting rights. Earlier this year, a federal court dismissed a challenge to Youngkin’s restrictive new approach on a technicality, meaning the process remains in place ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
Florida is another nightmare scenario. In 2018, 65% of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment that automatically restored voting rights to all felons upon completion of their sentence. That enraged Gov. Ron DeSantis, who took the extraordinary step of forcing through a new state law that required former felons to first pay off any outstanding court fees—without providing a way for former convicts to actually find out what fees they owed.
DeSantis’ new law was so confusing that even Florida election officials didn’t understand it. In 2020, the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections provided incorrect voter registration information to felons nearing their release date. When those former convicts showed up to cast a ballot, they were arrested for voter fraud. Since then, DeSantis and Florida Republicans have used the threat of voter fraud prosecutions to intimidate thousands of former felons who are legally eligible to vote. Instead, those eligible voters choose to play it safe by staying home.
Of course, there is one felon who has DeSantis’ full support: Donald Trump. Back in May, DeSantis took the unusual step of guaranteeing Trump would be able to vote in Florida despite not qualifying for voting rights restoration under DeSantis’ own law. The reason? Because DeSantis personally disagreed with the jury’s guilty verdict.
“Given the absurd nature of the New York prosecution of Trump, this would be an easy case to qualify for restoration of rights per the Florida Clemency Board, which I chair,” Desantis declared in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Black Floridians aren’t as lucky as Trump. Nearly 20% of Florida’s Black population is legally disenfranchised, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Sentencing Project. Those Black residents are also unlikely to see their rights restored. Under DeSantis’ predecessor, now-Sen. Rick Scott, the state clemency board restored voting rights to twice as many white ex-felons as Black ones. That trend has only amplified under DeSantis.
Earlier this year the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition dropped its legal challenge to the law after DeSantis promised to sit down with civil rights advocates to develop clearer guidelines. That turned out to be a massive tactical mistake: As of October, the Florida Department of State still hasn’t implemented any reforms—meaning there’s virtually no chance the issue will be resolved in time for next month’s election. That’s a big win for Republicans and a massive loss for democracy.
It’s no coincidence that the states with the toughest voting laws for felons are also the deepest red states. Research found that felons are four times as likely as non-felons to identify as Democrats. In the eyes of many red state governors, restricting felon voting rights helps make their states less politically competitive by artificially reducing the number of Democratic voters in the broader population. For the GOP, keeping those potential voters off the rolls is a matter of political survival.
Trump shares the GOP’s hatred for restoring voting rights to former felons. The former president has repeatedly attacked Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz for ensuring formerly incarcerated Minnesotans can cast a ballot, calling the idea “dangerous.” Given Trump’s open hostility to free and fair elections, it’s likely a restored President Trump would push for Florida-style voting restrictions in states across the nation. The result would be a seismic shift in state-level electoral power toward Republicans.
GOP leaders have worked tirelessly for decades to tilt the balance of political power by restricting the voting rights of former felons who have served their time. Despite encouraging outcomes like Nebraska’s recent court decision, too many states still make it too hard for formerly incarcerated people to vote—and Republicans are happy to keep it that way.
