Practical barriers, legal complexities stifle Mississippi, Alabama voting restoration efforts

“I’d like to see this process streamlined to where we're not even included in it,” he told the Gulf States Newsroom as the legislature neared the end of its 2026 session.

The typical process starts with someone who’s been disenfranchised. They do the initial legwork of finding a legislator to sponsor a measure to restore their rights.

Some people do that on their own; others work with advocacy groups to find a lawmaker willing to sponsor them and push that bill. 

After that, it has to go through all the same processes that any other bill would: going through (and making it out of) committees, getting on the calendar and, finally, being heard in both chambers.

Unlike many other bills, though, these individual suffrage measures must then pass by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. 

If that happens, a bill will then make its way to the governor’s desk, leaving the governor with ultimate discretion on whether or not to veto the bill. The likelihood of this method being successful is slim — one estimate puts that number at roughly zero to six bills passing each year.

People can also apply for a pardon from the governor to get their rights back, but that’s also highly unlikely, at least with the last two governors.

Gov. Tate Reeves has only ever issued pardons to turkeys as a recent Thanksgiving tradition, and he’s only issued executive clemency orders in two cases. 

“I believe this process in which a person has to go through to have their rights to vote restored is too tedious, it's too cumbersome, and too many politics get in the way,” Porter said.

Mississippi’s system is one of the more complicated in the Gulf South. Louisiana, for example, automatically restores the right to vote to people who’ve finished their sentences, barring a five-year waiting period for people on parole.

But lawmakers in the state are trying to close that gap, taking lessons from neighboring states. One measure proposed this year was modeled after Alabama. HB 1661 would have established a panel to review restoration applications. 

That bill would have afforded this proposed panel more discretion than Alabama’s Bureau of Pardons and Paroles. It also would have included opening an investigation into applicants, alerting sheriffs and district attorneys in the counties where an applicant’s conviction occurred and considering letters both for and against an application. 

Its sponsor, Rep. Noah Sanford, didn’t return calls or emails for comment on the bill. But Democratic lawmakers saw it as being less streamlined than other options and had some concerns about it.

HB 1661, like the majority of other voting rights measures, died in committee in early February.

“I'm not in favor of a board being put in place because it's just another level of bureaucracy,” Porter said. 

The process outlined in HB 1661 is not how Alabama’s process works. Their bureau accepts applications for restoration and is supposed to approve applications from people who meet the basic requirements. 

If you’ve committed a disenfranchising felony, then you have to meet four requirements to submit a Certificate of Eligibility to Register to Vote — or CERV — application.

You have to be free of any pending felony charges, have paid all your fines and fees, have completed your full sentence (including probation and parole) and not have committed certain crimes that require a pardon instead of a CERV.

If you check all those boxes, you send the bureau that application. They then have to respond within 44 days. 

On paper, Alabama’s approach seems like a pretty simple process. In reality, there are a lot of bumps in the road. 

One Alabama resident, Darius, learned that firsthand. 

“Once I completed my sentence, I thought it was just a layup in regards to, ‘Hey, the only thing I need to do is just register,’” Darius, who requested to use only his first name for privacy reasons, said. “It turned into just this thing in regards to getting over this hurdle of paying off these fines and fees, in my case, which was roughly about $64,000.” 

Darius was disenfranchised in 2006, over a marijuana trafficking conviction. For the last decade or so, though, he’s worked in the corporate world. 

Much of that time was spent trying to get his right to vote back — roughly 15 years. 

The first time he tried to apply, the board rejected his application over the thousands of dollars he owed in fees and fines.

“With the felony conviction, there was a $50,000 fine that was associated with it,” Darius said. “If it wasn't paid within five years, there was an extra 30% tacked on to it, some type of fee: so it quickly ballooned to $64,000.”

That was money Darius couldn’t pay. 

“I just pled my case through writing and also when I was in front of the board,” he said. “From there — this was in 2022 — they initially restored my voting rights based on that argument.”

Even with a relatively straightforward process in Alabama, these practical barriers keep people from getting their right to vote back. 

Birmingham resident Stephanie Hicks sees that all the time.

“No one has $25,000 coming out to be able to do that and restore their voting rights: if they did, they wouldn't have went in,” said Hicks. “But this is the hurdle that a lot of people have to deal with, not being able to vote because of these money factors.” 

Hicks works as a business operations specialist and also does advocacy work to help others get their voting rights restored. 

She was disenfranchised after a federal bank fraud conviction when she was 45, in 2016. 

“I had lived a long life not in trouble,” she joked. 

When she finally was able to vote again, it actually wasn’t after going through the board — she, like many other convicted Alabama residents, had assumed her conviction was disenfranchising.

It wasn’t, but her privilege was still revoked, which she found out in 2016, when she checked her status before going to try to vote. 

In 2018, someone finally pointed out to her that she should still be able to vote. 

“Doug Johns ran for senator here, and it was his campaign that alerted me that I could vote,” Hicks said. “I had already been encouraging everybody else to get their voting rights and doing all this voter rights restoration work for everybody else, but hadn't even considered it necessarily for me — crazy, I know.”

After finding this out, she tried reapplying online. Within 72 hours, her rights were restored, Hicks said.

Darius and Hicks’ stories aren’t necessarily the story of every person who has been disenfranchised in Alabama. 

But the practical barriers and lack of information they faced aren’t uncommon. 

“You tell them everything they're going to have to do on the inside: now you need to tell them everything they need to do on the outside,” said Hicks.  

Voting has been important for Hicks her whole life, both before and after incarceration. She said her mom’s life during the Civil Rights Movement was a huge influence on her. 

“My mother is a child of the ‘60s, so I voted most of my life, and I'm down here from the heart of the Civil Rights Movement,” she said.

To Hicks, voting is an anchor for people in reintegrating. 

“I had a master's and a bachelor's before, but it didn't mean anything after I did time,” Hicks said. “The only thing that could have been normal was that: being able to vote.”

And that’s why education is, to her, a critical element in voting rights: both in informing people on how to get those rights back or whether they’ve even lost them in the first place.

Information — or the lack thereof — is an issue across the Gulf South. 

Alabama Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison, a long-time proponent of automatic restoration, hopes to make progress on that in her state this session. 

She sponsored a measure, SB 24, that would require the bureau to post procedures and an application form for requesting restoration of voting rights. And, the bureau would have to post on its website the Alabama Institutional Serial (AIS) number of parolees and probationers whose applications have been approved. 

“They can go on this site, find their number, and if their number is listed, they know that they are eligible to vote,” Coleman-Madison said. 

She’s been proposing this bill, along with other restoration measures, for years now. Progress has taken time. 

“This has been incremental over the years,” she said. “As we discover these little things that prevent people or barriers, one of those things was the fact that people didn't know how to apply.”

As of early April, SB 24 had passed both chambers and was sent to Gov. Kay Ivey. 

Dev Wakeley, worker policy advocate for Alabama Arise, said measures like that are steps in the right direction.

“That's important because a lot of folks don't know the ins and outs of the regulatory process,” he said. “Having that info just posted on the website is going to be a big deal for people: it's going to help folks get through that process.” 

Like Hicks, he sees that as part of the larger picture of getting back to normal life after incarceration. 

“If you're getting released from prison, your fundamental priority is not going back and getting the stability necessary in order to make sure you don't,” he said, pointing to the array of policies that could help with that. “Some continued follow-through on what reentry looks like once you're already out would be helpful.”

And, to Wakeley, automatic restoration would be continued movement in the right direction. 

“Automatic restoration would be a reasonable and sustainable improvement on the process: what we really should be doing is to never disenfranchise people in the first place,” he said.  “What we really wanna see in the long run is the end of the policy position that the right to vote isn't fundamental to all Alabamians who are adults and citizens.”

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.