Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You canread more about the section here.
Mississippi knows how to change clothes. We just have a habit of keeping the same problems underneath them.
Poll taxes and literacy tests are forms of voter suppression we recognize immediately because history has taught us what they look like. They were blatant. But barriers to political power do not always announce themselves so clearly. Policies change. Language changes. Sometimes the struggle underneath them does not.
But the fight underneath these tools was always bigger than the tools themselves. It was about access. Who gets political power? Who gets to exercise it easily? And who has to work harder just to reach what supposedly belongs to everyone?
That question followed me recently while trying to navigate Mississippi’s voter-registration system.
I am 21 years old, study political science and have done civic engagement work. I have reliable internet access and spend more time thinking about elections than the average person. Yet even I found Mississippi’s voter information difficult to navigate. I moved between different state resources looking for answers and eventually called the Mississippi Secretary of State’s hotline.
Jakari Holland Credit: Courtesy photo
When I asked about transportation assistance, the representative had to search the state’s website while I waited and ultimately told me she would need to call me back with an answer.
That made me think less about inconvenience and more about equity. If both the person seeking information and the person responsible for providing it have to search for the answer, how accessible is that information in the first place?
And if exercising a right requires navigating multiple resources, making phone calls, printing and mailing paperwork or finding transportation to complete a process in person, who pays the price for those extra steps?
What about an older Mississippian unfamiliar with navigating multiple websites, someone in the Delta without reliable transportation, a first-time voter who does not even know the first step to becoming registered, a student away from home, a working parent who cannot easily make it to an office during business hours?
These people may have completely different lives, but an additional step costs each of them something: time, transportation, technology, information or assistance.
I am a college student with reliable internet access and a laptop, and I still struggled to navigate it. The ballot may be free, but accessing Mississippi’s democracy can be remarkably cumbersome.
Maybe I noticed the difference because I came to Mississippi for college from Georgia, where eligible residents with state-issued identification can register to vote online. Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee also offer online voter-registration options. Crossing one of Mississippi’s borders, and accessing the same fundamental right can suddenly look remarkably different.
And once I started thinking about the cost of access, it became difficult to look at online voter registration as an isolated issue.
Mississippi lawmakers already had an opportunity to remove one of those costs. House Bill 593 was introduced during the 2026 legislative session to authorize online registration for eligible first-time voters. It included state-issued identification requirements, identity verification and county registrar review.
It died in committee.
Why?
One bill dying would not tell us much. Mississippi bills die every year. But HB 593 does not exist in a political vacuum. When a proposal designed to remove an administrative barrier dies before reaching the floor, it is worth examining it alongside Mississippi’s other unresolved fights over access to political power.
Mississippians have been without a functioning statewide ballot-initiative process since 2021. Our state has prohibited ranked-choice voting in state and local elections. And in 2024, a three-judge federal panel found that portions of Mississippi’s legislative maps unlawfully diluted Black voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, requiring the state to redraw districts.
Legislation capable of expanding access dies before reaching the floor. A ballot-initiative process that once gave citizens direct political power remains unavailable year after year. Even redistricting intended to remedy the dilution of Black voting strength has become the subject of continued political and legal fights.
At some point, resistance to change stops being a sufficient explanation.
When voter access is repeatedly caught in another committee, another lawsuit, another delay, the cumulative effect can stymie political participation itself.
At some point, we have to stop examining these decisions individually and start examining the pattern.
Different policies. Different circumstances. But the same underlying question: Who gets access to political power, and how easily do they get to exercise it?
And I have a hard time accepting that the answer is simply to wait.
Change in Mississippi did not arrive because institutions suddenly became generous. Black Mississippians, students, churches and communities organized until maintaining the old system became more difficult than changing it.
Maybe we have spent too much time waiting for political power to come down from the Capitol instead of bringing our collective power to its steps. Mississippi’s history has already shown us what happens when ordinary people make their voices impossible to ignore.
So where do we start? With each other.
Mississippi already has the infrastructure for collective power within our communities. What if we built a statewide coalition around a simple demand: accessing democracy in Mississippi should not be harder than it has to be?
The system already knows how to tell us no.
Maybe it is time we organize enough people that it can no longer afford to.
Jakari Holland is a senior political science student at Jackson State University and a native of Atlanta. He has described his work as centering on political access, economic disinvestment and a simple question: when opportunity is promised, can the people it is meant to serve actually access it? He is particularly drawn to grassroots movements that transform local communities into sources of collective political power and turn that power into tangible change.
