Across America around 4.6 million formerly incarcerated people are barred from voting. And in Tennessee, a recent state Supreme Court ruling makes it harder for anyone with a conviction on their record — either in or out of state — to get their voting rights reinstated.
Tennessee is the 16th most populated state in the country, but it has some of the highest numbers of disenfranchised citizens. Blair Bowie with Campaign Legal Center says there’s over 471,000 Tennesseans who can’t vote.
"The total number of people who can’t vote in Tennessee is only smaller than Florida, which has over a million people that can’t vote,” said Bowie. “So, to put that in context Tennessee disenfranchises more people than Texas, which is a state with nearly 5 times the total voting age population.”
In fact, Bowie says nearly 10% of voting age citizens in the state cannot vote because they’re former felons who have served their time but haven’t gone through the state’s rigorous process to get their rights restored.
“You have to get the certificate of restoration, which you have to have filled out by a probation officer or a clerk. And these folks are not trained on the law. They don’t have uniformed processes. They don’t have recordkeeping around it,” said Bowie. “So, navigating the process of actually getting that golden piece of paper that lets you get your voting rights restored is a wild goose chase.”
For a long time, only people convicted in the state had to go through that process. But in July, the Tennessee Supreme Court made a change that requires formerly incarcerated people — no matter where they served their time — to navigate that process.
Dawn Harrington is the executive director of Free Hearts, an organization that helps families impacted by incarceration. She has personal experience with the procedure.
“It took me nine years to get my voting rights back. And it’s really because the voting restoration system is so flawed as well, but we think it’s very intentional, all of the voter suppression that is happening,” said Harrington.
Harrington served her time in New York, a state with automatic voter restoration. However, when she moved back to her home state of Tennessee, she couldn’t vote until finishing the certificate of restoration process.
While that sounds simple, when she took the paperwork to New York, they had no idea what to do with it and sent her back to Tennessee with a certificate of employability.
She says, at that point, she lost hope.
“I didn’t blame the state of New York, it was the state of Tennessee that was having me bring this paper that only applied to Tennessee and bring it to this state that would’ve given me my voting rights back immediately had I lived there,” Harrington said.
Eventually, after a reporter shed light on Harrington’s issue, she was able to get her voting rights back. But she says not everyone can be so lucky. That’s why her organization joined a federal lawsuit with the Campaign Legal Center to make the reinstatement process easier.
She’s hoping they win in court, but a simpler route, she says, would be for Gov. Bill Lee to step in and remove the restrictions altogether.
“Because of how hard it’s going to be, we need the governor to take action. He can do just like Gov. Kim Reynolds did in Iowa, and he can write an executive order to restore voting rights,” said Harrington.
And it worked in Iowa, when Gov. Reynolds signed an executive order in 2020, that paved the way for 45,000 formerly incarcerated Iowans to vote.
WPLN News reached out to Gov. Lee to see if he has similar plans to get voting rights reinstated. He didn’t have an answer, but directed us to the Secretary of State’s office, who wouldn’t comment due to the pending litigation.
In the meantime, that lawsuit against the state is set to go to trial in November.
