NEW BERN, N.C. — As the daylight faded on April 12, 2018, a Craven County sheriff’s deputy pulled over a white pickup. Heather French was sitting in the passenger seat.

The deputy began tailing the truck on the other side of the Trent River, in a location he deemed “consistent with [a] drug area.” He eventually pulled over the driver, whose registration had recently expired. During the stop, the deputy called in a K9 unit from the local police department, which sniffed for drugs as night set in. The officers didn’t find drugs on French, but they searched through her wallet and noticed something else: Twenty-nine imitation one dollar bills.

The officers would later say that the material felt unusual and that each bill had a matching serial number and “pink Chinese lettering stamped on it.” They also said the bills looked “very realistic.” The prop money — which French maintains she never passed off as real money, something law enforcement has not contradicted — would become the reason she was stripped of her right to vote.

Over the next five years, French’s eligibility see-sawed with a series of court rulings. They left her eligible to vote in some elections but not others, and illustrated the power of judges to grant, and to claw back, Americans’ most basic rights.

The rulings also tell a story about the North Carolina Supreme Court, whose Republican majority traces back to changes legislators made in the dying days of 2016. North Carolina is one of eight states where Republican politicians have passed laws that pushed the courts in a conservative direction or helped strengthen Republican control, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

These changes have ramifications for those states’ residents and, increasingly, for the country.

In many ways, North Carolina represents the starkest example.

The driver of the truck in New Bern that April evening was John Cuddy, who purchased the prop money online for $2. He told police that he and his wife had used it to tease French, who he described as “pretty much our only friend.” In turn, she’d kept some of it and played a joke on her mother.

“You know, we’re poor. So for us, this is a prank,” French said.

She was arrested and charged with possessing “five or more counterfeit instruments with the intent to injure or defraud any person.”

Prosecutors offered French a misdemeanor plea deal, but she rejected it. “I have no problem admitting when I f— up … That’s not one of those times. I will forever, ever maintain my innocence.” The money, she says, “is clearly fake.”

At a trial on July 6, 2020, her attorney argued the bills were only “play money,” and that no evidence showed French used it to buy anything or defraud anyone. Prosecutors argued that the location of the bills in her wallet was itself evidence of “an intent to defraud.” Judge Joshua W. Willey called the case “circumstantial” but said he was swayed by the location in the wallet.

He sentenced French to three years of probation and to pay court costs and for her court-appointed attorney, a total of over $1,600. Additionally, she would pay a state-mandated $40 each month she was on probation.

When the judge’s ruling came down, the felony on her record meant that French couldn’t cast a ballot.

“I was upset because the presidential election was coming up,” she said. After Trump was elected, she had begun paying closer attention to politics. “I would have given anything to be able to vote.”

The legal case made a rough stretch of French’s life rougher. Hurricane Florence ripped through eastern North Carolina in 2018, badly damaging the mobile home where she lived with her parents. The floor began sinking, mold crept in from the moisture, and the family had to live around holes in the walls, ceilings and floor. Eventually, with government support, she and her parents moved into an RV.

The felony made finding work nearly impossible. She put her energy into helping care for her aging, disabled parents, and began attending classes at Craven Community College. “I plan to pursue a degree in political science, actually, because of this court case,” said French, 32.

So when French received a text last year from a nonprofit, telling her she could now vote despite her criminal record, she was intrigued. But she didn’t do anything right away — French was concerned she might be arrested, like 20 people had been in Florida for voting with criminal records. “I did not want to get slapped with another felony,” she said.

But a second text convinced her to call the county. She was eligible to vote, they told her, due to a ruling in a court case called Community Success Initiative v. Moore.

The same court system that had taken away French’s right to vote in her criminal case had now given it back, in this civil one.

In November 2022, she sat down in the kitchen of the RV and cast a ballot for the first time. She had jotted down notes about the U.S. Senate race, local contests and two state Supreme Court elections, and marked her absentee ballot accordingly.

“I felt like I was finally contributing something positive to society,” she said.

‘Your voice is your vote’

The case that enabled Heather French to vote challenged the state’s felony disenfranchisement law, which bars people on probation, parole or post-release supervision from voting. People remain ineligible if their inability to pay fines and fees extended their supervision, even if they have completed all other terms.

The lawsuit was brought by groups that work with North Carolinians wrapped up in the criminal justice system. A key plaintiff, Community Success Initiative, was founded by Dennis Gaddy, 66.

Voting rights are Gaddy’s heritage. He grew up on a dirt road in rural Fairmont, North Carolina, in the 1960s. He and his mother would drive around the area with stacks of the state’s big, brown voter registration forms, “going up to people who didn’t ever think they could even register to vote, and get them registered by hand.”

His father was the chair of what locals called the “Gaddy Precinct.” After polls closed on election day, the elder Gaddy would transport ballots to the smoke-filled rooms of the local board of elections to be tabulated.

“He guarded those ballots like they were gold,” Gaddy remembered. “So I saw that, smelled all that, was part of all that, knew how important it was.”

Gaddy went to law school and became an attorney, but he was disbarred in 1990 and convicted of a string of felonies in the ensuing years. When Barack Obama became the first Black major party presidential candidate in 2008, Gaddy was still on probation and couldn’t vote.

“It was devastating to me,” he said.

He founded Community Success Initiative to assist people leaving prison with reintegrating into their communities. Regaining the right to register and vote was a key piece of that process. “Your voice is your vote,” Gaddy said. “If you can’t vote, you’re not really a citizen in North Carolina.”

Gaddy estimates 90% of the people he works with are Black men, and he saw how the law deprived many of a political voice. He also had clients deprived of the right to vote even when they’d otherwise be eligible, simply because they couldn’t afford to pay the costs associated with their cases.

“Your voice is your vote. If you can’t vote, you’re not really a citizen in North Carolina.”

Dennis Gaddy, Founder of Community Success Initiative

The lawsuit filed by Gaddy and others made those issues explicit. “This case is about the General Assembly’s intentional discrimination against Black people and against poor people,” Forward Justice’s Daryl Atkinson, one of the attorneys who argued the case for the plaintiffs, told Public Integrity.

In legal filings and expert testimony, the plaintiffs documented how over 56,000 North Carolinians were stripped of the right to vote due to the state’s felony disenfranchisement laws. Virtually everyone with a felony owes money as part of their case, with the median amount for those on probation around $2,400. Failing to pay those costs can extend probation for years, and, in rare cases, lead to arrest.

“You’ve got to pay to be able to vote in North Carolina. Flat out,” Atkinson said.

Before trial, a three-judge panel found that the requirement imposed an unequal burden, and issued an injunction. That granted the right to vote to roughly 5,000 people who had completed their felony terms except for the payment of fines and fees.

The trial that followed focused on the racially disparate impact of the law. Felony disenfranchisement has a long history in North Carolina, and legal filings pored over the past in exacting detail.

After the Civil War, former Confederates embarked on a campaign to convict Black men of petty crimes and publicly whip them. An 1867 article in the National Anti-Slavery Standard deduced that the whipping campaign’s “real motive … is to guard against their voting in the future, there being a law in North Carolina depriving those publicly whipped of the right to vote.” Crowds would gather every day at the courthouse in Raleigh to watch the violence.

After the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, politicians shifted to tactics that were not explicitly race-based. A version of the state’s current felony disenfranchisement law went on the books in 1877. Modifications to the law in the early 1970s provided more routes to people to get their voting rights restored, but the statute maintains “origins in racial discrimination and still disproportionately negatively affects African Americans in North Carolina,” Clemson University historian Orville Vernon Burton wrote in a filing.