With a felon in the White House, Mississippians convicted of certain crimes can't even vote

State legislator says he plans to call for a corrective to state's Jim Crow-era felony disenfranchisement law next week

Toni Johnson, founder and director of Jackson-based We Must Vote, noted a particular irony about the 2024 presidential election: Although Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, he could still ascend to the nation’s highest office, while she is prohibited from even voting due to a Mississippi law that permanently disenfranchises people convicted of certain crimes.

In Johnson’s view, the Mississippi Legislature’s unwillingness to rescind the state’s felony disenfranchisement law, as many other states have done, is racist.

“The root of the issue is because the majority of those individuals they don’t want to vote are African American people, Indigenous people, Latino people,” Johnson told The Mississippi Independent. “And it’s not getting better. Look at the current climate we’re in from a national, federal standpoint. That hate and discrimination has trickled down. They don’t want those people to have voices at the ballot box because they will vote against the system.”

Johnson, who, like the president, is a convicted felon, said her desire to get voting rights reinstated has its origins in childhood summers spent with her grandmother in a rural community outside Macon, Mississippi, which in her memory felt like another country. Her grandmother, Rosie Lee Shepherd, now 91, would drive her Buick sedan into town once a month to shop for groceries and collect her Social Security check -- routine acts that were once fraught due to Jim Crow-era racial intimidation.

Back then, for most Black people, voting was impossible. Yet even Shepherd’s Social Security check was also an outgrowth of a racial struggle, given that the enabling act had once excluded many workers, the majority of whom were Black.

Over time, Johnson, 39, came to understand the historical weight and deeper significance of her grandmother’s life. Born in the Jim Crow era, she was exercising her hard-won freedoms in a state where overt and systemic racism lurked for decades, even after the Civil Rights Act was passed. That recognition sparked a passion in Johnson.

“The summers at my grandparents’ home helped shape the work I do now and helped me understand the needs of poor Black people in rural areas,” Johnson recalled. She has since devoted her career to fighting for voting rights — rights that she and more than 235,000 Mississippians no longer have due to the state’s antiquated law prohibiting felons convicted of certain crimes from participating in elections.

Johnson lost her voting rights in 2022 after being convicted on two felony counts related to her work as a Hinds County elections commissioner. She was initially indicted on 26 felony counts, but all but two were eventually dismissed. Through We Must Vote, she now works with students at historically Black colleges, in rural communities, and with formerly incarcerated individuals. Her nonprofit partners with organizations including One Voice Mississippi, the Southern Poverty Law Center and local NAACP chapters to educate Mississippians about civic engagement.

A Law Rooted in Racial Disenfranchisement

In 1890, Mississippi lawmakers revised the state constitution to permanently bar individuals convicted of crimes that were most commonly associated with Black residents. Supporters of the amendment said their goal was to prevent Black men from voting. More than a century later, the law remains in place.

In 2020, approximately 5.2 million Americans were disenfranchised because of their felonies nationwide, according to a report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C.-based humane sentencing advocacy group. According to One Voice Mississippi, nearly 11 percent of the state’s population – more than 200,000 people – cannot vote due to criminal convictions, the highest percentage in the United States. Among Black Mississippians, the number is even higher, 16 percent, according to the group.

There are narrow avenues for getting voting rights restored, such as gubernatorial pardons, expungement of records or case-by-case legislative actions that require agreement from two-thirds of legislators. According to this report, those methods are rarely used and are often politically fraught.

Plaintiffs and lawmakers have made numerous attempts to overturn the law. In 1974, at a time when most states still administered such laws, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution generally permits disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies. But 50 years on, the practice has fallen from favor in many states. One Voice Mississippi reports that the magnolia state is among only 11 that still enforces felony disenfranchisement.

The Supreme Court rejected another challenge to the law two years ago. A group of Black Mississippians who had permanently lost their right to vote after being convicted of felonies argued that the 130-year-old law was solely designed to discriminate against Black people and disproportionately disenfranchises them in violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, which prevents the government from discriminating among different groups.

In 2022, around the time he designated April as Confederate Heritage Month, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have restored voting rights for a small group of Mississippians. Reeves said that felony disenfranchisement was a “principle of the social contract at the heart of every great republic.”

Last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear another challenge to Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era law, which was another setback for advocates, including Johnson, who hoped a ruling in their favor would be a turning point.

Reeves applauded the court’s rejection.

“If you've committed certain felonies, you don't deserve to have a say in how we run our state – it’s as simple as that,” the governor wrote in a Facebook post six days after Trump was sworn in. “Glad the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the 5th Circuit’s decision today and declined to hear a challenge to our lifetime voting ban on those felons. Murderers, rapists, and other felons will still not be allowed to vote in Mississippi!”

“Those felons” appears to have been the operative phrase. The law had nothing to do with another kind of felon ascending to the White House.

Multiple other attempts to reform the state law have made their way through the legislature, all of which have failed. During the 2024 legislative session, District 41 state Rep. Kabir Karriem (D-Columbus) sponsored House Bill 1609, which would have restored voting rights for as many as 40,000 nonviolent offenders but failed to pass.

Though it died, the bill spawned 2025’s House Bill 940, with Karriem and three GOP members as cosponsors. Karriem said he was hopeful but the bill died in committee on Feb. 13, 2025, according to state records.

“It’s bitterly disappointing,” Karriem told The Mississippi Independent, adding that he was thankful for the support he received from GOP colleagues — House election committee chair Price Wallace and Speaker of the House Jason White. “But the governor used his bully tactics against Republicans trying to do bipartisan work with House and Senate Democrats.”

Karriem said he is planning to demand a suffrage vote during a speech at the state capitol on Tuesday, Feb. 25.

Unlike Johnson, Karriem doesn’t see the restoration of felony voting rights as a race issue. “This is not a Black or brown or white issue,” he said. “It’s not a Democrat, Republican or Independent issue. Restoring voter rights is a Mississippi issue. Those people paid their debt to society and deserve to be a full member of society again.”

Yet the racial metrics are telling. About 40 percent of Mississippi’s population is Black, with the jailed population rising to 60 percent, according to a Sentencing Project report. Approximately one in every 16 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate 3.7 times the non-African American rate, according to the report, which noted that, “In seven states – Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming – more than one in seven African Americans is disenfranchised, twice the national average for African Americans.”

So entrenched is the concept of felony disenfranchisement in the Black community that one Mississippian with felony convictions, Albert Donelson, assumed he had lost the right to vote, though he had not.

“I didn’t know until someone told me,” Donelson said. “Turns out a lot of people think that even though they can vote.” It comes back to the specific types of crimes codified in the law.

Donelson spent more than 20 years in and out of the justice system, picking up charges for drug possession, aggravated assault and shooting into an occupied dwelling. “I didn’t want to be a criminal. I wanted to help my mother,” he said while reflecting upon his decades of crime. “I tried to come in with the money to help with bills or food. Then one day, I was in deep.”

After he had served his time, Donelson moved on to a venture that involved helping other people. Since his release in 2019, he has been working a job at the Jackson city hall and running a nonprofit, A Chance and a Choice, which mentors struggling families. The organization makes use of Donelson’s personal experiences with the criminal justice system and with voting rights.

“I’m trying to get the word out to people that they maybe can vote and make a difference,” Donelson said. “But the people who can’t don’t deserve to be pushed out forever. They paid their debts, let them back in.”

Christopher Harress is an award-winning investigative journalist who has spent more than 15 years covering crime, exposing corruption and reporting on environmental injustice in the American South and beyond.

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Image: Voters in a Mississippi precinct (via ProPublica)