Nebraskans who have felony convictions can register and vote in the November election under Wednesday’s Nebraska Supreme Court ruling that overturned Secretary of State Bob Evnen’s directive to local election officers to refuse registrations for felons who had completed their sentences.
Evnen’s directive was based on a non-binding opinion by Attorney General Mike Hilgers that found both a 2005 law that allowed felons to register to vote following a two-year waiting period and LB20, passed by the Legislature this year, which restores voting rights to thousands of Nebraskans who have been convicted of a felony and completed their sentences, to be unconstitutional.
That opinion and Evnen’s directive were issued in July, just two days before LB20 was to take effect, throwing the question into the courts and raising a serious question for Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman.
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"Why now? Why not take the opportunity to challenge the laws long ago with available remedies, rather than creating uncertainty at this time? Why did the court enable the tardiness by expanding mandamus?" she asked in her consenting opinion.
The answer to the first two questions appears to be simple — by delaying the opinion and directive as long as possible, the attorney general and secretary of state gambled that the legal timeline to decide the sure-to-come challenge to their decisions would take long enough that, even if they lost, the registration deadlines for those who have had their voting rights restored will have passed.
Or, to state it more directly, the suppression effort to keep those convicted felons, who are disproportionately Black and brown people living in Omaha and Lincoln, from voting will have worked, even if the case was lost.
But the Supreme Court, working on an expedited timeline, issued its ruling Wednesday, two days before the deadline to register to vote online or by mail and more than a week before the in-person registration deadline of Oct. 25.
It remains to be seen how many of the thousands now eligible to vote can get registered in the next week. We trust that organizations who opposed the opinion and directive, including the Nebraska ACLU and Civic Nebraska, will lead efforts to identify and register those potential voters.
Getting the maximum number of registrations will mark the final defeat of the Republican-led voter-suppression effort that, like an attempt to slow the vote count in Georgia, had to be stopped by the courts.