For the last 10 years, north Fondren resident Patricia Ice has called private investment advisor Ashby Foote, the lone Republican on the Jackson City Council, her councilman.
But after the city redrew its ward maps last year due to population declines, the shape of the voting district Ice used to live in, Ward 1, shifted east, meaning she now lives in Ward 3.
With that came a new city representative, and from appearances, a polar opposite one: Democrat Kenny Stokes, a 33-year veteran on the council known for eccentric quotes delivered in a thick Southern accent. “The mayor must stop smoking that dope,” he said to the local TV station in 2022.
But because of an error that was later corrected, Ice and dozens of her neighbor’s addresses were initially left out of the move, resulting in Ice casting an invalid Ward 1 ballot in this year’s municipal primary election.
For some, the snafu has caused anxiety surrounding an election that, with 19 candidates in the mayoral race alone, has already proven difficult for residents to navigate.
“So when we vote, will our votes count or matter, since the ballots will be erroneous? Sounds like it could turn into a mess,” one of Ice’s neighbors wrote in a group messaging app.
In February, the Jackson City Clerk’s Office sent out some 6,000 letters to people who, like Ice, experienced a ward change, notifying them ahead of the April 1 primary Election Day which council race they would be voting in.
Ice’s neighbors on bordering streets received the mail confirming they’d been switched to Ward 3. They discussed it in the group chat. But Ice’s letter never came.
Ice called the city clerk, Angela Harris, and the Hinds County Circuit Clerk, Zack Wallace. She recited to them her Kings Highway address and they told her she still lived in Ward 1 – disregarding the published maps that showed her house inside Ward 3. Since Ice is over 65 years old, she had the opportunity to cast an absentee vote.
“That’s when I went to vote early because I said, ‘I’m going to see what’s on my ballot,’” Ice said.
On Mar. 7, Ice cast her vote in the Democratic primary election for Ward 1. Her preferred Ward 1 council candidate is an independent, so on the Democratic ballot, she wrote in her own name for that race. Harris told Mississippi Today Wednesday that Ice was the only person from the impacted section of Kings Highway to vote absentee.
The Secretary of State, which oversees elections, directed questions about this story to the local clerk, but told Mississippi Today that “any errors in redistricting that allow a voter to vote in the wrong district may result in an elections challenge.”
The 2020 U.S. Census found Jackson’s population fell by about 20,000 since 2010, with the decline especially affecting Ward 5 and 3, WLBT reported. The 1964 Voting Rights Act requires that the city’s population be evenly distributed among the districts, with no ward deviating in size by more than 10%, and requires governments to reevaluate every 10 years after the census.
The city commissioned the Central Mississippi Planning and Development District to help it redraw the lines and held public hearings to discuss the changes, which were adopted last August. Part of the hope was that in redrawing cleaner lines, the city could cut down on the number of split precincts, that is, the polling places that serve people of different wards and must manage handing out different ballots on Election Day.
Harris told Mississippi Today that she gave the new maps to the city’s GIS department, which culled the list of addresses that changed wards. Harris gave that list to Wallace, who was responsible for updating the voter registration database and pulling the names of residents who would need to be notified. But Wallace said the two-block section of Kings Highway from Meadowbrook to Northside Drive was left out of the spreadsheet of addresses he received.
“So those 50 something people are still right now in Ward 1,” Harris told Mississippi Today last week, not indicating a change would be made before the election.
If true, those Kings Highway residences would represent an island of Ward 1 voters inside Ward 3. Legally, wards must be contiguous, City Attorney Drew Martin said at a hearing last year.
“They cannot have islands or donuts within them,” Gray Ouzts, Principal Planner for the local planning and development district, told Mississippi Today.
After Mississippi Today spoke to Foote about the error last week, he added an agenda item to discuss the issue at the council’s Tuesday meeting. Then Harris took action, sending Wallace a list Monday of the Kings Highway addresses that had been left out. Wallace quickly updated the voter registration database to reflect their correct ward and letters went out to those residents the same day.
Another impacted Kings Highway resident, Jennifer Baughn, spoke to Mississippi Today before the correction was made. It may not have made a difference on the outcome of the race, but to Baughn, the error threatened to lock her out of the democratic process. Baughn concluded that if she’d received a Ward 1 ballot, she’d have voted for someone who wouldn’t actually represent her.
“That’s the essence of disenfranchised. And yet, there’s no acknowledgement from the city clerk … It’s ridiculous,” Baughn said before her voter registration was corrected. “I wasn’t super happy about being moved, but now I’m feeling like we won’t be getting representation from either (council member), because the Ward 1 candidate is going to know that we’re not going to be voters the next time, so why put the effort into our street? And we have major issues.”
Baughn said a new nightclub opened up within a block of her house, and the music and traffic have kept her awake into the wee hours of the night.
She said she’s also run into similar ambiguity about which of the separate police forces in Jackson are there to serve her. Take a noise complaint, for example. She said when she calls Jackson Police Department, an employee has told them she is in the jurisdiction of Capitol Police, and when she’s called Capitol Police, they’ve told her they don’t deal in city ordinance enforcement.
“We have no one to call. We call the police and they say, ‘Oh you need to talk to your council person,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay who is our council person?’” Baughn said.
Though he hasn’t made contact with his new constituents yet, Stokes is apparently up to speed on the issues residents in that area are facing, bringing up nightclubs unprompted. “I ride, I ride my whole ward,” Stokes said. “I ride, I look, I observe, and I pay attention to the different patterns that’s taking place.”
Abigail Hartman, president of the Fondren North neighborhood association, said her community was generally pleased when they learned they would be represented by Stokes, who they feel is more responsive to constituents, rather than Foote.
While Foote tinkers away in his office on maps he had made of all state-owned tax forfeited property in Jackson, a driver of blight across the city, Stokes appears at community events he’s organized, shaking hands and wearing his signature black hat with white serif font reading, “STOKES”.
Ironically, despite their quite different tacks, constituents of Stokes and Foote currently receive very similar representation on the council since the two men nearly always vote together, particularly on items where they have a chance to oppose Mayor Chokwe Lumumba.
“Politics makes for strange bedfellows,” Foote said. “We’ve both had differences with the mayor.”
In 2022, during a spat over selecting a new garbage contractor, Lumumba accused both Foote and Stokes of taking bribes from one of the vendors, which they both denied. (Hence, Stokes’ “smoking dope” quote).
Later, at the end of Foote’s term as council president, the Ward 1 councilman had replica black and white ball caps made for himself and all the other council members spelling their own names in “the Stokes lettering,” Foote said.
From hurling taunts like “Yo mama” or suggesting Black leadership “throw rocks and bricks and bottles” at suburb police to calling out Lumumba, who was eventually indicted by federal prosecutors, “Stokes has evolved a lot over the last eight years,” Foote said.
“I think he’s seen more as a voice of common sense now,” Foote said.
There are a total of 52 candidates running for either mayor or council this year, including Lumumba and 11 challengers in the Democratic primary for mayor April 1. Foote chose to run as an independent as a way to encourage his supporters to participate in the Democratic primary, which commonly determines the winner for mayor. Foote, who represents a whiter, wealthier part of the city in northeast Jackson, will face two challengers in the general election – the Democratic nominee and one independent. Four are running for Ward 1 in the Democratic primary.
So the north Fondren residents who moved from Ward 1 to Ward 3 have a little easier decision this election. Stokes does not face a challenger until the General Election in June, when he runs against one independent.
But once Hartman learned some residents in her association were told they’d still be voting in Ward 1, “We’re having to research double the amount of candidates,” she said.
“I’ve never had to work so hard in an election season,” Hartman said.
Adding to the confusion, campaign signs and mailers for Ward 1 candidates began popping up in Hartman’s neighborhood, causing residents to wonder who exactly was mistaken.
“If anything, it should have been caught. It’s sad that it took some of the individuals in the neighborhood to dig into this and find the information for themselves,” Hartman said.
Ice received a letter Tuesday notifying that her vote had been voided and she’d have to go back to City Hall to cast a new absentee ballot for Ward 3. But unlike some of her neighbors, she wasn’t too bothered. “I don’t mind going down there to vote again,” she said.
“I was never that worried about it,” Ice said. The only thing she’s sought from the council was, years ago, for them to add some speed bumps to her street, which never materialized.
The longtime immigrant rights attorney is much more concerned about what’s happening on a national level, the new Trump administration’s dismantling of federal programs and threats towards democracy, which she described as a coup d’état.
The local election ordeal did, however, remind Ice of the impression she had when she moved to Mississippi from her hometown of Detroit in 1998. She’d heard of Mississippi’s notorious history of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement, a legacy still visible today through the state’s attachment to some of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation. When Ice registered to vote in Mississippi for the first time, she said she was required to get the signature of a sponsor in her area.
“This is really true,” she remembered thinking, “they really do have a hard time voting here.”
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