Perrin Larkin | RMV Intern
At midnight on November 5, 2024 — only five hours after the polls in the 2024 General Election closed — HB100 went into effect, allowing for the fourfold expansion of the disqualification of Alabama citizens from the voter rolls.
Alabama House Bill 100 of the 2024 session, abbreviated HB100, expanded the list of felonies that disqualify an Alabama resident from voting. Not only did it amend the law surrounding felony disenfranchisement — the practice of removing the right to vote from people convicted of felonies — but it applied retroactively, such that a crime that resulted in a felony conviction two months ago, two years ago or twenty years ago yields the same result: disenfranchisement.
“It’s anyone’s guess how many people HB100 will affect,” said Dr. Richard Fording, professor of political science at The University of Alabama and co-director of Return My Vote, an online service that counsels Alabamians with felony convictions on how to petition the state to return their right to vote. Return My Vote is attempting to identify how many people the bill will disenfranchise.
For the majority of the bill’s life in the process of moving through the Alabama legislature, it was a “comparatively benign bill,” said Dori Miles, lawyer and co-director of Return My Vote.
The ultimate passage of HB100 largely blindsided advocacy groups intent on ending felony disenfranchisement in the state, but it is only the most recent development in a long state history of denying the right to vote to swathes of the population.
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Felony disenfranchisement is not unique to Alabama. However, The Sentencing Project considers Alabama to be included in a group of states with the most strict felony disenfranchisement. In this category, people with felony convictions can be disenfranchised while in prison, serving probation and parole, and after the completion of their sentence, up to and including for life. Only in two states — Maine and Vermont — and in the District of Columbia do people with felony convictions never lose their right to cast a vote.
In Alabama, felony disenfranchisement as we know it today stems from the 1901 State Constitution, established by constitutional convention. On the second day of debate, President of the Convention John B. Knox proclaimed the common cause of 150 disparate delegates to be “within the limits of the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy within this State.”
In step with this goal, the Convention’s final constitution established that, “no person convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude… shall be qualified to vote until restoration of civil and political rights.”
The delegates did not define “moral turpitude.” Thus, each county registrar — the position responsible for maintaining county voter rolls — had full discretion over the crimes that were classified as disqualifying. Voting laws varied county to county and, importantly, person to person as leeway in the law permitted racist attitudes to prevail, and further disenfranchise black citizens amidst the proliferation of Jim Crow laws.
In 2003, Alabama instituted the first major change in felony disenfranchisement law since the adoption of the 1901 Constitution: the creation of the Certificate of Eligibility to Register to Vote (CERV). Formerly, a citizen disenfranchised on the basis of their felony conviction could only restore their right to vote through applying for a pardon from the governor, a process that took a great deal of time and resources for both the applicant and the government.
The CERV was designed to restore the franchise more quickly to those with non-violent convictions and no pending felonies, who have completed their sentence in its entirety, and paid all applicable fines, court costs and fees. The applications would be received by the Board of Pardons and Paroles, processed within 50 days, and notify the applicant of their approval or denial. However, as The Brennan Center for Justice reported in 2006, the program was a great failure because it was so necessary.
Over the first two years of the program’s existence, the Board of Pardons and Paroles received at least 7,635 applications — averaging 192 applications per month — the Board was consistently overwhelmed, and missed the statutory time limit on 80% of applications.
Concurrently, the Alabama Secretary of State had ordered, illegally, that election officials refuse to register any new voter with any felony conviction. The Brennan Center found hundreds of instances where citizens with felony convictions that the state had never deemed those of “moral turpitude” were refused registration without a CERV, but were refused a CERV because they had never lost their right to vote in the first place.
The courts struck down the Secretary of State’s mandate to not register any voters with felony convictions indiscriminately, and the concept of the CERV was now firmly ingrained in the role of The Bureau of Pardons and Paroles.
The churn of slow, confusing and discriminatory bureaucracy continued until, over 115 years after its first use in state law, “moral turpitude” would finally receive a definition.
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The 2017 Definition of Moral Turpitude Act set out about 45 convictions that impacted the right to vote. Three convictions — treason, impeachment and convictions that result in an uncommuted death penalty — will forever disenfranchise a person. About 20 of the convictions, predominantly related to murder or sexual crimes, still require a pardon from the governor to restore a convicted person’s right to vote.
The remaining 25 disqualifying crimes are a mixed bag. The list, composed of violent and non-violent crimes, likely makes up the only list that includes bigamy (marrying a person while knowingly married to another), endangering the water supply, biological weapons and theft of trademarks in the same category.
To restore one’s right to vote after a conviction of a crime from this category, one must complete all elements of the sentence: probation, parole, or community supervision. All fees, fines, court costs and restitution (referred to collectively as legal financial obligations) charges associated with the disqualifying conviction must be paid. Finally, the person must have no pending felonies. One would not be able to restore their right to vote even if the pending felony is not a disqualifying felony.
Voting rights activists of the time viewed the law as progressive. The law established procedure free from discretion, eliminating the grey area of defining “moral turpitude.”
However, it was known to only be part of the solution. Felony disenfranchisement is still an incredibly messy area of the law and administration. It is in this area that Dori Miles has dedicated her time to untangling and raising awareness through co-founding and co-directing Return My Vote.
“There are still a number of areas where the law fails,” Miles explains. The first area of concern is the requirement that all legal financial obligations be paid. Miles has encountered many clients who face insurmountable debts to the court system. Their debts “effectively take their voting rights away in perpetuity.”
Importantly, this requirement can be considered a poll tax, which were declared unconstitutional with the ratification of the 24th Amendment in 1964.
Perhaps more pressing, there was the issue of resistance by the Alabama Secretary of State himself. Each State’s Secretary of State is the chief election official, and the office of the Secretary of State administers state elections and certifies election results.
The Alabama Secretary of State in 2017, John Merrill, when questioned about the confusing requirements, misleading public announcements and general lack of awareness of the change in the law, asserted, “I’m not going to spend state resources dedicated to notifying a small percentage of individuals.”
It was estimated that 300,000 Alabamians with felony convictions were impacted by the change in the law — or about 8% of Alabama’s 2017 voting-age population.
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Eight years later, Representative Adeline Clarke of Mobile received word that volunteer poll workers in her district feared violence against them during the 2024 Election. Though Alabama never experienced the degree of violence threatened against poll workers in Arizona, Michigan and Florida, among other states, there was a palpable fear.
Rep. Clarke quickly responded to the needs of her constituents, and proposed a bill to address the issue: violence against an election official would constitute a new type of crime, and conviction of this crime would disenfranchise the perpetrator. This language, and only this language, formed the first draft of HB100.
“I remember my colleague saying, ‘I’m not super worried about this, but it does open the moral turpitude code section, so keep an eye on that,’” explains a policy analyst with an advocacy organization.
The primary source for this article was a policy analyst working in the State House in 2024. The source requested that their information be kept anonymous, and to be referred to by the pseudonym Charlie.
The policy analyst was responsible for knowing the content, monitoring the progress and speaking to the sponsors of all bills related to the interests of the organization — especially bills which may impact voting rights. This was no small task, seeing as there were 844 bills introduced in the 2024 session.
So, when HB100 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee in early February, Charlie did not think much of it. It is not unlikely that a bill will be passed out of committee in its house of origin.
When the bill came to the House of Representatives floor, Charlie was surprised when House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Hill of St. Clair County — a semi-rural county that sits between Birmingham and Gadsden — joined Rep. Clarke in introducing the bill. Rep. Hill, Charlie later learned, had approached Rep. Clarke was very interested in her bill, and discussed an amendment with her.
Rep. Hill, as is standard, gave a brief overview of the amendment on the floor. Rep. Clarke declared the amendment friendly. The vote on the amendment commenced and passed. The vote on the bill as a whole commenced, and passed the House unanimously.
For Charlie, suspicion only grew after Rep. Hill’s brief summary of his amendment.
“We were listening and we immediately perked up. We’re thinking, ‘this sounds like more than what he’s talking about.’ We made a note to get a copy of the amendment.”
So, amidst the chaos of session — monitoring other bills, liaising between the legal organization and legislators, keeping abreast of interests from all sides — Charlie obtained a copy of the amended bill.
“As soon as we saw it, we saw that it was much, much longer than Rep. Hill made it out to be.”
The bill added five crimes by name to the list of disqualifying felonies — compelling street gang membership, elder abuse, aggravated stalking and domestic violence in the first degree, second degree and by strangulation. However, the final addition read that any solicitation, attempt or conspiracy to commit a crime of moral turpitude (together referred to as “inchoate crimes”) shall be considered a crime of moral turpitude.
In practice, this amendment would expand the list of disqualifying felonies from 43 to over 160 in an area of the law that is already poorly understood and poorly administered. Not only that, but the addition of all inchoate crimes made some areas of the bill unconstitutional. Under a 1985 Supreme Court case, a misdemeanor conviction may not disenfranchise an individual.
“Inchoate crimes are less serious than completed counterparts under the law. HB100 did not recognize this distinction, so labelling all inchoate crimes as disqualifying is blatantly unconstitutional. For example, attempted theft of property in the second degree is a misdemeanor, so it cannot be disqualifying,” explained Miles.
Additionally, the bill’s language provided that the change in voting law would go into effect on Oct. 1, 2024, only one month before the 2024 election. The Alabama Constitution prohibits change in election law within six months of a general election.
Despite these flaws in the bill itself, support among the legislature remained high, with few exceptions. The pressure of the legislative time crunch coupled with highly publicized issues — including a bill to place an Alabama lottery constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot for referendum, Senate Bill 129, or the “Anti-DEI” in public education bill, and a host of other anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigration bills — repeatedly tore Charlie’s attention from HB100.
Amid this context, Charlie could not dwell on the bill’s passage in the House. “I immediately called a staffer in the Senate because I thought, well, there’s nothing we can do about it. Bills pass the House, let’s fix it in the Senate. That’s not going to be that hard, so I thought.”
They drafted an amendment to the bill that would remove the addition of all inchoate crimes from disqualifying felonies, and spoke with Sen. Coleman-Madison, who represents several cities just north of Birmingham, about the issues with the bill.
Though it was truly only three weeks at the end of April with HB100 stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charlie recounted that they “didn’t hear about it for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.”
The chaos of the session was scheduled to come to an abrupt end: a three-day week, packed with committee sessions and scheduled floor votes. Wednesday, May 7th, — the second to last day of the 2024 legislative session and the final day of committee meetings — hosted the final Senate Judiciary Committee meeting of the year. HB100 had been added, removed and added to the schedule again in the span of 24 hours. Several Senators friendly to Charlie’s amendment were late to the meeting.
HB100 was passed in committee without opposition, and without amendment. It was added to the Senate floor agenda for the following day — the final day of session.
“We’ve really got to deal with it on the floor,” Charlie recalled.
But the floor on the final day of session is a much greater beast than committee. Each legislator has bills they are fighting for, and issues they are prepared to stand up on; on the last day of session, that list of issues is short.
Charlie attempted to leverage their contacts; they spoke to several Senators who would be friendly to proposing the amendment. They received word early in the morning, just before the day was called into session.
“They’re not going to take your amendment.”
“What do you mean they’re not going to add the amendment? What do you mean? What do you mean?”
A staffer spoke with Rep. Clarke, who was on the Senate floor to ensure the progress of her bills.
If a bill is amended in one chamber of the legislature, it must be voted on again in the other chamber for concurrence. With the vote on the last day of session, there was no time for concurrence; if amended, the bill would die.
HB100 passed the Senate unanimously.
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The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a lawsuit against the legislation on the grounds that the October 1, 2024 implementation date violated the Alabama Constitution, which, after a 2022 constitutional amendment, bans changes in election law within six months of a general election.
CLC filed the suit on behalf of JaiGregory Clarke, a Decatur native who lost his right to vote after a felony conviction who has since headed activist efforts with Faith in Action Alabama, and Robert Crowley. Both men had convictions for a crime on the original 2017 list of crimes of moral turpitude, and a conviction in the expanded 2024 list. The court sided with the CLC, and determined that HB100 could not go into effect until the day following the 2024 General Election.
Miles and Clarke, like many other affected Alabamians, were truly unaware of the steps necessary to ensure Clarke’s participation in the 2024 General Election. During the process of the suit, they filed a second CERV as a proactive measure while the plaintiffs were left in limbo.
The uncertainty and lack of information “costs money, it wastes time, and who gains what?” Miles asks.
Fortunately, the case ended in a settlement which clarified that the law would go into effect after the General Election. The state explained that Clarke and Crowley were “free to vote” in the 2024 election, but “after that election, however, they will be disqualified and will not be able to vote lawfully unless their voting rights are restored.”
Still, it is important to note that the case of JaiGregory Clarke represents a best-case scenario. As an activist, he was very aware of the change in state law, and all legal financial obligations associated with the second conviction had already been paid.
For many, these conditions will not be met, and the overly bureaucratic process of understanding one’s voting status will diminish citizens’ ability to participate in the basic right of a democracy: the right to vote.
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“So that’s sort of the summary, the depressing summary, of what happened,” concluded Charlie. “And I think there are things I would do differently, and there are conversations I wish I had had before the end, but we thought the bill was dead.”
The chaotic passage and gradual implementation of HB100 undoubtedly represents a step backwards for voting rights in the eyes of activists across the state and nation. HB100 expands the number of felony convictions which strip a person of the right to vote from 43 to over 160, and applies retroactively. Alabama’s increased scrutiny starkly contrasts with the general liberalization of felony disenfranchisement laws across the country.
In the future, as activists continue to fight to protect the political rights of those with felony convictions, and those with felony convictions seek to restore their right to vote, both parties hope that they will find more than unawareness of the law or indifference to its broad impact, in Montgomery and across the state. Activists hope the populace will stand with them as they challenge new laws in felony disenfranchisement, or tackle existing laws in court.
Most of all, activists would ask individuals to reconsider the notion that anyone may be stripped of the right to vote — under what circumstances does the state have the right to remove each individual’s most direct power over its government?
