Fort Worth, Texas – There’s an elephant in the room when Crystal Mason talks about her seemingly never-ending legal case. It’s her three-year-old grandson, Karter.

Stomping around Mason’s home in Fort Worth, Texas, Karter clenches a plastic straw between his teeth as a makeshift trunk. He lifts his head towards the sky and blows through the straw with all his might, delivering his best interpretation of an elephant’s trumpet.

It’s a moment of silliness that makes Mason, 49, break into a wide smile.

“He thinks he’s an elephant,” Mason told Al Jazeera. “He can name every animal. We took him to the zoo recently, and he was so fascinated.”

Caught up in the memory, Mason lets herself relax. But only for a moment.

Heavy on Mason’s mind is the prospect that she could return to jail on charges of illegal voting.

What happened, she said, was a misunderstanding. But her case has raised questions about the restrictions some parts of the United States put on people with felony records — and their right to vote.

Increasingly, states are moving away from restricting those who have served their sentences. In the last quarter-century, approximately 26 states, plus Washington, DC, have restored the right to vote for most people with felony convictions, with some exceptions for severe crimes like murder and sexual assault.

“Nationally, tremendous progress has been made,” said Blair Bowie, a lawyer and the director of the Restore Your Vote project, which advocates against the disenfranchisement of voters with past convictions.

But in recent years, some states, like Virginia and Tennessee, have bucked the trend, heightening the threshold for the restoration of voting rights.

In other states, like Texas, the automatic restoration of voting rights comes with caveats — something critics blame for stirring up confusion and leading to situations like Mason’s.

“Texas is unique,” Bowie said, “because of the way it goes after voters. It’s one of those states that’s trapped in the past.”

Lawyers, advocates and historians say that — because of the variation in laws and the disproportionate effects of incarceration on certain demographics — geography and race have therefore become some of the biggest factors affecting voting rights today.