Tennessee, which imposes notoriously demanding requirements on residents with felony records seeking restoration of their voting rights, recently added a new wrinkle: Before supplicants who have not managed to obtain a pardon are allowed to vote again, they have to successfully seek restoration of their gun rights, a task that is complicated by the interaction between state and federal law. Given the difficulty of obtaining relief from the federal gun ban for people convicted of crimes punishable by more than a year of incarceration, this requirement would be prohibitive in practice.
If it is upheld by Tennessee courts, the new policy would essentially mean “there’s no way to vote” for people who were disenfranchised based on their criminal records, says Adam Ginsburg, a spokesman for the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), which has challenged Tennessee’s voting requirements in federal court. Even without the problem created by federal gun laws, CLC attorney Blair Bowie says, people convicted of drug felonies or violent crimes “will not be able to restore their gun rights” under Tennessee law. “It’s beyond the pale,” she says. But she adds that “it’s still an open question, because the Elections Division, which governs who can register to vote in Tennessee, clearly hasn’t really thought that through.”
The new requirement would further complicate a process that is already hard to navigate. “Tennessee has the most convoluted, harsh and poorly managed rights restoration process of any state in the country,” the CLC reported in 2022. Among other things, “Tennessee is one of only a handful of states that conditions the right to vote on payment of legal debt and the only state that requires a person to be current on child support to restore their voting rights.”
Tennessee’s obstacles to re-enfranchisement have had the sort of impact you might expect. “Over 450,000 citizens—accounting for more than 9% of the voting age population—are denied the right to vote because of past felony convictions,” the CLC noted. “Since 2016, less than 1% of post-sentence Tennesseans have gotten their voting rights back due to modern-day poll taxes and issues with obtaining a Certificate of Restoration,” which requires a court order.
Hellbound and Down 