1. Early voting is underway and there’s a lot of coverage of Nevada being a battleground state and even Clark County being a battleground county. But few are talking about the fact that historically, felons mostly haven’t been able to vote and now they can. Tell us how this impacts the election.
A: Each state has its own law about whether felons can vote.
In 2019 in Nevada, former inmates were given back their right to vote once they’re released from prison.
Before then, Nevada’s laws about who could vote after prison was complex – it depended on how many convictions they had, the type, what year they completed their sentence, and whether their convictions were in state court, federal court, or out of state.
When the law changed in 2019, the state estimated that 77,000 formerly incarcerated people became eligible to vote. That number has only increased.
BUT only a fraction of those people whose rights were restored in time for the 2020 election actually made it back onto voting rolls.
In Nevada, 8,633 of about 37,000 people released from prison in the past 10 years had registered. That’s about ¼ of those eligible, that’s compared to 3 in 4 eligible voters registered in Nevada.
So this will be the first year that people who were incarcerated for felonies may vote in large number and have some sort of impact on elections.
2. How many other states allow felons to vote and what did a recent poll find when it asked inmates how they plan to vote?
16 allow the vote after prison, and after their parole/probation period has ended.
Two states, Maine and Vermont, and Washington DC, actually allow inmates to vote while in prison.
Lots of felons around the country — and in Nevada — don’t know they can vote – they’re told incorrectly by parole or probation officers, election officials that they can’t when then can.
The recent poll was done by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that advocates for criminal justice reform.
They polled 54,000 people in 785 prisons around the country and found that despite commonly held notions that people behind bars would support Democrats — who are seen as easier on crime than Republicans — incarcerated people represent a wide spectrum of political opinions, like the rest of the general population. 35% identify as independents and roughly half of all respondents said they would vote for Trump.
3. Talking about the new voting system, Clark County has already used it in recent elections, but the rest of the state is using it for the first time. How much does it cost and is the rollout smooth?
A: Clark County started using the Voter Registration and Election Management System, or VREMS, last year, but this is a presidential election, with senate and congressional races, state and local races, so you have many more people voting now.
All the counties besides Clark are using it for the first time — it’s a centralized system that creates a top-down voter registration database that collects and stores voter registration information from all counties, instead of its bottom-up systems that required the state to put together separate files from each county into a statewide voter registration file.
It cost a whopping $30 million to pay for the technology and staffing needed for it.
When the secretary of state announced it earlier this year, election officials were concerned with the speed with which they were expected to learn the new system, roll it out, inform voters how to use it.
So its launch was delayed at the request of 15 county clerks and election officials in order to work out remaining issues, and give clerks additional training time under the new system.
So there was skepticism and we have seen some lines, some wait times at early voting locations so far.