TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on Jul 1, 2024

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has put on hold a Nashville judge’s ruling that Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins ran afoul of federal law by not informing thousands of individuals convicted of felonies that they may still be eligible to vote. The appeals panel said that the ruling came too late in the election cycle to go into effect this year, Tennessee Journal reports. The decision comes in a 2020 lawsuit brought by the Tennessee chapter of the NAACP, the Campaign Legal Center, Brave Hearts and Baker Donelson law firm. Nashville-based U.S. District Judge William Campbell ruled in May that the state violated federal voting law and ordered it to develop new policies and procedures for processing felony voter registrations and train election workers how to follow it. State officials then asked the appeals court to postpone the changes until after this year’s elections.