Although most of the attention following last week’s wrap-up of the 2024 session of the Mississippi Legislature was on its failure to come up with a compromise on Medicaid expansion, it was not the only significant legislation that died over the course of the past four months.
With thousands of bills filed every year, the vast majority don’t survive, many of them rightfully so. Here are three proposals, though, that definitely should have passed, and which will be back on the table in 2025.
- Felon voting rights. Mississippi still remains one of the few states that does not automatically restore voting rights to felons after they have completed their sentences. Instead, the state continues with a cumbersome, piecemeal process that restores suffrage to individual felons only if their case can muster two-thirds of the vote of lawmakers in both chambers.
Mississippi’s current system, which dates back to its 1890 constitution, was originally rooted in racism. Now it’s just illogical. Some lower-level felonies, such as excessive bad-check writing, can produce a lifetime voting ban, while more serious offenses, such as drug dealing, produce no ban at all, even allowing the felon to vote while behind bars.
Mississippi for years has discussed making restoration of voting rights automatic for most non-violent offenses once a sentence has been completed, but it can’t get past the “tough on crime” attitude that also makes this state one of the most incarcerated-prone in the nation.
The goal of the criminal justice system should be to rehabilitate offenders to be law-abiding, responsible, contributing members to society. Holding back voting rights after felons have done their time only propagates their feeling of alienation. It is unfair and counter-productive.
- Ballot initiative. Will the Legislature ever keep its promise to restore “people power” to the people? After three straight sessions of failing to do so, there are reasons to wonder.
Before the Mississippi Supreme Court threw out the initiative process on a technicality in 2021, it was already rare for citizens to get a proposal enacted. During the 30 years in which citizens were provided an avenue to bypass the Legislature, only seven proposals garnered enough signatures to get on the ballot, and only three of those received enough votes to pass.
Nevertheless, lawmakers, particularly those who occupy seats in the Senate, want to make it harder by enacting a much higher threshold for signatures. And both chambers want to be able to place some limits on what can be considered, especially taking anything dealing with abortion off the table, and to have the power to amend fairly quickly any initiative that lawmakers don’t like.
Mississippians deserve to have “people power” restored, but it also needs to be a power that means something.
- Early voting. If Mississippi has a problem with voter fraud, it is almost always centered on absentee ballots. Lawmakers had been offered an easy way to reduce that vulnerability by allowing in-person, no-excuse early voting, as 47 other states do in some form.
A bill that easily passed the Senate would have allowed any legal voters to cast their ballots in person at the circuit clerk’s office up to 15 days before the election. That could both increase voter turnout and decrease demand for absentee ballots.
Unfortunately, a House chairman let the proposal die, saying he wanted to give the issue more study in response to the concern of circuit clerks that they might be overburdened by the additional work.
The delay was not necessary. Whatever short-term cost early voting caused would be more than worth it.
