As Iowa caucuses approach, hundreds of people await decisions on their voting rights

It's been about a decade since Jarvis Guyton served two years in prison for a drug conviction. The recent college graduate, who played football at Grand View University, says he's getting his life back in order, and he wants to participate in Iowa's Feb. 3 presidential caucuses.

But his name is one of 330 on a backlog of convicted felons waiting for Gov. Kim Reynolds to approve restoration of their voting rights.

Since newly elected Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear last month abandoned the practice, Iowa is alone among U.S. states in requiring that the governor individually approve each application for restoration of voting rights.

Iowa's bottleneck threatens to deny Guyton and many others the chance to have a say in the state's first-in-the-nation nomination process.

“If a person don’t know how it feels to have their vote taken away, they don’t care about anything,” said Guyton, 31. “That’s how I see it.”

Guyton filed his application a few weeks ago — but others have waited for months.

And many more like them erroneously believe they could face criminal prosecution should they participate in the caucuses, a government accountability group says. Iowa's system for listing ineligible voters is rife with inaccuracies, which victimizes people who should be eligible to vote, according to the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group based in Washington, D.C. The group plans to hold a press conference Monday to highlight the issue.

More than 52,000 people in Iowa — a number that is greater than the populations of 89 of the state's 99 counties — are currently prohibited from voting.

Civil rights advocates have long said the ban disproportionately affects minorities, noting statistics from the Sentencing Project that show black people in Iowa are imprisoned at 11 times the rate of white people. Some have linked felon voter bans to Jim Crow actions taken by white-dominated legislatures to enforce racial segregation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Campaign Legal Center in recent months stationed three organizers in Iowa to assist people seeking restoration of their voting rights. Monday's event will showcase the stories of some of the more than 250 people like Guyton whom it has tried to assist.

The group isn't ruling out the possibility of seeking legal action against the state if the flawed system is not fixed, or as in Kentucky, scrapped.

Short-term steps urged before caucuses

Reynolds has so far resisted signing an executive order like Beshear's to automatically restore the rights of felons who have completed their sentences. She says she wants to avoid adding to the confusion created by conflicting executive orders on felon voters signed by previous Iowa governors.

Instead, she wants the Legislature to begin the process to enact the change through a constitutional amendment. An amendment would be more resistant to political whims, but requires approval from the Legislature in two successive two-year sessions before it can be placed on the ballot for a statewide vote.

Reynolds sought an amendment in the 2019 session, but the effort was derailed by fellow Republicans who raised questions about what constituted actual completion of a sentence, such as whether it should hinge on full repayment of any restitution.

The Campaign Legal Center contends that, if Reynolds continues to call for the lengthy amendment process, she should at least consider some changes that would help speed the restoration process before the caucuses.

Among the recommended changes is a real-time database people can review to see whether they are eligible to vote; an expedited process to eliminate the backlog of voter restorations before Feb. 3; and clarification of complex Iowa policies that civil rights groups say result in thousands of people incorrectly believing they are ineligible to vote.

Such action is necessary to safeguard people’s constitutional rights and help maintain the integrity of Iowa's voting process, said Blair Bowie, a Campaign Legal Center attorney.

“Disenfranchisement in the state takes out a whole set of people who have a particular background, and those people tend to be disproportionately people of color and poor people,” Bowie said.

Longtime problems with ineligible voter list

The system Iowa uses to track people, including convicted felons, who are prohibited from voting has been shown to have numerous errors. In 2016 alone, 2,591 people had their voting rights restored after staff for Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate determined they were incorrectly listed, records obtained by the Des Moines Register show.

A Register investigation published last year found that the ballots of more than two-dozen voters had been wrongly rejected since 2017 — including 20 in the November 2018 midterm elections — because their names erroneously appeared on the felon list the state circulates to county officials.

In addition, a Register review in September found that at least 69 Iowans who had been convicted in other states, and who had their voting rights restored after serving sentences there, remained on the list of felons ineligible to vote — despite an Iowa policy to recognize such restorations by other states.

On top of that, the Register in November identified people whose rights Reynolds had restored, yet who remained listed in the database as ineligible to vote.

Pate’s office did not respond Friday to a question about whether it would comply with a request to post a real-time database of ineligible voters. The Register has published a database it obtained from Pate’s office through a records request, and has repeatedly updated it as it obtains new records through additional requests. But the Register lacks the information necessary to update the database continuously.

► Database: Iowa's list of felons ineligible to vote

Pate in November announced that his staff will manually review each of the more than 90,000 files in the felon database in a six-step verification process it hopes to complete before this year’s general election.

“We are improving our processes to make sure eligible voters are not deterred from casting ballots,” Pate said in a news release at the time. “My staff is going to dig through every record, no matter how old, double- and triple-check the information with the courts, and make sure everything is correct.”

Many mistakenly think they're ineligible

Reynolds’ office staff did not respond Friday to questions about Campaign Legal Center’s recommendations, but said 330 voter restorations were pending.

Reynolds — whose administration this year simplified the application process and eliminated a $15 processing fee — received 809 voter rights applications in 2019, granting 292. In addition, the governor sent 187 applications back to people it said mistakenly believed they were ineligible to vote and who did not need the governor’s clemency, according to information Reynolds provided to Iowa Public Radio for a story aired last week.

“We were doing fine for a while, but we are behind now. So I’m not going to say that we’re not,” Reynolds said in the radio interview. “But we’re doing everything we can, especially with an election coming up — we want to make sure that if they are entitled to vote, we give them that opportunity.”

The Brennan Center for Justice and the League of Women Voters of Iowa put the state on notice last year that they believe the database has inaccurately denied people their voting rights and violates federal law.

Bowie said the Campaign Legal Center has not ruled out pursuing or joining litigation against Iowa in connection with the problems.

“Felony disenfranchisement impacts tens of thousands of Iowans," Bowie wrote in a Dec. 16 letter to Reynolds. "They deserve a voice in our democracy and a say in the future of the state.”

Jason Clayworth is an investigative reporter at the Des Moines Register. He can be reached at 515-699-7058 or jclayworth@dmreg.com