On March 10, Mississippi held its 2026 midterm congressional primaries. The races were consequential: a U.S. Senate seat, all four congressional districts and the balance of power in Washington at stake. Yet, as polls closed and the data trickled in, one number stood out more than any candidate’s vote tally: the number of Mississippians who stayed home.
Mississippi has approximately 1.95 million registered voters. According to certified returns reported by the Associated Press, 146,227 people voted in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, and 156,570 voted in the Republican primary, for a combined total of 302,797 Senate primary ballots cast. News outlets across the state confirmed what had been expected: turnout was low.
Those 302,797 combined Senate primary votes represent roughly 15.5% of the state’s registered voters. Approximately 1.65 million registered Mississippians sat out the primary entirely. Secretary of State Michael Watson had sounded the alarm weeks before the election, noting his office had received only about 9,000 absentee ballot requests. “I hope folks are making plans now to vote. We’ve got a really low turnout so far,” he said. “It’s terrible for Mississippi. We’ve got to do better.”
For context, the 2022 congressional primaries drew approximately 11% of registered voters.
The last time this particular Senate seat was on the ballot in a midterm primary, in June 2018, roughly 157,000 people voted in the Republican primary and 88,000 in the Democratic primary, for a combined 245,000. This year’s Democratic primary turnout of 146,227 nearly doubled the 88,000 from 2018, a notable surge. But even with that increase, the vast majority of the electorate remained absent.
A State Where Voting Has Never Been Easy
These numbers cannot be examined in isolation. Mississippi’s relationship with the ballot box is unlike that of any other state in the union.
When Mississippi was admitted to the Union in 1817, only white men held decision-making power. After the Civil War and during Reconstruction, nearly 97% of eligible Black men registered to vote. In 1869, the state elected its first Black secretary of state and its first Black legislators. But that era of democratic progress was short-lived. In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution specifically designed to strip Black citizens of the franchise through poll taxes, literacy tests and other mechanisms. The convention’s president, Solomon Saladin Calhoon, stated the purpose plainly: “Let’s tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the Universe. … We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.” By 1892, fewer than 6% of eligible Black men were registered to vote, down from near-total participation.
The effects of that 1890 constitution echo into 2026. One of its most enduring legacies is felony disenfranchisement. Under Section 241 of the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of certain felonies, a list that has expanded over the decades to roughly 22 crimes, lose their right to vote for life. The Sentencing Project estimated 218,181 Mississippians were disenfranchised as of 2016, representing 9.63% of the state’s citizen population, more than triple the national rate. More recent reporting from The Marshall Project estimates approximately 50,000 people lost their voting rights through state court convictions between 1994 and 2017 alone.
Approximately 60% of those disenfranchised are Black, though Black residents comprise roughly 36% of the adult population. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened doors, but those doors have never been fully unblocked in Mississippi. A bipartisan effort in the state legislature to restore voting rights for some nonviolent offenses passed the House overwhelmingly in 2024, but died without receiving a committee vote in the state Senate. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the state’s lifetime voting ban multiple times, including as recently as 2024.
Structural Barriers That Suppress Participation
Beyond history, Mississippi maintains a set of voting rules that are among the most restrictive in the nation. It is one of only two states, along with Texas, that does not offer online voter registration. It does not have early voting. It does not permit same-day voter registration. Voters must register at least 30 days before an election, by mail or in person at a county circuit clerk’s office. Casting an absentee ballot requires a qualifying excuse—such as being physically disabled or out of the county on Election Day. A photo ID is required to vote in person.
Joshua Tom, legal director of the ACLU of Mississippi, described the cumulative effect as “the cost of voting,” a cost that falls disproportionately on lower-income residents. In a state where nearly 20% of residents live in poverty, where more than half the population resides in rural Census-designated areas of fewer than 2,500 people, and where car ownership sits at just 27 vehicles per 100 residents—well below the national average of 33—the physical act of getting to a polling place can be its own barrier. Vangela Wade, president of the Mississippi Center for Justice, told a Millsaps College panel that economic inequality compounds the problem because of “the challenges of transportation to polls across the state’s rural, sparsely populated landscape.”
Hospitals Closing, Food Programs Cut. The Stakes Are Real
The irony of low voter turnout is that the issues most directly affecting Mississippians’ daily lives are precisely the ones being decided by elected officials chosen, in many cases, by a fraction of the electorate.
Consider healthcare. Mississippi’s State Health Officer, Dr. Daniel Edney, told state senators that 54% of the state’s rural hospitals, or 38 facilities, are at risk of closing. A separate analysis from Chartis found that 49% of Mississippi’s rural hospitals are vulnerable to closure, placing the state second only to Arkansas. Mississippi is one of the remaining states that has declined to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. According to the American Hospital Association, 74% of rural hospital closures occurred in states where Medicaid expansion was not in place or had been in place for less than a year.
In my hometown of Fayette, Mississippi, the seat of Jefferson County, the crisis is not theoretical. It is lived. Jefferson County Hospital converted to a federal “Rural Emergency Hospital” designation in September 2023. That designation provides a $3.3 million annual federal stipend. However, it requires hospitals to end inpatient services and transfer patients requiring stays of more than 24 hours to a larger facility. Dr. Edney has likened the conversion to a closure because of the corresponding loss of medical services. Mississippi now has more Rural Emergency Hospitals than any other state in the country.
Before that conversion, Jefferson County Hospital had laid off 16 employees while carrying more than $3 million in debt. The hospital’s head administrator, Jerry Kennedy, told the board of trustees the hospital was “on life support.” For a county of approximately 6,900 people—84.2% Black, with a 30.2% poverty rate and a median household income of $36,207—the loss of a full-service hospital is not an inconvenience. It is a matter of life and death. Residents needing overnight care, labor and delivery, or specialized treatment must now travel to larger facilities, adding distance, cost, and risk. Statewide, 68% of Mississippi’s rural hospitals do not have a labor and delivery unit.
Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten in a Winona jail cell for trying to register to vote in Mississippi. Medgar Evers was murdered in his own driveway for it. Vernon Dahmer was firebombed in his home for helping others do it. They bled for a right that 1.65 million Mississippians did not exercise on March 10. Every hospital that closes, every meal program that disappears, every decision made in Washington without Mississippi’s full voice at the table is the cost of silence in a state where silence was once enforced at gunpoint. The guns are gone. The silence remains. And it is no longer someone else’s fault.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
