The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting

It was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.

To make matters worse there is a byzantine bureaucracy in Tennessee and other US states, which can make it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to vote again. The system has allowed officials to block people from voting for owing small sums of money and prosecutors to bring charges against others who make good-faith mistakes about their voting eligibility.

But at the center of the Moses case was a relatively simple question: should someone who makes a voting mistake face serious criminal charges?

Nearly everyone in Memphis seems to know Moses, 45, or has heard of her.

When Moses pleaded guilty, there was a hearing in which a judge questioned her and made sure she understood the consequences of her decision. But there was one ramification that neither the judge nor any of the lawyers present brought up: Moses would lose the right to vote for life.

After constitutional amendments in the 19th century expanded the franchise to Black Americans, many states passed felon disenfranchisement laws as a way to continue to keep African Americans from the ballot box and therefore prevent them from wielding political power, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the topic closely. He suggested the laws had persisted because people with criminal convictions are stigmatized, and so seeking redress for them is politically fraught.

That uncertainty is the point of these laws, said Nicole Porter, the senior director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project.

This was the tangled web Moses stepped into just after Labor Day in 2019.

And these bureaucratic mistakes can land people in prison.

May responded later that afternoon and attached a copy of a July court order saying Moses was still on probation. She was still ineligible to vote, he said.

She also defended the emails she and Collins sent after learning Moses was ineligible to vote.

Later, prosecutors offered her a deal, saying if she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge she would get six months of unsupervised probation and no additional prison time. She refused.

Just before the trial began, prosecutors dropped 12 of the 14 charges, declining to prosecute her for illegally voting. There was no evidence that anyone had told Moses she was ineligible to vote, and the fact that the elections office had sent her voter information made it harder to prove she knew.

The trial began on 3 November 2021 and lasted just two days. A single question remained: did Moses knowingly trick Billington to falsely say she was off probation when he filled out the form?

May, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, zeroed in on the numerous times after 2015 that Moses had asked courts to declare she was off probation and judges had rejected her requests.

When Billington testified, he owned up to his mistake. But May argued Moses had deceived him, even though she was not in the room when he did his research and signed off on the form. Billington said Moses had told him she was off probation when she walked into the office and was acting impatient as he researched her case.

Ultimately the jurors found Moses guilty. In late January, W Mark Ward, the judge overseeing the case, sentenced Moses to six years in prison. Weirich, the prosecutor, said Moses had brought a trial and any harsh punishment on herself by refusing to take the plea.

Then, a few weeks later, new information came to light.

Both Weirich and Ward would go on to lose their re-election bids in August.

Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, is still appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for a federal felony. Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible, and the ballot had even been rejected.

Moses, as well as those who have followed her case, doubt that it will be one of the last.

Brandon Dill contributed reporting from Memphis