'Citizenship in name only': The fight to restore voting rights for felons in Mississippi

Some Mississippi lawmakers have been trying to change that for years, but attempts continue to fall flat. This year, dozens of voting rights bills died in committee, nearly all of them in one day. 

Those committees include the House Apportionment and Elections Committee, House Judiciary B Committee, Senate Elections Committee and Senate Constitution Committee. 

Restrictions on restoring people’s rights — and failure to remove those restrictions — affect nearly 70,000 people in Mississippi, who have been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. 

One of those disenfranchised residents is Frank Martin, of Byram. The 46-year-old works six to seven days a week at a concrete pumping company just outside of Jackson.

He was charged with felony drug possession at 17 and was in jail for about three weeks. He turned 18 and was released, but put on probation for five years. 

“I had one month left in my probationary bid, and I had got stuck with an embezzlement charge,” Martin said. “I didn't know what embezzlement was; I didn’t even know it was a thing.”

18-year-old Martin quit his job installing satellite dishes after his employer wasn’t paying him, but Martin still had some work equipment with him when he stopped coming into work. 

His supervisor told him to bring the equipment to the Rankin County Sheriff’s Office, and they’d drop the charge. 

“They didn't do it,” he said. “And that is the disenfranchising charge that has kept me from voting my entire life.”

To this day, Martin has never been able to vote.

Alabama and Mississippi are among 10 states that remove the right to vote for life for certain convictions. But Mississippi’s laws are a little complicated, with some confusion about which crimes cause disenfranchisement and which don’t. 

Paloma Wu, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice, said that confusion stems from the state’s 1890 Constitution being the basis for its disenfranchisement law. 

“The Mississippi Supreme Court has interpreted theft, for example, to mean what it meant in 1890,” she said. “That's why identity theft does not take your right to vote away, but felling a tree worth $250 does.” 

Many of those crimes originally listed in the 1890 Constitution were also meant to target Black residents. 

While that list has changed slightly since — dropping burglary but adding rape and murder to the list — many of those original crimes remain. 

“I think we came up with a patchwork because people have had their right taken to vote away by law due to criminal conviction, and it was never trying to pick the best of the best or the worst of the worst,” Wu said. “That's clear from the crimes that they chose in Mississippi: they were just trying to shift the people who could vote to be more white and less Black.”

Even today, the differences in disenfranchisement are stark. Data from the Sentencing Project shows over 3% of the total number of voting-age Mississippians are disenfranchised, but over 5% of Black residents don’t have the right to vote — roughly 44,000 of the 70,000 disenfranchised Mississippians are Black.

“At the end of the day, what is citizenship without voting?” Wu said. “You can't vote for the people who govern you: now you're sort of just like an object in the country, you're not a subject. It's a citizenship in name only.”

This year, a slew of measures died that would have led to some form of automatic restoration for Mississippi residents with felony convictions: many either upon sentence completion or after a waiting period. 

But there are still two paths forward to try to get one’s voting rights back. 

You can submit an individual suffrage bill, in which two-thirds of the House andSenate have to vote to restore your rights — and then that bill has to get signed by the governor. Just over a dozen individual suffrage bills have been filed this year. As of March, all of them were still undecided. 

The governor can also pardon you directly. Neither of these methods happens frequently. 

“For suffrage acts, you're talking maybe zero to six people a year are gonna get their right to vote back,” Wu said. “The current system of the suffrage act re-enfranchises about 0.00014% of disenfranchised people per year.” 

Many affected also don’t know about these methods.

“No one had ever said that was a possibility,” Frank Martin said. “You get convicted of a felony crime, and they say, ‘You've lost your right to vote, your right to bear arms,’ and they don't educate you and say, ‘Well, you can get it back if you do the right thing.’”

Martin’s not alone — Wu says more could be done to clarify how to get those rights back or whether you’ve even lost them at all. 

As much as disenfranchisement can create barriers to civic engagement, Wu considers misinformation — and a lack of information — just as troubling. 

“Only felonies and not misdemeanors: and no federal conviction takes the right to vote away in Mississippi,” she said. “No pending criminal charge takes your right to vote away in Mississippi. In order to lose your right to vote in Mississippi, it's got to be in a Mississippi court, a felony, and conviction, not pending, and for one of the 23 disenfranchising crimes.”

The assumption that every felony disenfranchises means residents who can vote may not be. Wu sees solutions to that issue, though. 

“Our Secretary of State could do a lot to make it easier for people to know if they've lost their rights due to criminal conviction: it wouldn't take much,” she said. “Fix the voter registration application to be accurate. And… post by criminal code section which crimes are disenfranchising.” 

Posting those codes would give people specific information to pinpoint if they’ve lost their voting rights. 

With registration, that would mean clarifying on the actual application sheet that disenfranchising crimes are felonies, not misdemeanors, so people who can vote do. 

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson said publishing more information on restoration, as well as clarification on disenfranchisement, are both doable things. 

“We may have some on the website now if we don't, that's something easy that we can do, so I have no problems with that,” Watson said during a March press conference. 

“We maybe can add something in that that would help educate them, but it's important for us to, again, educate folks whose job is what, so I know who to hold accountable, and having those phone numbers out there again is another way for them to call us.”

To date, the Secretary of State’s office has not made these changes. While its website does host some information on the restoration process, it does not include details on specific criminal codes.

That information isn’t under voter FAQ’s. And the office’s voter education campaign — Elections 101 — doesn’t include any information on restoration or disenfranchisement. 

Education was part of the slate of voting rights measures for legislators this year, too. 

One measure from this session, along with automatic restoration, would have also required the Department of Corrections to develop a voter education course for offenders. 

Another would have required the DOC to provide incarcerated people with information on whether they’ve been disenfranchised, along with a voter registration form. 

Yet another would have established a program within the Secretary of State’s office to publish the criteria for restoration, create a public portal for applications and raise awareness about getting voting rights back. 

Those all died in committee.

The majority of disenfranchised Mississippians — about 48,000 people — have completed their sentences and are back in their communities and living their lives, like Frank Martin 

What he wants, now that he knows he can have it, is a voice. 

Martin worked on a project at the Capitol several years ago with his concrete pumping company, doing concrete work for a parking lot in front of the building. It was the first time he’d ever been inside the building. 

The second time was earlier this year, at the end of January. He joined the advocacy group Mississippi Votes to talk to legislators about reenfranchisement. 

“I have also written my state senator and my state representative,” Martin said. “I haven't gotten anything back from anybody. But moving forward, obviously, these are steps that can be made.” 

By early March, he still hadn’t heard anything. He’s still hopeful that measures might make it next year – and he plans to apply for an individual suffrage bill. 

“I accepted my fate a long time ago, so I had come to terms with it,” Martin said. “I'm happy, I'm excited, I'm sad, I am angry, a little bit, that [reenfranchisement] could have happened 20 years ago, 25 years ago, had I known.”

And those two decades were spent building up a life that he wants to have a say in. 

“I'm not trying to undo whatever crimes have been done in the past but you know if someone has changed their life and made things right then I feel like it's only fair that they should have a right and a voice,” Martin said. 

“I've been a taxpayer most of my life with a legitimate job and I have no say so in anything that goes on around me.”

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.