When Laurie Erickson stepped out of the lobby of the South Boise Women’s Correctional Center and into the hot desert sun on the outskirts of Boise in the summer of 2018, she intended to stay out of prison forever.
Inside, she had served her sentence attending treatment programs and working in the kitchen for $0.30 an hour.
Erickson embraced her husband, Stanley, at the facility’s door before hopping into his car, and asked to buy cigarettes on the way to transitional housing. They sped past arid fields and sagebrush steppe toward a truck stop. Stanley did not approve of smoking, but Erickson insisted. She had earned her freedom.
Two years later, however, she made the mistake of registering to vote.
Erickson, now 53, is one of five people charged by prosecutors in Ada county, Idaho, for election fraud-related offenses in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race, and one of 19 across the state’s 44 counties since 2016, according to data from the Idaho supreme court. Erickson’s husband is another.
Idaho is among 14 states where people with felony convictions – such as burglary, forgery or certain types of drug possession – lose the right to vote even after they have been released from prison. The state’s law requires anyone with a felony conviction to complete all probation or parole requirements before they register to vote or cast a ballot. But some, like Erickson, say they did not fully understand this.
Experts say a complex web of varying state laws, combined with a lack of public education and governments’ failure to clear up confusion about eligibility, are largely to blame for cases like theirs.
Such laws have a chilling effect, discouraging people who may be eligible to vote from participating in elections, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-profit law and policy institute. An estimated 4.6 million Americans have lost the right to vote because of a felony conviction.
As Erickson tells it, when she left prison in 2018, the Idaho department of corrections didn’t tell her she couldn’t vote. An Idaho department of corrections spokesperson told the Guardian: “It does not appear that we make these notifications but your inquiry has prompted us to look into this.”
Erickson’s trouble began in October 2020 when the Idaho secretary of state’s office mailed a voter pamphlet containing registration forms to all of Idaho’s approximately 800,000 households. She and Stanley filled out the forms, assuming they were eligible to vote if the state sent them to their home address. Both were on parole.
The form contained a checkbox asking whether the person registering had any “legal disqualifications”, then stated: “Idaho felon’s rights are automatically restored upon completion of all sentencing conditions including probation or parole”.
Confused by the language, they registered successfully and cast ballots for Donald Trump in the November election.
Stanley’s charges came first.
It was April 2021 when the couple learned that he had been charged with a felony for “illegal voting”. Prosecutors tacked on an enhancement charge for his past convictions and the state issued an arrest warrant, but allowed him to post bond. He eventually pleaded guilty to avoid going back to prison and spent a year on probation.
Erickson kept working her four jobs as an app-based delivery driver, often pulling 12- to 14-hour shifts. She had turned her life around, but investigators came knocking again in February 2022.
It was only then that she realized she may have broken the law. “I felt horrible. I mean, really. They sent me to jail over it, you know?” she said.
“I thought I could vote seeing as how I was sent a voter registration and was approved to vote,” she remembered telling law enforcement.
But the attempts to be truthful did not win her leniency. The judge presiding over her arraignment hearing asked whether she had been coerced into voting. Erickson repeated herself: she voted because the state approved her registration.
She pleaded guilty after spending four months in jail, unable to post bond because the state claimed she had violated her parole. She recalled officials at the county jail laughing at the absurdity of her charge. “I registered to vote in Idaho and here I am. I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Patrick Berry, an attorney for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, which monitors felon disenfranchisement laws, told the Guardian that the myriad of different voting restrictions facing formerly incarcerated people “often results in the mass dissemination of inaccurate and misleading information” to the public about who is eligible. “And this is not just for would-be voters with past convictions, but for government officials who don’t understand their own state laws,” he said.
Erickson isn’t certain why the state approved her registration or why it took two years to file charges.
A spokesperson for Ada county explained that the Idaho secretary of state’s office procures a list of registered voters with felony convictions monthly, which is then reviewed for matches. If a person is found to have voted without fulfilling their sentencing requirements, the information is forwarded to law enforcement. Cases are handed over to the prosecutor’s office for a charging decision after investigation.
State law doesn’t take into account whether or not someone made a mistake.
According to Berry, criminal disenfranchisement laws in the United States were largely enacted to target newly enfranchised Black men after the civil war. Today, he says, the laws are also used against those confused about their eligibility.
The Ericksons’ situation mirrors those of dozens of similar cases filed across the United States following the 2020 election. The Brennan Center argues that the trend is accelerated by the politicization of law enforcement and conspiracy theories spread with increasing frequency by far-right politicians. Donald Trump and allies say that widespread voter fraud plagued the 2020 election and will do the same in 2024.
Early this year, the Idaho attorney general, Raúl Labrador, attempted to create an office of election crimes and security. Florida’s office, launched by the governor, Ron DeSantis, to investigate voter fraud, charged 20 people in the leadup to the state’s November 2022 gubernatorial election. The majority of them were Black and did not realize they had been ineligible to register to vote due to past convictions. Other states have followed suit.
But contrary to claims that voter fraud is a major problem, researchers have repeatedly found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
Kendal Shaber of the Idaho League of Women Voters said that people with felony convictions being uncertain whether they can vote “is not an unusual occurrence as Idaho has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, and the highest female incarceration rate in the world.
“What was shocking about [Erickson’s] case is that she was actually prosecuted … and the consequences were just dire for her and her husband,” Shaber said.
Mark Renick, a longtime friend of Erickson’s and program manager of St Vincent de Paul of Southwest Idaho’s Reentry Services, described Erickson’s panic upon learning about the charges.
“The district attorney has the capacity to say: ‘This is absurd. Let’s just throw this out.’ And the district attorney chose to press charges,” he said.
Asked why the state chose to pursue Erickson’s cases, the Ada county prosecutor’s office said it had reviewed all evidence and found that “these crimes were committed beyond a reasonable doubt. Both defendants pled guilty to these charges.”
In cases like Erickson’s, the circumstances need to be taken into account, said Berry of the Brennan Center. “These are honest mistakes. That’s not fraud,” he said.
Until then, people like Laurie Erickson are living with the consequences.
Speaking about her experience, Erickson is forlorn, but she is also angry. She says she’ll never vote again. “I don’t trust the system,” she explained. “If they can wait two years and come after me, they can wait two years to come after me again. And I’m not giving them no reason.”
English (US)