March 19, 2020
Lexington Herald-Leader
In the middle of a worldwide pandemic and national crisis, when every credible governmental official and health expert is telling us to practice social distancing and stay at home, the Kentucky legislature continues to meet. It is considering bills that have nothing to do with helping the state through the coronavirus crisis.
What a perversion of democracy.
March 5, 2020 at 02:18pm
We had our Healthy Democracy Day in Frankfort yesterday bringing about 100 Kentuckians to Frankfort to share their vision for a real Democracy in Kentucky and to fight for it.
We had 9 lobby teams, recruited 7 bill co-sponsorships, had 24 legislative meetings, had 15 powerful speakers, and really laid the groundwork to stop SB 62 this session, and pass HB 6 next session while weaving an overall vision of what kind of Democracy we want more than we have before in Frankfort.
February 24, 2020 at 01:41pm
We’ve been pushing to restore voting rights of people with felonies in their past in Kentucky for 15 years. We’re closer now than ever, but some Senate Republicans are answering this call with voting rights legislation that doesn’t actually give anyone their right to vote back. It will come up for a vote in the Senate tomorrow (Tuesday, 2/25), so calls are needed urgently!
February 19, 2020 at 08:46am
With information from the Campaign Legal Center's RestoreYourVote.org tool, KFTC has developed a decision tree to use in the field to help people determine if Governor Andy Beshear's Executive Order restoring voting rights to 140,000 Kentuckians applies to them. Here's a link to the PDF and an image of it is below.
Click the image to enlarge
February 6, 2020 at 12:15pm
Over 36 hours, we had three big voting rights events – a Voting Rights Lobby Day, a Criminal Justice Panel Discussion, and a Press Conference for HB 6.
Voting Rights Lobby Day
In all, we had 34 documented meetings with legislators, 8 lobby teams, and 28 grassroots lobbyists plus the Kentucky Council of Church's great Prayer Day of Action on Voting Rights and 60 UFCW workers there who talked to legislators about HB 6 as a part of their meetings.
Our members built up their confidence in speaking truth to power and we had frustrating and yet valuable conversations with foes and allied legislators alike.
We got a lot done today and we can build on it. Come join us in Frankfort to continue the work!
January 23, 2020 at 05:26pm
KFTC members were in Frankfort and on the phones yesterday to fight Senate Bill 2, a photo voter ID law designed to make it harder for some Kentuckians to vote by creating new hurdles for them. It’s especially troubling for young, elderly, low income and people of color communities – people who are less likely to have or need a photo ID.
SB 2 is supposed to make it harder for people to impersonate someone else on election day. But even the bill's supporters at the hearing couldn't come up with even one example this century of any time anyone tried to do that in Kentucky.
To address this non-existent problem, they’re trying to pass a complicated 66-page bill that restructures a lot of our voting process and they’re trying to do it all in a hurry.
We ought to be making it easier for citizens to vote, though, not harder.
January 21, 2020
The Appeal
Less than a month after newly sworn-in Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear signed an executive order restoring the right to vote to roughly 140,000 people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences, state Republicans
January 13, 2020 at 10:52pm
Over 40 people from 22 organizations gathered yesterday in Frankfort to celebrate our recent victories around voting rights, come to a shared understanding of Beshear’s executive order, to plan our work in the General Assembly to pass a robust constitutional amendment, and to start to think about how we can work together to register the estimated 140,000 Kentuckians who just regained the right to vote.
Our legislative focus between now and April 15 will be on HB 6, Charles Booker’s bill to restore voting rights to all Kentuckians after they’ve served their time. This bill is still needed because it doesn’t have the same exclusions as Beshear’s Executive order and it would be permanent.
To make a difference in this campaign in just a few minutes, you can call the Legislative Message Line (800-372-7181) and leave a message for your senator and representative, plus House and Senate Leadership to say that you “support HB 6.”
January 13, 2020 at 10:38pm
We won a major victory late last year when Governor Andy Beshear signed an executive order restoring the right to vote to an estimated 140,000 people with felonies in their past.
Our allies at the Campaign Legal Center put together a great tool at www.Restoreyourvote.org to help people figure out whether Andy Beshear's Executive Order applies to them.
It asks a series of questions to determine if someone can register to vote, and if so, connects you with an online voter registration portal. For people excluded from the executive order but who have served their time, there's still the option of requesting voting rights through an individual partial pardon from the Governor.
Exclusions in the executive order are:
December 23, 2019 at 10:39am
On December 12, Governor Andy Beshear helped Kentucky take a historic step forward. With the twirl of a pen, 140,000 previously disenfranchised members of our commonwealth were re-empowered with the right to vote. Years of conversations, meetings, phone calls, and work by people with felonies in their past created the grassroots support needed to bring us to this moment.
Over a hundred of us attended and cheered as the governor signed the order and stated his support for a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights. There is much to be lauded about this act, including the explicit exclusion of any requirement that fines and fees be paid to qualify for restoration. 140,000 is truly a huge number, and a step towards helping disenfranchised people regain a sense of normalcy within society.
This is what a healthy democracy is about – allowing people who have a stake in the decisions made by elected officials to have a voice in deciding who those officials are. It’s fundamental to who we are as a state and a nation.
We, the Kentucky Voter Rights Restoration Coalition, are a network of 30+ similarly minded community groups working to ensure that every person who is denied the right to vote has that right restored. We believe that once a person has served their time, they have the right to re-engage with society.
