It is late afternoon in Mississippi. Walter Lewis is a full-time truck driver and is frequently on the road. The automobile engine stops humming in the background, and suddenly, it’s quiet. He is parked on the side of a highway. He takes a deep breath before telling the story about how he became disenfranchised.
“When I lost the right to vote, I was upset because I knew how things could have been different in my life,” Lewis, a Black man and father of two from Jackson, tells the Mississippi Free Press on Feb., 21, 2025.
Lewis was 19 years old when he went to work at a construction site on a Monday in 1997. His intuition told him something was amiss. After clocking out, he went to the family auto shop, where he saw his father’s body on the floor in the center of the room, surrounded by paramedics. He never found out the exact cause of death. Later that year, he walked into a bank and robbed a teller. Police would later charge him with unarmed robbery, a felony.
Lewis takes a pause.
“Post-traumatic stress disorder wasn’t a thing back then, especially for black people,” he says. “People don’t know what you’re going through. There was, ‘Oh, you are just acting out.’ That was a big part of the frustration.”
Lewis explained his situation to the judge, who sent him to see a psychiatrist. After an evaluation, the psychiatrist determined that he was mentally unwell. The court sentenced him to two years in a federal correctional facility in Florida and then two years in therapy. After completing his sentence requirements, he returned to Mississippi and started his own successful trucking business. But he was no longer allowed to vote.
“I served time and paid my debt to society, but they still punished me because I had no voice in what went on for over 20 years.”
‘A Powerful Moment’
A Jim Crow-era law bans locals from voting if they have committed one of 23 felonies, such as theft, bribery and arson. Advocates have worked tirelessly to introduce bills that would overturn the archaic law that still drains political power from people of color, but none have been enacted. About 5% of Mississippi’s Black population is disenfranchised, The Sentencing Project’s 2024 Locked Out Report shows.
Mississippians do not have voting-rights restoration procedures for people with criminal records who have completed their sentences and returned to society, nor does the state have online registration, early voting or same-day voter registration at polling places, the DMV or other state agencies. Voters need a photo ID to vote in-person and a qualifying excuse to vote by mail. Residents, however, overwhelmingly support legislation that would expand voter access.
Lewis spoke with various lawyers and others in the legal system about how to get his voting rights restored and his record expunged. In his group 50 or so people applied for suffrage, and only about one fifth were approved.
“Everybody told me I couldn’t do it. You know, nobody would do it for me. They said that it was impossible and this would never happen,” he told the Mississippi Free Press.
A client of Lewis connected him with Program Director Catherine Robinson at One Voice, a Mississippi nonprofit that advocates for the voting rights of locals. The nonprofit took on Lewis’ voting rights restoration case. He reached out to hundreds of customers, friends and acquaintances in his phone’s contact list to call Mississippi’s senators on his behalf. Dozens called repeatedly to vouch for him.
Lewis walked up onto a podium in the summer of 2024 in the Mississippi Capitol in front of a dozen people.
At the Mississippi courthouse he was asked, “Why do you want your rights back? How would it benefit you and the community?”
He responded, “I want to be a part of the position where I could vote for the person that’s representing me, versus just have these people representing me in a way that I don’t feel comfortable with.”
Three weeks later, a thick packet arrived in his mail with a voter-registration form from One Voice. His suffrage bill was approved, and after 27 years of not voting, he participated in the November 2024 national election. He is elated to have his voting rights back.
“You can’t get your rights restored after you have completed all your time. In other states, they are allowed to get their rights restored once they are finished with incarceration,” Robinson told the Mississippi Free Press on February 25, 2025. “We are still behind in Mississippi, but we are progressing because for the first time in 10 years, we were able to get people’s rights back.”
“So that process was kind of nerve-wracking because I didn’t expect anything out of it,” Lewis told the Mississippi Free Press. “It was a powerful moment where everything that had been taken away from me I got back.”
The Voting-Rights Restoration Process
Voting-rights restoration is an extensive and complex process. One Voice helps former prisoners navigate the procedure at no charge. First, One Voice makes sure the former inmate meets certain requirements. Then, the organization submits the case to the Mississippi Legislature, where a member of either the House of Representatives or the Senate may introduce a suffrage bill restoring that person’s voting rights. If both houses pass the bill and the governor signs it, the person’s rights are restored.
“Voting is very important,” Robinson said. “It addresses all aspects of life, when it comes to knowing who your representatives and your senators are, to making sure that we are implementing policies in the community that are beneficial, not just for our well-being, but also the intergenerational wealth of our children and our families.”
Agnes Standifer and Joseph Armstrong, two locals from Jackson, received letters in the mail in February with voter-registration paperwork from One Voice. Agnes, a 74-year-old Black retiree, was an active voter before she lost the right to vote in 1999 after she was charged with shoplifting. She was disenfranchised for 26 years but will be participating in elections again this year.
Armstrong, a 38-year old appliance repairman, was arrested for possession of stolen property and grand larceny in 1997 when he was just 16 years old and two years away from the legal voting age.
“I’ve never voted,” Armstrong said. “I wasn’t able to do it. It was taken away from me as a kid.”
“You know, everybody makes mistakes,” he continued. “Everybody deserves to take a second chance. I really feel like it was unfair.”
He encourages disenfranchised people in his life to make an effort to have their voting rights restored.
When Advocates Defended Voting Rights
In March, Mississippi legislators introduced seven bills related to voting rights, the Voting Rights Lab tracker reports.
Gov. Tate Reeves signed H.B. 1419 into law on March 12, prohibiting officials from changing polling sites within 60 days of an election except under special circumstances. Polling place changes just before an election have caused confusion in recent years, including a Hinds County polling place that changed the day before the 2023 primaries.
Under the new law, officials must present a valid excuse for changing the voting site and must notify the government and voters three weeks in advance before an election.
But overall, lawmakers have not made significant progress in expanding voting rights in recent years, not even amid the COVID-19 pandemic that made voting particularly hazardous in 2020. In fact, some bills and judicial decisions have made it harder for citizens to vote since 2020, voting rights advocates say.
In January, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a felony disenfranchisement case that attempted to overturn Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era felony disenfranchisement law. The high court said that the responsibility for changing the law fell on Mississippi legislators, not the court. Legislators have introduced 58 bills on the subject to increase voter access in 2024. Dozens of the submitted bills proposed overturning the disenfranchisement law, but none were passed or signed into law.
Voting-rights advocates have challenged other laws that would have disenfranchised voters during the past five years. Organizations such as the Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, Mississippi Votes, and the League of Women Voters sued states that passed laws making it easier to purge voters from rolls, presenting new challenges for naturalized citizens and limitations on voting rights for disabled voters. Since 2021, the state has enacted only five bills that changed or maintained voter access, the Voting Rights Lab says.
“What we’ve seen over the past several years is a legislature that is hostile to voting rights and does not want to make policy decisions that would make it easier for Mississippians to vote,” Amir Badat, manager of Black voters on the Rise Project and Voting Special Counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, told the Mississippi Free Press on February 21, 2025. . “Our election code creates a lot of barriers for people to be able to vote.”
Notable Voting-Rights Changes From 2020 to 2025
In 2020, the Legislature passed H.B. 1400 during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing people with disabilities and COVID-19 to vote absentee by mail. The bill was not as expansive as bills passed in other states, and did not allow universal early voting in the state as many others did, but it helped increase voting access by mail. No significant voting-rights laws or restrictions passed in 2021.
In the 2022 legislative session, H.B. 1365 restricted access to funds for initiatives to increase voter participation. Election officials are not allowed to accept private funds for voter education, outreach or registration programs. It was passed after Mark Zuckerberg gave $400 million in 2020 for election operations in the country. Mississippi officials argued the money unfairly favored Democratic-leaning counties, but any county was eligible to apply for the grants, Badat said.
That same year, H.B. 1510 passed, which lawmakers said was to ensure that only citizens participated in elections and to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting.
“We’re seeing a national narrative that there’s a problem with noncitizens voting,” Badat said. “The reality is that it’s incredibly rare for noncitizens to vote. I don’t know of any examples happening in Mississippi.”
The law also eased the voter-registration process for naturalized citizens by no longer requiring them to show proof of legal status.
The controversial H.B. 1310, which opponents called a “use it or lose it” law, in 2023 made it easier for officials to purge voters from the rolls. If a voter does not vote in two elections, they are labeled inactive, and after four years, a voter can be purged from voting rolls.
The same year, disability rights advocates accused lawmakers of disenfranchising disabled voters with H.B. 2358, limiting who can assist disabled people with voting. Republicans who backed the law said it would ban “ballot harvesting.”
“That’s because free and fair elections are a key pillar of our republic,” Gov. Tate Reeves said as he signed the bill into law in 2023. “Today, Mississippi is taking another step toward upholding the absolute integrity of our election process by banning ballot harvesting across the state.”
Under the law, only caregivers, family members, postal workers and election workers were allowed to submit a ballot on behalf of another person, and anyone else would be fined or jailed. Advocates sued over the legislation, and the Legislature amended the law to allow disabled voters to choose a person to submit an absentee mail-in ballot for them, though it bars them from choosing a poll watcher, a candidate on the ballot, a candidate’s relatives, an employer or a union representative.
“The pattern that we consistently see is Mississippi restricts voting, someone files a lawsuit, and then the legislature passes a bill that fixes the violation,” Badat said.
A court convicted a Mississippi woman earlier this year of breaking the ballot harvesting law after prosecutors accused her of submitting ballots on behalf of seniors she visited in an assisted living facility; she is vowing to appeal her conviction.
In 2024, three federal judges ruled that Mississippi’s state House and Senate districts were drawn in a way that weakened the strength of the Black voters and ordered additional districts that would give Black voters an opportunity to choose lawmakers of their choice to represent them.
In August 2025, a federal court ruled that district lines had to be redrawn by the state’s Supreme Court. Then, in special elections in the redrawn districts in November 2025, voters flipped enough Mississippi Senate seats to Democrats to break the Republican Party’s supermajority.
Other recent minor changes include bill MS2576 and bill SB2353. The first gave voters the right to present expired identification cards at the polls and the second increased compensation for poll workers. Voters also gained the right to use new qualifying excuses to vote by mail. Workers can submit absentee ballots if they are on-call on voting day, and incarcerated registered voters can participate if they have not committed a disenfranchising offence.
Voting advocates say much work remains to be done. Early voting, online registration and voting-rights restoration for people with criminal convictions are top priorities.
“There has been little to no progress in people’s ability to participate in the electoral process in Mississippi,” Executive Director of Mississippi Votes Arekia S. Bennett-Scott said to the Mississippi Free Press. “We’ve been fighting for what little we do have, all while advocating for what could be possible.”