Editorial Note: While there is no constitutional right to vote which is regulated by state law, there is a constitutional right to bare arms, period.
Original Post from the Jackson Sun
State elections officials appear to have changed the voting rights restoration process to require that Tennesseans who committed a felony be able to legally own a gun before regaining their right to vote.
Employees in the election division of the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office first revealed that the office was considering the change during depositions in a federal lawsuit in late 2023.
In a statement to The Tennessean on Tuesday afternoon, Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins said full citizenship rights in Tennessee must be restored in order to vote and those citizenship rights include the right to bear arms.
“When someone commits a felony in the state of Tennessee, that person forfeits the right to vote in future Tennessee elections,” Goins said in the statement. “The legislature provided a path for those who committed a felony and seek to regain the right to vote.
“The Tennessee Supreme Court made it clear through Falls v. Goins that a felon must receive a pardon from the governor or other appropriate authority or have his or her full citizenship rights restored as part of the path to regain the right to vote. Under the Tennessee Constitution, the right to bear arms is a right of citizenship. Specifically, Article I Section 26 of the Tennessee Constitution states, ‘That the citizens of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense; but the Legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms with a view to prevent crime.’”
The Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group, said on Monday that such a policy change would be the first of its kind in the country. It expects it could prevent tens of thousands of Tennesseans from being able to restore their right to vote.
It is unclear if the apparent change will retroactively apply to those who have had their voting rights restored while being unable to legally own a firearm.
The depositions took place in the lawsuit NAACP v. Lee, which challenges Tennessee’s voting rights restoration process. Voting rights advocates say that process is already unduly burdensome.
Several state and federal laws permanently prohibit those convicted of certain charges — such as felony drug crimes — from owning a firearm without permanently stripping them of their right to vote under previous interpretations of those laws.
“It just looks to me again, like they’re moving the goalposts,” Blair Bowie, director of the Campaign Legal Center’s Restore Your Vote project and the attorney who questioned officials during the depositions, said in an interview. “Whenever we seem to be on the cusp of making progress, they will pull back hard in the other direction.”
Goins said during his deposition on Dec. 14 that he planned to make the decision before the Feb. 5 voter registration deadline ahead of the presidential primary on March 5.
“I mean this needs to be done now, as soon as we can get this issue resolved. The day of the deadline, that’s not when it needs to be made,” Goins said during his deposition.
Donald Hall, an employee in the elections division, said during his Dec. 13 deposition that “somewhere between nine and 12” applications for restoration of voting rights by people prohibited from owning a firearm were pending until the office decided if gun rights should be considered a requisite for the right to vote.
Goins said in his deposition that he had discussed the issue with the Tennessee Attorney General’s office and planned to request a formal opinion from the attorney general. The Tennessee Attorney General’s office declined to comment, and the Secretary of State’s office did not answer The Tennessean’s question about seeking an opinion from the attorney general.
No opinion from the Tennessee Attorney General’s office on the issue has been uploaded online as of publication. The office denied The Tennessean’s request for records of communication between the Secretary of State’s office and the Attorney General’s office about seeking an opinion from the attorney general, citing exemptions to Tennessee’s public records law for work products of the attorney general and communications between an attorney and their client.
In July 2023, the elections division began requiring that those seeking to restore their voting rights in Tennessee both go through the administrative voting rights restoration process and either be granted a pardon or court order restoring their full rights of citizenship.
Officials said in depositions that they made that change in response to the Tennessee Supreme Court’s decision in the lawsuit Falls v. Goins, despite the lawsuit dealing with re-enfranchisement only for those with out-of-state convictions who restored their full rights of citizenship in that other state after establishing residency in Tennessee.
At the time of the depositions, the Secretary of State’s office did not consider gun rights as part of the “full rights of citizenship” necessary for voting. That interpretation had been explicitly held by the office in previous years as well, according to a training document read during Goins’ deposition.
“Note: Gun rights are also a citizenship right, but they involve overlapping federal laws so it’s okay if those are not restored as long as the other citizenship rights are restored,” Goins said, reading part the training document during his deposition. Bowie said that guidance was used as recently as May 2022.
Goins said he began reviewing the office’s definition of “full rights of citizenship” after it was “escalated to [his] level.”
The following dialogue is taken from Goins’ deposition.
“I said – and this is assuming that your office decides that gun rights have to be restored in order to restore your voting rights,” Bowie asked Goins, according to the deposition. “This person, who is prohibited by federal law from getting their gun rights back, is permanently disqualified from voting. Is that correct?”
“Unless exoneration or expungement. Right. Yes,” Goins replied.
Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @EvanMealins.
