GOP-Run Missouri Becomes Latest State to Roll Back Felony Disenfranchisement

Missouri Republicans are aggressively working to manipulate the rules of democracy to their benefit, including, notably, by further gerrymandering the state at Donald Trump’s urging, and trying to weaken the public’s ability to pass citizen ballot initiatives.

But against that backdrop, they’ve also just expanded democratic access in a major way: Republican Governor Mike Kehoe last week signed House Bill 1871, a GOP-sponsored omnibus elections law that, among several other changes, restores voting rights to an estimated 40,000 Missourians currently on probation or parole.

Many more will benefit in the years to come, as the reform calls for automatic voting rights restoration moving forward for most Missourians who exit prison on parole, or who are sentenced to probation. Thousands of people fit into those categories annually. 

Lots of similar legislation had stalled out in Missouri in the last decade. “This has been a top priority for many, many years,” said Denise Lieberman, a voting rights attorney who directs the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition. 

Lieberman credited this year’s breakthrough in large part to the advocacy of Republican state Representative Melanie Stinnett, who has often said publicly that she developed an interest in this topic after meeting a disenfranchised man while knocking doors on the campaign trail. 

“I saw the impact on a person in my district,” she told KCUR in Kansas City, adding that she is compelled by evidence that people whose voting rights are restored are less likely to be re-incarcerated: “If we can get people engaged and keep them out of our jails and prisons, then I think we should be doing everything we can.”

HB 1871 passed both chambers of the GOP-dominated legislature by wide margins this spring, after Stinnett had teamed up with some Democratic lawmakers to champion including this expansion of rights restoration. The bill goes into effect Aug. 28, and Lieberman said voting rights groups across the state must now organize to spread the word to affected people. 

“We want to make sure this gets implemented in a way that ensures people who need access to voter registration actually get it, because otherwise this is a right on paper only,” Lieberman said. “It should not fall on the shoulders of returning citizens themselves, as they struggle to address all of the other parts of re-entry.” 

The implementation and public education work will be particularly important in Missouri, since HB 1871 contains significant exceptions. Thanks to a Republican amendment adopted in the state Senate, the bill maintains disenfranchisement for those on parole or probation who were convicted of certain crimes lawmakers deem especially serious, including murder, child endangerment, first- or second-degree assault, and incest. This will require precision in messaging by those working to contact affected people.

The Sentencing Project’s Christopher Uggen, a national authority on felony disenfranchisement data, estimates that the bill’s exceptions apply to approximately 20 percent of Missouri’s parole and probation population.

HB 1871 was a sweeping elections reform bill, of which the felony disenfranchisement provision was but one part. The bill also bans political campaigns from collecting automatic, recurring donations from people who have not given affirmative consent; makes Aug. 12 “Election Worker Appreciation Day” in Missouri; permits candidates to use campaign funds on childcare; and disqualifies write-in votes for people who have not actively declared themselves write-in candidates. 

Stinnett’s voting rights restoration proposal was originally written into its own, narrow bill, before being folded earlier this year into the HB 1871 omnibus. Lieberman said that helped ensure the reform’s passage. 

“If this thing was a standalone bill, there might have been some kind of effort to try to get it vetoed,” she said. 

Like all states, Missouri disproportionately incarcerates Black residents, meaning that HB 1871 will shift voting power disproportionately to Black Missourians, who account for 12 percent of the state’s overall population, but 32 percent of its prison population. Felony disenfranchisement in the U.S. has traditionally been a potent tool for white lawmakers to deliberately limit Black political power and to maintain white supremacy in government. 

Today, felony disenfranchisement schemes vary dramatically by state. Some states make it virtually impossible for anyone convicted of any felony to ever regain the right to vote. 

But a handful of places—Maine, Vermont, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.—never strip anyone of the right to vote, even while they’re incarcerated. Another 23 states allow anyone to vote as long as they are not presently incarcerated, including those on probation and parole; Virginia is voting on a constitutional amendment this fall that’d make it the 24th such state.

Missouri would be joining that group, but for the carve-outs in HB 1871 that will keep its rule harsher.

“I feel that all they’ve done is correct a wrong that never should have been one,” said Richard Jackson, a St. Louis-based pastor, of HB 1871. Jackson is the founder of Manasseh Ministry, which works with and advocates for people with past and current convictions.

“If you’re on probation and parole, it should still be a right,” he said. “If you want people to pay taxes, and whatever other American obligations they have to contribute, but you don’t let them vote—it’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s not balanced.”

Missouri is no stranger to deliberate limits on Black political power. Lawmakers have moved in recent years to wrest control of policing from Kansas City and St. Louis, two liberal cities with large Black populations. The recent GOP gerrymander, blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, dilutes the voting power of Black Missourians. 

And even as Missouri Republicans passed HB 1871 into law, they pursued another reform that should disproportionately harm incarcerated people: Senate Bill 888, which Kehoe also signed this month, will force people with certain types of convictions to stay in prison longer, by removing parole eligibility from many prisoners until they have completed at least 85 percent of their sentences.

Jackson said he suspects the passage of SB 888 made Kehoe feel more comfortable signing a bill to expand voting eligibility. And, like Lieberman, he called on community organizations and churches to work to educate voters about the state’s new disenfranchisement rules.

Reginald Slaughter, a formerly incarcerated man who is now the outreach coordinator for Missouri’s Fathers and Families Support Center, said he’s eager to assist in that work, because he knows firsthand of the power of re-enfranchisement.

He spent four years on parole after his prison term, during which, he said, “I was working, paying taxes, all of that—and I couldn’t have a say. I felt like less than a human being. I was governed, and I had to live by the rules of the government, but I was not someone with a voice.”

When he did finally regain the right to vote, he continued, “I felt like a human being again.”