Two weeks ago, Moses was granted a new trial after The Guardian revealed errors by state officials in her case, though the charges still hang over her head. Moses was released on bond on Feb. 25.

Moses spoke with Bolts about her ordeal and what led to it—Tennessee’s harsh disenfranchisement rules, a punitive and discriminatory local court system, and the suppression of Black voters. Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist in Memphis who was barred from voting after a 2015 guilty plea, has denounced these practices long before her recent prosecution.

More than one in five Black adults are barred from voting in Tennessee due to criminal convictions, compared to seven percent of the rest of the state’s population, a number that reflects vast racial disparities in who is prosecuted and how severely. Last week a local group of advocates demanded a racial equity audit of Shelby County DA Amy Weirich’s office, pointing to past scrutiny into its practices; Weirich responded by calling their demand “divisive and inflammatory.” In addition, people seeking to regain voting rights are faced with Tennessee’s notoriously confusing and burdensome process of even determining eligibility, let alone actually restoring their rights.

Moses says this legal labyrinth keeps people from even trying to reclaim their right to vote. While she believes the attempt to punish her for getting it wrong—or rather, for following the state’s faulty guidance—is meant to intimidate others from exercising their rights, she also says she hopes that people will instead be inspired to press for change. 

How has this ordeal impacted your life?

My life is just not the same. You can’t just come back out of jail and pick up where you left off, especially with the loss of my dog. It’s just really hard. I don’t sleep much, I’m up all night, and when I do sleep, I don’t sleep well. 

Just being in jail and separated from your family is a tragic thing. But to have to be in jail and see all the other injustices, it’s a humbling experience. I feel like I shouldn’t have been there, but there’s nothing I can do about what has happened. I just have to move forward. 

Why was it important for you to register to vote and have your rights restored? 

At the time I was seeking public office, and you had to be properly registered in order to run. I was trying to follow the law and the instructions that I was given by the Shelby County Election Commission. And it was important because we live in a state where the poverty rate is very high, as well as the illiteracy rate. The simple things that we take for granted, such as schools, and parks, and things that I always had access to—it was disturbing seeing how you can’t even go swimming at a public pool anymore because they close all those things down. It was important for me to give the people in my community a voice so they can have those types of opportunities, because I felt like it would make the city safer. I was really doing this for Memphis, not just myself.

Tennessee’s rights restoration rules are notoriously confusing and burdensome. What was it like navigating them and trying to figure out if you were eligible? 

What made my situation so hard was that it wasn’t clear when my sentence was over. It wasn’t clear when I came off probation, what kind of probation, what year, what month, what day, what my jail credit was. Nothing was clear. And so, as a person that didn’t understand, I went to the custodian of records with the department of corrections, seeking guidance, and they said I was off of it. I presented them with a form that I also took to the court that said that I still owe court costs, which for some reason has something to do with your right to vote, but they signed the papers anyway. And then I took it to the department of corrections. They signed it. They verified it twice. That’s what made it so complicated: All these different layers of people and process that you have to go to just to get one thing done. 

A public agency gave you a certificate that said you were eligible. What was your reaction when prosecutors still charged you for registering?

When I was first charged, I was confused. I just knew that they had to have the wrong person. I had no idea because the charge was illegal voter registration, I didn’t even know what they were alleging. 

Do you think other people who want to vote give up rather than try to navigate this complicated system you describe?

Oh, I don’t just think, I know. Before I went through this, I was registering people to vote, and I would run into people who were convicted felons. And I’m not talking about newly convicted felons, they had charges from the 80s. They wanted to vote, but they were like, “I’m a felon, I can’t vote.” Everyone saying, “I’m a felon, I can’t vote,” “I’m a felon, I can’t vote.” I said, “You just need to get your rights restored.” And everybody said, “How do you do that? Oh that’s too much trouble man, I don’t feel like that.” It’s discouraging.

Do you worry that the way you’ve been treated will dissuade others in the future, that it will have an intimidation effect?

I think that the goal was to scare people, but it could boomerang. It could scare people, but I hope that it doesn’t. I don’t know what people are going to do. What I do know is that there are a lot of people who are inspired by the fact that this happened to me, like, “I’m gonna start voting more. Because that happened to you, I got to vote.” And we got another group that is like, “Man, this makes no sense at all. They need to change the law.” 

Do you believe that that race played a factor in how harshly the prosecutor’s office or the court treated you?

Oh, absolutely, at least from the prosecutor’s standpoint. I think that absolutely my race, my socioeconomic status, and my political beliefs, is what motivated them. I don’t think, if I would have been of another race, that this even would have amounted to a prosecution.

What political beliefs?

That I believe Black lives matter, and Black voters matter. I’m so vocal in saying that everywhere I go. I wear earrings that say it, I made a song about the DA and the racism that we experience as Black people in Memphis, so she knew that I wasn’t crazy about her. It didn’t have anything to do with her being a Republican; it has everything to do with the way she selectively prosecutes people. 

When I was in jail, this last time, there were women who’d been sitting in jail, waiting to go to trial, for years.  They were all Black. They were all poor. And they just been sitting there waiting to go to trial. That’s what I see: I see injustice in the jail, on the streets. [Editor’s note: Pretrial practices in Shelby county have been under scrutiny for keeping people locked because they are too poor to afford release; a recent report by a court-appointed inspector found people being held “for months or years.”]

The DA’s office has defended the six-year prison sentence you received at the trial saying they proposed a lesser sentence as part of a plea deal. Why didn’t you take the plea deal, and were you worried about being punished for going to trial?

Because that’s how I got into this situation, by taking a plea for something that I didn’t do. I tried to get out of jail, so I pled guilty like most people that can’t afford to make half a million dollar bond. I pled guilty to something that I didn’t do, and I told myself that I would never do that again. I would just have to sit and wait until somebody said I wasn’t guilty. So that was the main reason why. 

The second reason, why should a person waive their right, their constitutional right to trial by jury? If the Constitution says we have that right, why do Black people have to give up their right?

What would you tell people in Shelby County who have lost the right to vote, or who may just be reading the coverage of your case? What would you want them to take from your ordeal?

I want them to know that they have a constitutional right to vote, and everybody should try to exercise it. If you’re a felon, you should try to get your rights back. If you owe court costs, see if you can get a judge to waive it. If you can’t get your right back, support the people who are going to Nashville pushing for laws to be changed, show up with them: There’s strength in numbers. If five people go asking them to change something, they’re not going to do it. But if 5,000 people show up and say we want this change, it’s gonna happen. It’s called democracy.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Chetan Tiwari, who has lived in Boston since 2015, says he would like the chance to weigh in on the local education policies affecting his family. He and his wife are from Canada, recently had their green cards approved, and have two daughters who are American citizens. “The level of education, the quality of education that my daughters are getting, is a conversation my wife and I have every single day,” he told Bolts. “Voting on those issues would make us very happy, it would be very important to us.”

This push gained new allies in November. Bostonians elected a new mayor, Michelle Wu, and new city councilors who said they support the effort. Now in power, they may pave the way for Boston to revisit the issue, and join a growing movement across Massachusetts. 

In recent years, the cities of Amherst, Brookline, Cambridge, Newton, Wayland, and Somerville, have all passed ordinances to enable noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, though their efforts have stalled due to this state’s peculiar rules. In Massachusetts, unlike in New York State, cities must file a home-rule petition and the state lawmakers and governor must approve it. The Democratic legislature has for now ignored these cities’ petitions. Proponents hope that a breakthrough in Boston can give them further momentum.

The state’s 2022 elections, in which voters will select their lawmakers and a new governor to replace the retiring Republican incumbent, could also clear their path further.

More than a dozen communities across the U.S. already allow immigrants with legal status to vote in local elections, including 11 municipalities in Maryland and two in Vermont. Chicago has given noncitizens the right to vote in local school council elections since 1989, and noncitizens in San Francisco have cast ballots for the local school board since a citywide referendum succeeded in 2016. (Undocumented residents were also included in San Francisco’s measure.)  New York City brought many more eyes to the issue last winter when it enabled residents to vote in all municipal elections such as for mayor and city council if they hold a green card, are authorized to work in the United States, or are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. San Jose’s city council also voted last month to study the issue.

This practice was once common in local, state and even federal elections. For the first 150 years of American history, white, male property owners—regardless of citizenship status—were allowed to vote in many states, though the tide began to turn following nativist backlash after the War of 1812. Arkansas was the final state to end noncitizen voting in 1926. Efforts to shut the door to local reforms have also grown in recent years; Alabama, Colorado, Florida, and North Dakota all passed ballot amendments to embed in their state constitutions that only U.S. citizens can vote in local elections. 

Boston’s city council also has dealt with the debate in the past before. In 2007, Felix Arroyo, the first Latino councilor ever elected in the city, proposed a measure to allow legal residents to vote in local elections but it failed. The issue faded after Arroyo lost his re-election bid. In 2018, then-City Council president Andrea Campbell organized a hearing to discuss the idea. 

Campbell’s proposal would have granted the right to vote in local elections to immigrants who hold green cards and work visas, and to DACA recipients. The Boston Globe estimated that the proposal would enfranchise 48,000 Bostonians, which is about 7 percent of the city’s overall population. 

Campbell said at the time that the reform  could be a way to empower local immigrant communities who felt threatened and marginalized by the Trump administration. The idea was backed by Ayanna Pressley, who was then a Boston councilor and has since joined the U.S. Congress. “Our immigrant communities contribute to our economies, they contribute to our tax base, contribute to the vibrancy of our communities,” Pressley said. “I believe they deserve a say in who represents them at the municipal level.”

But not all councilors were on board. Ed Flynn maintained then that voting “is a privilege reserved for U.S. citizens.” Michael Flaherty also opposed the idea, saying enfranchising noncitizens to vote in local elections runs “watering down” the benefits of citizenship, “by either allowing folks to come in the back door or cut the line or expedite the process.” 

Still, much has changed in the last four years and activists say the conditions are more favorable now. It’s also not unusual for this type of issue to take a few tries politically. In San Francisco, voters rejected noncitizen voting for local school board elections in 2004 and 2010, before ultimately approving it in 2016. 

Beginning in 2019, Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group, began asking local candidates in Boston if they would support noncitizen voting if it came up at the council. Ricardo Arroyo, Kendra Hicks, Ruthzee Louijeune, and Julia Mejia have all newly joined Boston’s city council since 2020 after telling Progressive Massachusetts that they support it. Wu said the same during last year’s mayoral race.

“I think you could get 10 out of 13 votes on the Council [today],” said Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Massachusetts, who helped run those questionnaires. His experience resembles that of Beth Huang, executive director of the Massachusetts Voter Table, a voting rights group that has asked candidates around the state in 2021 for their views on noncitizen voting. “Eighty out of 126 candidates who responded to our questionnaire said they supported it,” she said. 

Boston is currently experimenting with other measures meant to bolster local democracy. In November, more than two-thirds of Boston voters approved a ballot question to overhaul the city’s budget process, which contained a provision to  establish a new participatory budgeting process for a portion of the budget. Wu, the new mayor, also supported participatory budgeting.

On the same day, nearly four out of five Boston voters also backed a nonbinding referendum to switch their appointed school committee to one elected by city residents, adding new pressure on the government to democratize local school decisions. This change would require a home-rule petition, though.

Carolyn Chou, executive director of the Boston-based Asian American Resource Workshop, says the successful local organizing for an elected school committee and participatory budgeting is creating new opportunities to promote noncitizen voting. “Immigrant organizing groups and SEIU32BJ have been focusing on this, and I’m hopeful that with this new city council we may be able to move it along,” she said.

Kathy Henriquez Perlera, a community organizer with Neighbors United for a Better East Boston, also told Bolts her grassroots group would absolutely support noncitizen voting. Members of her organization have recently been exploring the idea of getting the city to grant municipal IDs for all city residents, similar to a program that exists in New York City.

Some immigrants’ rights activists have major reservations, however. 

During the 2018 debate in the Boston city council, Veronica Serrato, then executive director of Project Citizenship, said her group had worked with two immigrants in Massachusetts who had mistakenly voted in an election, disqualifying them from future citizenship. Allowing immigrants to vote in some elections may lead to errors—for instance, if poll workers give them the wrong ballot and they vote in an election they were barred from voting in—with potentially major consequences.

Mitra Shavarini, the current executive director of Project Citizenship, told Bolts this remains a worry for her organization, though she said they would abstain from taking a stance this time if a new bill came up in Boston. “We also aim to safeguard green card holders against possible issues that may jeopardize their ability to naturalize,” she said. “We therefore believe that it’s far more important to remove obstacles that impede immigrants from naturalizing than to solely push for voting rights.” 

Huang pushes back against this worry, noting that she heard a similar concern when voting rights proponents in Massachusetts were pushing automatic voter registration (AVR). “That was not a good reason not to do AVR, and it’s also not a good reason to oppose noncitizen voting,” she said. “Of course we also need to have crystal clear expectations and communications.”

To address these risks, cities that have enabled non-citizen voting often set up separate processes, including alternative local registration forms and voter rolls that are specific to voters who should only have ballots for local elections. They may also offer to provide residents a letter to submit alongside a naturalization application, as Takoma Park does. Local governments have also partnered with immigrant advocacy groups, to distribute non-citizen voting information in multiple languages.   

Damali Vidot, a city councilor in Chelsea, has championed the issue  in both her own city and statewide. “I tried to introduce a conversation on this on the city council a few years ago and people voted down a discussion, but at the beginning of last year, with Trump finally out of office, I decided to try again,” she told Bolts. She reached out to city councilors in Cambridge, Somerville, Brighton, Lawrence, and Boston to talk about the idea, and connected with a local immigrant rights group in her city, La Colaborativa. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get a consortium of resolutions or get different municipalities to pass it all at once?” she said.

Huang said noncitizen voting has not been a “front-burner priority” for local groups that are in coalition with the one she leads; groups are more focused right now on getting driver’s licenses for undocumented residents. But she says there is growing support for the idea in cities with high concentrations of immigrants and working-class people. “We’re talking about the post-industrial cities that have now been inhabited by a lot of refugees,” she said, naming Worcester, Springfield, Lowell, New Bedford and Chelsea as examples. 

Huang stresses that keeping noncitizens from voting significantly skews the electorate toward white residents, especially in cities where the population that is eligible to vote is majority white but not the overall population. “That was not quite clear to me until I looked at the data community by community,” she said, in reference to census estimates updated last year.

The city of Lynn, for instance, has an overall population of more than 90,000 residents that is barely a third white. But of the residents who are eligible to vote, the majority is white. Latinx residents make up more than 40 percent of the city’s population, but only about 25 percent of the electorate. 

This pattern is very prevalent in the dense stretch of municipalities between East Boston and the North Shore, Huang added. “I think that presents a really good case for why we absolutely need non-citizen voting,” she said.   

For proponents of expanding the franchise, the biggest barrier they cite is the state legislature. Its Democratic leaders have not brought the home-rule petitions of recent years to the floor. Advocates in the state have long complained that state lawmakers have shied away from strengthening immigrants’ rights. During the Trump years, advocacy organizations like Progressive Massachusetts kept pushing for the “Safe Communities Act,” which would have limited how local and state law enforcement could enforce imigration law, to no avail. Three of the chamber’s leaders, state Senate President Karen Spilka, House Majority Leader Claire Cronin or House Speaker Ronald Mariano, did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmakers are all up for re-election in 2022, and so activists see new opportunities to apply pressure on them. Cohn, of Progressive Massachusetts, also noted that voting for immigrants with legal status was included in the state Democratic Party platform last year for the first time, thanks to the rising organizing around the issue.

But the upcoming governor’s race is what may give the issue the most impetus if an ally is elected and uses their pulpit to support the local ordinances. The wide-open race has drawn a crowded field, yet so far, few are willing to comment. Bolts did not hear back from Democratic candidates Danielle Allen, Orlando Silva, and Sonia Chang-Díaz. Maura Healey’s campaign declined to comment. 

Josh Caldwell, a socialist running for governor in the Democratic primary, told Bolts that he strongly supports enfranchising noncitizens. “The fact of the matter is, that not giving representation to those that participate in taxation seemed to be a core argument to a certain historical revolution,” he said. “Our systems have and will always find a group to otherize.”

Keeping up local pressure will be key, proponents say. Vidot, the Chelsea councilor, is confident the issue is moving forward. “Progressive politics basically means we’re ahead of ourselves,” she said. “It will happen and we just have to keep pushing.”

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