Nothing bad will come of this, Kelli thinks. This is for my children.
Her daughter is learning about civics and voting and, coincidentally, the town of Montrose, Iowa, where Kelli lives with her husband and children, is holding an uncontested municipal election. It is balmy on this day, Nov. 5, 2013. Kelli Jo Griffin picks up her children and stepdaughter from Keokuk Catholic School and Central Lee — four kids total. Both schools are a short and raucous ride to the polling station inside the Ivor Fowler community center where things will soon go wrong.
Kelli has forgotten her driver's license. She packs the children back into the car and speeds home — 45 minutes, maybe an hour, one way, then back again. The kids are shouting. Mommy's voting! It's exciting and restless, this democracy.
With her license, back at the community center, she must register, though she had once before, under a different name. What name? She has to think, there were many. Saylor, she tells the poll workers, who call someone in Fort Madison, one of two county seats. They aren't sure what to do. But they decide to register Kelli Jo Griffin as a new voter, anyhow, while Kelli tries maintaining order among her kids, who rush around and holler. Kelli's eldest is thinking of tricorn colonial hats and a bell in Philadelphia. And this election, Kelli believes, is the perfect opportunity for her daughter to witness firsthand how this democratic thing works.
The poll workers help Kelli settle the kids and fill out the registration. They ask if she's ever been convicted of a felony, or had her rights restored after a conviction. Kelli tells them no.
"No" seems to her the right answer. No, she is not a felon. No, she is not that person, long since eradicated, the one who faced hardships and made good on restitutions and changed. She is a mother now, a better person, a volunteer and a role model for battered women, part of society like any other citizen. Voting is her right. No, she is not a felon.
Or so she thought.
Some two months after Kelli votes, she is arrested and charged with voter fraud.
An auditor notes that when Kelli cast her ballot on that day of suffrage, an inalienable right she believed she still maintained, Kelli had failed to restore her right to vote after completing her sentence. She had served two five-year sentences on probation for drug violations.
Now she was charged with a brand new crime. Kelli, after years of sobriety and goodwill, faced up to 15 years in prison.
The motto on the state seal of Iowa reads: Our liberties we prize, and our rights we maintain.
Long before its admittance to the United States, Iowa upheld firm beliefs in civil rights, which made it somewhat unique in its Midwestern context. From its inception, the state Supreme Court granted slaves freedom, struck down a ban on interracial marriage, allowed women to practice law, and admitted the first woman to the bar — all before the turn of the 20th century.
This history does not sit well alongside the narrative of Kelli's case, which in March was argued before the Iowa Supreme Court. Her story, told here, is similar to the stories of some 200,000 indentured felons in her state alone and millions of those convicted of felonies throughout the country. An October 2016 report by the Sentencing Project said Americans who are forbidden to vote because of felony disenfranchisement and laws penalizing people charged with those crimes increased from 1.2 million in 1976 to 6.1 million earlier this month.
In a zany and bizarre political season, criminal justice still takes a front-row seat in Washington, D.C., and around the county, and battles over reenfranchisement are among the hardest-fought. Some states reinstate a felon's right to vote after successful completion of his or her sentence, probation, or parole. Others never will.
One in every 40 adults, about 2.5 percent of the voting population in the United States, cannot vote because of a current or previous felony conviction. The rate is even higher for African-Americans: one in every 13. Iowa is among the 12 states that disenfranchise felony convictions post-sentencing. Even after completing probation, parole, and a stint in prison, this group of felons accounts for half of all disenfranchised voters.
A rolling debate surrounds the penalties levied against citizens convicted of crimes. In six states, more than seven percent of the population cannot vote because of a criminal record. In 12 states, a person convicted of a felony cannot vote regardless of whether they are incarcerated, on parole or probation, or have finished their sentence, compared with two states who have no voting restrictions. How the remaining states disenfranchise felon voters varies: Some, like Hawaii and Massachusetts, only restrict voters serving time in prison. Others, like Alaska, Georgia, and North Carolina, restrict voters serving any sentence in prison, on parole or probation.
Kelli's case is central to this national debate about who can reenter society in this most fundamental of ways — through voting — and has only recently, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, and other groups, become the face of so many others who have served their time but find themselves still relegated to life without full citizenship.
While Kelli's case is central, it is perplexing. One Iowa governor successfully restored the right to vote to more than 100,000 disenfranchised voters, only to see his work reversed by his predecessor in 2011.
What happened in Iowa, though, is nothing new. The same fight has been roiling other states, like Maryland, which in February restored voting rights to 40,000 felons only after a contentious legal battle, and in Virginia, where, after the Virginia Supreme Court overturned Gov. Terry McAuliffe's restoration of voting rights for people who successfully completed their sentences, he had no option other than individually reinstating the voting rights to 12,832 people — a fraction of the hundreds of thousands he initially set out to help.
When I visited Des Moines this spring, a litany of troubles embroiled the vastly overpopulated, nonrehabilitative criminal justice system there. Amid recent calls to jail a man convicted of multiple DUIs before he could fill a Senate seat, a drunken driver had killed two police officers and their prisoner. The Iowa caucuses, meanwhile, were dividing criminal justice reform between red and blue. Now, faced with an opportunity to reincorporate thousands of ex-offenders, how would the state respond? And underneath that question were others. How would a state move forward in an election season when some twenty percent of its population had been disenfranchised? How would the sitting governor defend his executive order, which had stripped so many of that very right?
In the end, at the case's most basic level, Kelli prized her liberties, the same inalienable rights she lost. It is all she wanted. She worked to get her rights back, at first with lengthy, often times contentious, court battles.
She sought to maintain them — echoing the motto of her state that had shunned her.
READ THE REST OF THIS STORY AT THE BIG ROUNDTABLE.
This story originally appeared at The Big Roundtable. Writers at The Big Roundtable depend on your generosity. All donations, minus a 10 percent commission to The Big Roundtable and PayPal's nominal fee, go to the author. Please donate.