Virgil Dixon was born in New Mexico but had been away for two decades moving around the country, following his son and grandchild to remain close to them.

Dixon, 71, made it a priority to register to vote and was able to cast ballots everywhere he lived: in Iowa, Oregon and Minnesota.

Those states, like New Mexico, allow people like Dixon – who was once convicted of a felony – to vote.

But after he returned to his home state in 2022, he tried to register to vote the following year and was denied his right, because he was convicted of possessing cocaine more than two decades earlier.

People with felony convictions can vote in New Mexico. The state has for many years allowed people who are out of prison — and who are no longer on probation or parole — to re-register to vote. 

When Dixon tried to register to vote in 2023, Bernalillo County Clerk Linda Stover sent him an outdated registration form asking him whether he served his full time in prison.

The thing is, Dixon has never been in prison. A judge sentenced him to one year of unsupervised probation, and he completed it in 2001.

However, on July 27, 2023, Stover wrote a letter to Dixon telling him he was not eligible to vote because he had been convicted of a felony.

Whenever someone is convicted of a felony in New Mexico, the state’s voter registration system attaches a “felony flag” to their name, making them ineligible to vote.

Until a 2023 change in the law, the only way to get the flag removed was for the Corrections Department or the voter themselves to have it removed.

This resulted in felony flags being attached not just to people in prison but also to everyone who had ever been convicted of a felony, including those still on probation or parole, and those who had long completed their sentences.

Dixon said he felt like tearing up the letter. He tried to register a second time in September 2024, and was rejected again for the same reason.

“My spirit just got shot down,” he said in an interview.

Dixon said the denials triggered his post-traumatic stress disorder. He was a U.S. Army combat engineer in the Vietnam War from 1972 to 1973.

“I blew my top,” Dixon said. “I was ready to say, ‘To heck with it all,’ you know?”

‘Emotional disenfranchisement’

On July 1, 2023, a new state law went into effect, restoring voting rights to people with felony convictions as soon as they get out of prison, including those who are still on probation or parole.

It restored the franchise to an estimated 11,000 New Mexicans, according to the Sentencing Project, which advocates for lowering the number of people behind bars.

But over the following 15 months, Dixon and about 900 other New Mexicans’ voter registrations were wrongfully denied because New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver used an incorrect list showing they were still in prison, said Daniel Yohalem, a civil rights attorney representing Dixon and the other plaintiffs in the case.

The new law requires the New Mexico Corrections Department to give Toulouse Oliver a list of people in prison and therefore ineligible to vote, so she can register everyone who’s eligible, including those on probation and parole.

However, the Corrections Department failed to give her the list, leaving her to rely on outdated and inaccurate information to populate the statewide voter registration system.

When the county clerks ran those registrations against the Secretary of State’s bad list, that caused those people to be rejected, Yohalem said in an interview.

After repeated unsuccessful attempts over the past year to convince Toulouse Oliver to implement the new law, court documents show, Yohalem and the Washington D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center filed the lawsuit.

Less than two weeks later, on Oct. 8, a judge ordered Toulouse Oliver and the Corrections Department to make the changes needed to implement the new law.

Following the judge’s order, Toulouse Oliver directed all 33 county clerks to stop using the old voter registration form, and to use only the new corrected ones, Yohalem said.

The old forms were unlawful because they incorrectly stated that, unless the governor had personally pardoned them, people with felony convictions cannot vote until they had served their whole sentence and completed all conditions of parole probation, according to the lawsuit.

Toulouse Oliver also changed some incorrect references to the old forms on her official website, Yohalem said.

Toulouse Oliver compiled a list of the people who were improperly denied after the new law went into effect, sent it to the clerks and directed them to reprocess those people, and unless they’ve gone back into prison for a new crime, they’re supposed to be registered, he said.

The Corrections Department sent an updated list of people in prison as of Oct. 1 to Toulouse Oliver, and set up a hotline for clerks to call to determine whether someone is incarcerated.

But people impacted by the criminal legal system aren’t going to return to a government building asking to vote, said Selinda Guerrero, a core organizer with Millions for Prisoners New Mexico, a plaintiff in the suit. She calls this “emotional disenfranchisement.”

“There’s so many restrictions if you’ve been convicted of a felony that you essentially are under Jim Crow law,” she said. “You’re a second-class citizen.”

When she tried to reach back out to people who had been wrongly rejected, some had completely lost hope, she said.

“We’re having to re-energize people and try to convince them that this also belongs to them all over again,” Guerrero said.

‘This is home’

As part of the lawsuit, Dixon explained to the court why voting is important to him as a citizen of the Navajo Nation.

“I want to be able to vote in my home state of New Mexico, where my Diné homelands are,” he said in a sworn affidavit.

During World War II, Dixon’s grandfather Richard Thomas, of Shiprock, was a Navajo Code Talker, a group that used their tribal language to secretly transmit messages during battles against Japan. The state of New Mexico did not provide Native Americans the right to vote until a U.S. Marine and Pueblo of Isleta citizen used the courts to force the issue in 1948, well after that war ended.

Dixon’s case is an example of the barriers to Native voting access that remain to this day, including sparse mail pickup in rural and tribal regions, racist gerrymandering in local elections, and polling places located on the other side of poorly maintained or non-existent roads.

In fact, the same state law being fought over in this case also enacted the first-in-the-nation Native American Voting Rights Act, which mandates state and local election officials consult and cooperate with tribal governments on where to locate polling locations, among other reforms.

While there’s no national data for felony disenfranchisement’s impact on Native people, their representation in New Mexico’s population and criminal legal system indicates they’re heavily impacted by felony disenfranchisement laws and policies, according to Human Rights Watch.

Native American representation in New Mexico’s prisons — in other words their share of past felony convictions that land someone in prison — in 2023 surpassed the national rate, with just over 10% compared to 2% nationally, according to the New Mexico Sentencing Commission.

Dixon is a success story in this case. Stover reprocessed his and the other three named plaintiffs’ voter registrations after the judge’s order came down, Yohalem said. Dixon said he mailed in his 2024 ballot on Oct. 15.

“Now I know my voice is heard,” he said.

The day after he mailed in his ballot, Dixon said was sitting in his apartment in Albuquerque, looking at the Sandia Mountains through his bedroom window.

“Oh man, it’s good to be back home,” Dixon recalls telling himself – physically in the same place, but still a world away from the lost feeling he felt when he couldn’t vote.

He wants to hang around on this planet a little longer to see his grandchildren grow.

“I really feel like I’m settled in New Mexico, you know? This is home.”