Tennessee election officials want a U.S. Appeals Court to postpone changes to how people with felony convictions can register to vote until after this year’s elections.
Officials said in a court filing there’s not enough time to make the changes a federal court judge ordered them to make in a ruling issued last week.
(READ MORE: How a court ruling could change voting rights for former felons in Tennessee)
The Tennessee Conference of NAACP filed a lawsuit against state officials in 2020, challenging requirements for people with felony convictions who want to regain the right to vote after they’ve been released from prison.
When a person is convicted, Tennessee law strips them of their voting rights, but a formerly incarcerated individual can petition to have those rights restored. But there are exceptions to those. Before 1981 the felony vote-stripping law didn’t exist or only applied to a narrow set of convicted crimes.