Bolden: Mississippi faces new threat to voting rights

By Mikel Bolden, Executive Director, Mississippi Democratic Party

Sixty years ago, Americans marched, bled, and died to secure the most fundamental promise of democracy: the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was born from that sacrifice. Today, that promise is under direct assault at the United States Supreme Court, and nowhere will the consequences fall harder than right here in Mississippi.

I need us to understand what’s at stake, and I need us to understand it regardless of how we vote.

The case is Louisiana v. Callais, and while it technically concerns congressional maps drawn across our western border, its implications stretch directly into every majority-Black district, every polling place, and every ballot cast in this state. The conservative-majority court appears poised to significantly narrow Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that has long protected minority voters from racial gerrymandering and vote dilution. Legal observers who watched oral arguments last October noted deep skepticism from several justices about the role race may play in redistricting. The question now is not whether the Court will act, but how far it will go.

That should trouble every Mississippian: Republican, Democrat, and independent alike.

Mississippi is not a blue state. But it is a state with a 60-year memory, and a state where the integrity of elections has never been merely a political question. It has been a survival question. When the rules of political participation are manipulated to benefit one group over another, it is not just a partisan issue — it is a direct attack on the integrity of our democracy. Voter protection and election rights are not optional values for me. They are foundational.

With nearly 38 percent of its population identifying as Black, Mississippi has more at stake in this ruling than almost any other state in the nation. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the legal guarantee ensuring that Mississippi’s Black voters have a genuine opportunity to elect representatives who reflect their communities. Strip that protection away, and you hand the Republican-controlled legislature an open invitation to redraw maps that push Black Mississippians to the margins of political life, not because of how they vote, but because of who they are.

Governor Tate Reeves should answer for his role in what comes next. His decision to turn over Mississippi voter registration data to the federal government (despite bipartisan alarm nationwide about data security and privacy) was a failure of basic stewardship. That data belongs to the people of Mississippi. Every voter in this state, Republican or Democrat, deserves to know their personal information is being protected, not handed off without transparency or accountability. It was not.

And then there is the question of who gets to feel safe at the polls. Public calls for federal immigration agents to surround Mississippi polling places are not a security measure. They are a warning shot aimed at specific communities. Whatever one’s views on immigration, the polling place has always been sacred ground. When prominent voices call for federal enforcement presence at the ballot box and Governor Reeves offers no clear assurance that Mississippians’ rights will be protected, it sends a message that some voters are more welcome than others.

That is not the Mississippi I am fighting for.

When access is restricted, districts are distorted, or voices are silenced, the harm does not stop at party lines. It weakens the legitimacy of every election, every elected official, and every decision that follows. A government that does not fairly reflect the will of its people is not conservative. It is not liberal. It is broken.

These are not abstract concerns. They are the pattern of what happens when voter protections are stripped away one layer at a time. First the data. Then the intimidation at the polls. Now, potentially, the federal law that has stood for sixty years as the last barrier against maps drawn to silence entire communities.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais is expected by June. Mississippi will feel it immediately — in how maps are drawn, in how communities are represented, and in what kind of state we choose to be heading into 2026 and beyond.

History did not give Mississippi a neutral role in the story of American voting rights. It placed this state at the center of that story, at enormous cost, and the people of Mississippi answered with courage that the rest of the nation had to reckon with. That legacy belongs to all of us.

I will always stand on the side of protecting the right to vote and ensuring that every election is free, fair, and representative of the people it serves. I hope Mississippians of good faith — on both sides of the aisle — will stand there with me.

Mikel Bolden is Executive Director of the Mississippi Democratic Party and is solely responsible for opinions expressed in this article.