‘Use Your Voice’: Ex-Incarcerated Milwaukee Man Cherishes Regained Voting Rights

“If your vote wasn’t important, why is that the first thing they take when they take your freedom?” asks Ray Mendoza.

By Mario Koran
Wisconsin Watch

Ray Mendoza doesn’t care who you vote for. He just wants you to vote. 

To Mendoza, 54, the right to vote is too precious to squander. That’s how the Milwaukee man feels after surrendering that right for the roughly 20 years he spent in a federal penitentiary and on probation.

“I encourage everybody, if you’re a convicted felon and you’re not on probation or parole, get out and vote. Use your voice,” Mendoza last week told a reporter outside Milwaukee’s Frank P. Zeidler Municipal Building, where he voted for the third time in his life — casting an in-person absentee ballot.

Each state sets its own process around removing and restoring voting rights following a felony conviction. Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow people to vote while still in prison. People in Florida can’t vote until completing their sentence and paying all fines and fees — a requirement some critics have likened to poll taxes that barred African Americans from voting during the Jim Crow era.

Wisconsin automatically restores voting rights after someone is “off paper,” meaning they have completed their prison sentence and time on probation or extended supervision. In a state of roughly 6 million people, that puts voting off limits for the roughly 23,000 in state prisons and more than 45,000 serving probation or extended supervision for felony convictions. 

Those figures represent just a fraction of people living with felony convictions on their criminal record.

Meanwhile, roughly 2 million people are incarcerated in jails or prisons nationwide, while about 17 million more live with a felony conviction — a status that can bar them from certain jobs, public assistance or housing. 

Mendoza regained his right to vote in 2019 after completing his prison bid and probation. But even now, voting stirs an anxiety he can’t fully shake. He feels at times as if restoration is a ruse to send him back to prison for unwittingly violating some rule.

“I’m waiting for somebody to come up and say, ‘You’re under arrest for fraudulent voting,’” he said of the back-of-mind feeling. “But I know I’m registered. I know I’m legit.” 

Nevertheless, he votes, and he urges all eligible voters to do the same, telling them: “If you don’t vote, you don’t have any right to complain.” 

Still, he recalls meeting community members who plan to sit out on Election Day, believing their vote counts for little. Mendoza’s experience helps him see things differently. 

He asks: “If your vote wasn’t important, why is that the first thing they take when they take your freedom?”

Mendoza now hopes his work and perspective will shape a more peaceful Milwaukee, where he lived before going to prison for participating in a violent crime that included charges of attempted murder and kidnapping. 

Mendoza, a Marine Corps veteran, began turning his life around even before going to prison. Just before his 1997 conviction, Mendoza publicly denounced the life of gang violence he previously embraced. When a Milwaukee police officer shot a man named James Rey Guerrero who was allegedly fleeing police, Mendoza worked with community leaders and police to calm tensions and organize a nonviolent prayer vigil.

At his sentencing hearing, family members and community leaders pleaded with the judge to show leniency, citing his work in the community, court transcripts show. 

“There were a lot of threats against Milwaukee police by gang members who were upset with what had transpired, and Ray was very instrumental in helping to kind of calm that and allow that prayer vigil in March to go on,” an employee of Milwaukee’s Social Development Commission told the judge. 

But redemption would have to wait. Mendoza was sentenced to 20 years in a federal penitentiary. 

His path to rehabilitation wasn’t a straight line. He said he spent his first 13 years in and out of solitary confinement, contemplating how to return to selling drugs without getting caught. 

 “All the way up until year 14 of my sentence, my mind said, ‘Well, I’m gonna come home and I’m gonna make a phone call and I’m gonna get a truckload of drugs and up here so I can get back to work,’” he said.

But returning to old habits, he eventually realized, would return him to prison. 

“One day I was sitting in the hole, and I just say, ‘You know, if I want to go home and stay home, I gotta change the way I think. I gotta change the way I live my life, and I gotta change the way I view everybody else and everything else around me,’” Mendoza said. “I refuse to go back to prison.”

He’s kept the promise he made to himself. After his release, Mendoza went to work as a violence interrupter, sharing his experiences and helping to head off gunfire. More recently, he began work as a restorative justice coach at The Northwest Opportunities Vocational Academy, designed for students determined to be at risk of not graduating. 

“According to (Milwaukee Public Schools), these (students) are the worst of the worst of the school system. Those are the ones that I love the most. Those are my favorites,” Mendoza said. 

He sees a version of himself in every young person he works with. For them, his message is simple: They don’t have to go through the pain and heartache he endured. They can do things differently.  

On this Election Day, the nation, including Wisconsin, faces partisan divisions so deep that some have vowed to move to another country if their preferred presidential candidate loses.

But where many see hopelessness, Mendoza sees something different.  

“I don’t think things are hopeless right now. I’ve seen hopeless,” he said.

“I see opportunity. Even with all the negativity that’s going on in our city, I still see opportunity, not for me, not for people my age, not for people in the work that I do, but for the young people.”