2023 Attorneys of the Year: Jennifer Schroeder, et al. v. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota attorney David McKinney and several colleagues won a court victory that led to the 2023 Minnesota Legislature restoring voting rights to more than 55,000 Minnesotans living in the community on felony probation or parole.

Gov. Tim Walz called the decision “the most significant expansion of voting rights in Minnesota in a half-century.”

After years of unsuccessful efforts to restore voting rights to ex-offenders living in the community, ACLU Minnesota and pro bono partner Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath sued the State under the Minnesota Constitution, on behalf of four community members. Their constitutional claims focused on statewide racial disparities in voting rights perpetuated by Minnesota’s felony disenfranchisement system.

McKinney said the ACLU has been involved for a number of years in lobbying the state Legislature to restore voting rights for people who are on supervised release, in partnership with a number of other organizations.

“From our perspective, we were motivated to find a way to protect the right to vote and the integrity of democracy,” said Craig Coleman, a partner at Minneapolis-based Faegre Drinker, who participated in the effort.

The attorneys litigated the case in district court, then before the Court of Appeals, which upheld the decision, and then before the Minnesota Supreme Court. “By that time, public pressure had really built to the boiling point for the legislature. We had also made the case in public arguments and it got national attention,” McKinney said.

Coleman said the focus of the plaintiffs’ arguments was “the lack of any purpose served by disenfranchising persons who are living in the community. Our clients really illustrated the idea that we release people to live in the community with the expectation that they function as members of the community. The idea of somebody wanting to vote and denying them that right makes no sense.”

The new law is already being challenged by at least one “conservative advocacy group,” Coleman said.

Other attorneys involved in the successful effort were Teresa Nelson, legal director of the Minnesota ACLU, and Jeffrey Justman, Kirsten Elfstrand, and Tom Pryor of Faegre Drinker.

Read more about Minnesota Lawyer’s superb class of Attorneys of the Year for 2023 here.