Voters in nine states may permanently lose their right to vote if they have a felony conviction. That includes Tennessee, where more than 470,000 people with previous criminal convictions currently cannot vote. In an Oct. 30 panel discussion organized by the VLS Voting Rights and Advocacy Society, Free Hearts Senior Legal Counsel Keeda Haynes, MTSU political science Professor Sekou Franklin, Tennessee State Rep. Bob Freeman, and Campaign Legal Counsel attorney Kate Uyeda ’22 discussed their work to eliminate barriers to reinstatement of voting rights and on behalf of individuals seeking the right to vote.
For Haynes, the battle for voting rights was personal; she was formerly incarcerated. “I know first-hand how hard it is to get your voting rights restored in Tennessee,” she said. Haynes studied for the LSAT while in prison, earned her law degree after her release, and worked as a public defender and at a law firm before joining Free Hearts, which advocates for formerly incarcerated women.
However, for the first several years she practiced law, “I was a shadow citizen—I did not have a vote on what’s happening my community,” Haynes said, because the process Tennessee requires those with criminal convictions to follow to regain their voting rights is lengthy, costly, and difficult to navigate.
Franklin, author of Losing Power: African Americans and Racial Polarization in Tennessee Politics, and Freeman, who represents a Nashville district in the Tennessee General Assembly, emphasized that for them, the fight to enable the formerly incarcerated to regain their voting rights was both personal and a policy goal. Freeman had a friend who struggled to regain his voting rights after serving time in federal prison. Franklin included obstacles to voting rights restoration as one of many desperately needed reforms in a state justice system that negatively impacts a disproportionately high number of Black citizens.
“The system is intentionally designed to keep people from voting,” Freeman said.
Uyeda characterized the situation in Tennessee as “a five-alarm fire—it’s hard to overstate the position we’re in now. Tennessee is one of only three states where your voting rights are in the hands of a governor.”
She cited a number of facts about Tennessee’s record of disenfranchisement, noting that Tennessee is second in the nation in the number of citizens who had lost their voting rights.
“Tennessee has some of the worst rates of disenfranchisement in the whole country,” she said. “There are 470,000 people in Tennessee who can’t vote—that’s the second highest number of any state nationally—and the second highest rate of voter disenfranchisement nationally. One out of every five Black Tennesseans can’t vote. That means they are locked out of elections for school board and judges as well as elections for state and federal offices.”
The onerous process required to restate voting rights in Tennessee includes completion of probation, payment of all court costs, fines, and restitution, and paperwork that must be completed and signed by local court officials. Individuals required to pay child support cannot be in arrears. “The process is so complex, individuals need the help of an attorney to complete it, and many experienced attorneys struggle to navigate the system,” Freeman said.
Both Haynes and Freeman emphasized that many low-income Tennesseans cannot afford the time, fees, travel to local courts, and legal counsel they need to navigate the process to regain their voting rights.
Freeman characterized the loss of voting rights as being “civilly dead.”
Panelists were introduced by Tyler Dorr ’25 (BA’19) of the VLS Voting Rights and Advocacy Society. The event was made possible by the Hyatt Student Activities Fund, endowed by Wayne S. Hyatt ’68 (BS’65) and his late wife, Amanda M. Hyatt (BA’67, MA’74), to support student-initiated events that enrich the intellectual life at Vanderbilt Law School.