He was charged with a felony for voting. Now he's registering others to vote
- Maggie Brown
- Mar 21, 2019
- 6 min read
ALAMANCE, NC — Keith Sellars went to the polls in November 2016 to do what he saw was his civic duty, vote. He went to his designated voting station, told the poll worker his name, home address and cast his ballot. He had always valued the right to vote, even at a young age. Even when his friends and others in his community didn’t. But Sellars didn’t know that one year later there would be a warrant out for his arrest for going to the polls that day.
Sellars and his soon-to-be wife, Fatih Cook, went out to eat the weekend that the North Carolina State Board of Elections served a warrant on Sellars for voting, with their three young daughters.
Their middle daughter was crying in the backseat. She had forgotten her favorite doll at the restaurant they were dining at in Burlington. He was racing back to retrieve it for her.
“When I pulled through the light, it was turning red,” Sellars said. By chance, a Burlington Police officer was behind him. He ran Sellars’ license plate, and saw there was a warrant out for his arrest.
“When I get down there, the kids are crying,” Cook said. “They have him sitting on the curb and in handcuffs.”
One of his daughters was barely over one-year-old. The older two, said they were terrified. But Sellars wasn’t surprised when he was arrested that night, though he didn’t fully understand why. By 45-years-old, he was used to the “system” working against him as black man living in Alamance County.
Before the arrest, Sellars and Cook were notified of the warrant by reading the front page of the Burlington Times-News.
“When it first started, we found out about it in an article in the paper. He received a letter that said no charges would be filed, and all that,” Cook said. “Just that his vote wouldn’t count. So we left it at that.”
Sellars and Cook decided it would be best if he turned himself into the Burlington Police Department. And Sellars tried, twice.
“I went and talked to the secretary at the front desk and he was like, ‘You have been here for a while and I’m pretty sure they know your situation but ain’t nobody coming from the back,’” Sellars said. He believes that the police department didn’t appreciate the “decency” of the charge, and didn’t believe in enforcing it.
Sellars was still paying off felony probation fines from 2014. According to an antiquated state statute, voting with felony charges is illegal. But voting while having felony charges is seldom enforced. A year after Sellars voted, the North Carolina State Board of Elections issued an audit of the 2016 elections revealing over 400 people that voted and violated this law. The reason for the audit is unclear.
District attorneys in each county can choose to carry out the warrants. Most attorneys in the state chose not to, even in counties with over 20 convicted felons that voted in 2016. But Pat Nadolski said he wouldn’t let the state’s audit pass by his desk without it being enforced.
Sellars said that he was never aware he couldn’t vote. Probation officers in Alamance county are under no obligation to inform offenders that they aren’t eligible to vote.
Cook and Sellars are a low income family in Alamance county who each work long and odd hours to provide for the household. Cook said studying up on old state statutes is not on the top of her and Sellars’ list of things to do around the house.
“I know people should study the law more so they can know their rights,” Cook said. “But a lot of people don’t have time and aren’t interested in sitting down there, reading the law, until they get into some kind of trouble.”
But none of this stopped the Burlington Police officer that night from arresting Sellars in front of his three children and charging him with another felony.
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Sellars didn't talk about what happened much at first. Though he believed his charge was unjust, he kept his head down.
“I didn’t let it phase me. I kind of stayed humble throughout,” Sellars said. “I knew something wasn’t right with it.”
He had been in trouble with the law before — enough times to make a defense attorneys’ head spin — and he wanted to take responsibility for his wrongs.
Court dates slowly started taking over his life. Sellars and his family were also dealing with a lawsuit against his landlord, on top of the felony voting charges. Due to poor mismanagement of his property, Sellars and his family temporarily lived in a hotel.
“It was back and forth between the courts,” said Cook. Her and Sellars were supposed to get married in September of 2017.
“It’s been something that’s caused us not to be able to complete our wedding day,” she said.
Then the Alamance chapter of DownHomeNC, a local activist group in the county, made it their mission to support those who have been known as the Alamance 12.
DownHome came to Sellars, when he said he was tired of fighting the courts and had given up on voting all together.
“They said, ‘This is your voice man. You have a right. Your vote is your voice.’ And I was like, woah,” Sellars said.
Todd Zimmer, DownHome’s Alamance organizer, said that over 50 members came out to the courthouse each day that Sellars had a court appearance to encourage him and the other Alamance 12.
DownHome eventually contacted The New York Times, where a reporter came to the county and interviewed Sellars. He started to speak more publicly about his experiences after the article gained national attention.
Hunt Johnson, a lawyer in Graham, heard Sellars deliver a small speech at the Democratic Women’s convention.
“It brings me to tears today just thinking about it,” Johnson said.
Johnson understood how hard it was for convicted criminals to get back on their feet. He called his friend Lawrence Slade, now a well known-barber in the area, to see if he had an open seat at his shop.
Johnson told Slade Sellars’ story.
“Hunt, we are on it. We don’t care about his past, we care about his future,” Slade said, according to Johnson.
Johnson was Sellars’ first cut. He is still in barber school at Slade’s barber shop. Sellars knows he wouldn’t have had the job at the shop if he chose to stay silent.
Finally, in August 2018, Sellars took a guilty Alford plea — he plead guilty for legal reasons, but did not admit any guilt to the misdemeanor charge of obstruction of justice. Others in the Alamance 12 took the simple guilty plea. But he saw the law as unjust, and wanted to humbly stand against it.
“They charged me for walking through that door,” Sellars said about voting. “That’s what really hurt me.”
After the 12 arrests in Alamance county, many low income residents were afraid to vote. Community members told DownHome during their voter registration events, “there is no way” that they would register to vote, because they believed would get in trouble with the law.
But Sellars still held tight to his right to vote. He did not want to be intimidated by the state and the district attorney who carried out his charges. He still believed what he believed when he was 20-years-old — his voice mattered. With support from DownHome, the Democratic Party in Alamance county and his local church, he made a commitment to vote again in 2018.
“Don’t let the forces discourage you from voting, because your vote is your voice,” Sellars said.
Sellars thought, if he could vote, others should too. For the 2018 midterm elections, DownHome hosted a March to the Polls, where members joined with Sellars his family while they voted.
“This was never about protecting democracy,” Sellars said at the event. “They wanted to make an example out of us, to intimidate us and thousands of potential voters with records from ever voting again.”
They marched past the Alamance County Courthouse, where Sellars had spent countless hours in fear, demoralized. Where Sellars thought he would never vote again. When Sellars got to his polling station, he showed the poll worker his name, his address, and voted again. Fearless.
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Today, Sellars and the Southern Coalition for Equal Justice are working on a suit against the state to abolish the felony voting law completely.
In defense of Sellars and others in the Alamance 12, the SCEJ argued that the felony law was established originally to prevent African-Americans from voting. According to state records, the law has only been modified minorly since the 1900s.
The argument filed in Alamance says, “The General Assembly of of North Carolina enacted the crime of voting while ineligible due to a criminal conviction with the explicit purpose of discriminating against African-American voters and doing everything in is power to disenfranchise those voters.”
But, it does not appear that this law will go away. Patrick Gannon, public information officer for the NCSBE said that the board is preparing another audit for 2018. More voters who are not aware of the felony voter law are at risk of being convicted.
Sellars now is no longer shy to telling his story. He sees it as his duty to inform others of how voting laws disenfranchise all people of color.
“Overall, I think lawyers and society will look back at the 12,” he said. “And will not let nobody else go through that.”
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