JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – Four of Mississippi’s Supreme Court Justices were up for re-election this year. Two of those had opponents. One lost in the general election and the other is going to a runoff.

The outcome of next Tuesday’s runoff could change the overall balance of power on the court.

Michigan State University College of Law Professor Quinn Yeargain explains that nonpartisan elections make it tough to get a sense of the ideology of state supreme courts.

The best way to get a glimpse of how the court leans is to look at previous decisions. Yeargain pulled six notable cases to examine.

“In recent years the Mississippi Supreme Court has been more of a far-right court or very conservative court than a moderate-conservative court,” noted Yeargain who is a state constitutional law scholar.

He created a color-coded chart with pink indicating more conservative decisions and green the more moderate ones.

“And so a lot of the decisions that it has reached have been or have had a tendency to be a little bit more extreme, more deferential to the state legislature, more deferential to the governor, less willing to recognize individual rights and liberties, less willing to believe that the government has isolated peoples, individual rights and liberties,” said Yeargain.

The more conservative opinion won out in all of the example cases. But one of those four justices that leaned that way every time referenced is now being replaced. Justice Dawn Beam was defeated by Gulfport lawyer David Sullivan.

“There’s still a lot that will need to be learned about the ideology of the new justice,” Yeargain noted.

Then there’s this runoff for Central District 1 Position 3 with Jim Kitchens and Jenifer Branning.

“Justice Kitchens has been more willing to hold the government to account, to express skepticism about the nature of what the government is doing, and how it is acting,” he said. “But Senator Branning, for example, has been in the government. She has been one of these actors and I think it’s fair to conclude that she might be more deferential to the legislature or to the Governor in how she approached her rulings.”

Yeargain notes that it’s not to say that would be the case for Branning.

He hopes voters will do research about the positions of the judges before returning to the polls for the runoff.

WATCH: Justice Jim Kitchen’s Interview on WLBT+

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JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era practice of removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft, attorneys say in new court papers.

Most of the people affected are disenfranchised for life because the state provides few options for restoring ballot access.

“Mississippi’s harsh and unforgiving felony disenfranchisement scheme is a national outlier,” attorneys representing some who lost voting rights said in an appeal filed Wednesday. They wrote that states “have consistently moved away from lifetime felony disenfranchisement over the past few decades.”

This case is the second in recent years — and the third since the late 19th century — that asks the Supreme Court to overturn Mississippi’s disenfranchisement for some felonies. The cases use different legal arguments, and the court rejected the most recent attempt in 2023.

The new appeal asks justices to reverse a July ruling from the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the laws.

Stripping away voting rights for some crimes is unconstitutional because it is cruel and unusual punishment, the appeal argues. A majority of justices rejected arguments over cruel and unusual punishment in June when they cleared the way for cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside in public places.

Attorneys who sued Mississippi over voting rights say the authors of the state’s 1890 constitution based disenfranchisement on a list of crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit. A majority of the appeals judges wrote that the Supreme Court in 1974 reaffirmed constitutional law allowing states to disenfranchise felons.

About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black. Nearly 50,000 people were disenfranchised under the state’s felony voting ban between 1994 and 2017. More than 29,000 of them have completed their sentences, and about 58% of that group are Black, according to an expert who analyzed data for plaintiffs challenging the voting ban.

To regain voting rights in Mississippi, a person convicted of a disenfranchising crime must receive a governor’s pardon or win permission from two-thirds of the state House and Senate. In recent years, legislators have restored voting rights for only a few people.

The other recent case that went to the Supreme Court argued that authors of Mississippi’s constitution showed racist intent when they chose which felonies would cause people to lose the right to vote.

In that ruling, justices declined to reconsider a 2022 appeals court decision that said Mississippi remedied the discriminatory intent of the original provisions in the state constitution by later altering the list of disenfranchising crimes.

In 1950, Mississippi dropped burglary from the list. Murder and rape were added in 1968. The Mississippi attorney general issued an opinion in 2009 that expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber larceny, carjacking, felony-level shoplifting and felony-level writing bad checks.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a 2023 dissent that Mississippi’s list of disenfranchising crimes was “adopted for an illicit discriminatory purpose.”

Jerry Boardman doesn’t remember exactly when he started collecting acorns in the fall.

But the thousands upon thousands of them he gathers to share with people working to improve habitat along the Mississippi River makes the 81-year-old resident of De Soto, a village of about 300 between La Crosse and Prairie du Chien, a pretty big deal.

“It’s like a myth or a legend,” Andy Meier, a forester for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who receives a portion of Boardman’s bounty, said of the integral role it plays in his work. “It just has always been that way.”

In reality, Boardman began collecting around the time that the need for acorns — a nut that contains the seed that grows oak trees — was becoming critical. For the past few decades, the trees that grow in the Mississippi River floodplain, known as floodplain forests, have been struggling. Although they’re named for their ability to withstand the river’s seasonal flooding, they’ve recently been overwhelmed by higher water and longer-lasting floods.

More: The Mississippi River’s floodplain forests are dying. The race is on to bring them back.

More: What to know about floodplain forests, a struggling ecosystem on the Mississippi River

Overall, forest cover along the stretch of the river from Minnesota down to Clinton, Iowa, decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010, according to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi. In the years since, losses in some places have neared 20% — and were particularly acute following a massive flood event in 2019.

What exactly is driving the excess water isn’t fully fleshed out, but climate change and changes in land use that cause water to run off the landscape faster are likely factors.

The result is mass stretches of dead trees that can no longer perform their functions of providing wildlife habitat, sucking up pollutants that would otherwise run downriver, and slowing water during floods. Reno Bottoms, a sprawling wetland habitat on the river near Boardman’s hometown of De Soto, is one such example of the dispiriting phenomenon.

Boardman, who has been a commercial fisherman, hunter and trapper on the river for most of his life, called the change in forest cover in recent years “shocking.” To combat it, he puts in about 100 hours a year between August and October gathering acorns from the floodplain in De Soto, Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. The idea is that if the trees that produced the acorns were successful enough at warding off flood damage to drop seeds, those seeds might be similarly resilient if replanted.

He looks for acorns from the bur oak, pin oak and swamp white oak, the latter of which is particularly well-suited to the floodplain forest. And the numbers he puts up are impressive — last year, he collected about 130,000; this year, 65,000.

He splits up the total to give to the Army Corps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both of which have foresters planting trees to restore floodplain habitat.

“Pretty much everything that Jerry collects, in one way or another, will return to the river,” said Meier, with the Corps.

Last fall, for example, they scattered between 20,000 and 30,000 of Boardman’s swamp white oak acorns near McGregor Lake, a river backwater near Prairie du Chien where the Corps is piloting an effort to protect trees from flood inundation by raising the forest floor a few inches.

More: A new technique could help save the Mississippi River’s floodplain forests: raising the forest floor

This spring, Meier said, he was “blown away” by the approximately 1,000 seedlings that had taken root there and begun to sprout.

Having access to Boardman’s acorns is important because it gives foresters the chance to experiment with direct seeding, instead of buying young trees and planting them. Direct seeding is both cheaper and more likely to result in a viable tree, because the seed is local.

“When we have an opportunity to get something we know came from the river, we know that it’s adapted to growing there,” Meier said.

To maximize his time, Boardman uses a contraption not unlike ones used to pick up tennis balls to scoop up the acorns. One small variety, though, requires collectors to “get down on your hiney or your knees” to pick them up, he said. For those, he relies on a little grunt work.

Ev Wick, a fifth grade teacher at De Soto’s Prairie View Elementary, has taken his students out for an acorn-gathering day with Boardman for the past several years. Boardman scouts the best trees ahead of time, Wick said, then the kids get to work. They can pick up between 5,000 and 6,000 in a day, propelled by friendly competitions to see who can collect the most or fill their bucket quickest.

They’re interested when Boardman tells them all the acorns they collect will eventually be planted on the islands they see in the river, Wick said. But most of all, they do it to thank Boardman for taking them out fishing and ice fishing in the winter and spring.

Acorn-gathering is just one of Boardman’s talents. Along with other members of Friends of Pool 9, a group of area residents who work to protect natural resources, he hosts fishing days, runs river cleanups and counts bald eagle nests to report to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Whether it’s acorn-related or otherwise, Meier said it’s amazing to see the commitment Boardman has to ensuring the river continues to thrive.

To Boardman, the chance to donate acorns or otherwise help out is a no brainer.

“That river has given me so much,” he said. “I’ve just got to give back all I can give.”

More: 240,000 acres of the Upper Mississippi have been unspoiled for 100 years. But concerns mount.

More: Dutch elm disease came first. Then emerald ash borer. Now, an urgent push is on to restore trees.

Madeline Heim is a Report for America corps reporter who writes about environmental issues in the Mississippi River watershed and across Wisconsin. Contact her at 920-996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com.