A House judiciary committee will delve into the state’s ban on voting for people convicted of certain felonies — one of the remaining vestiges of Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era where the white political leadership enacted laws to prevent African Americans from voting.
The meeting will begin Thursday at 10 a.m. in room 113 of the Mississippi Capitol.
Rep. Nick Bain, a Republican from Corinth and chair of the House Judiciary B Committee, said “it is an issue to be debated” on whether people convicted of felonies should regain their voting rights, but “I don’t think this is a legitimate function of the Legislature. I don’t think it is something we should be doing.”
Under Mississippi’s one-of-a-kind process in the nation, people convicted of certain felonies can go to the Legislature to have their rights restored via a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Legislature or through a pardon from the governor.
The Legislature, in most years, restores voting rights to a handful of people — normally less than five. Gov. Tate Reeves hasn’t restored voting rights to any Mississippian through pardon in his two years in office. Likewise, former Gov. Phil Bryant did not grant voting rights to a single person convicted of a felony through pardon in his eight years in office.
“I think it’s an issue for the judicial branch of government, if you will,” Bain said during an interview on Mississippi Today’s “The Other Side” podcast last week. “We allow judges to restore gun rights. We allow them to expunge records of people, and I think it’s more consistent. And it should be more readily available through the judicial system than the legislative body, and that’s the biggest concern that I have about it — I just don’t think the Legislature should be in this business.”
READ MORE: Attorney general argues in federal court that Jim Crow-era voting ban should be upheld
In the 1890s, the Mississippi Supreme Court wrote the disfranchisement of people of these specific felonies was placed in the Constitution “to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race” by targeting “the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.” The crimes selected by lawmakers to go into the provision were thought by the white political leaders at the time as more likely to be committed by African Americans.
That provision is currently being challenged on constitutional grounds in the federal courts with a case pending before the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Attorneys in that case have argued that the provision’s intent is the same as the poll tax, the literacy test and other Jim Crow-era provisions that sought to prevent African Americans from voting.
Scheduled to testify before the Judiciary B Committee on Thursday include those who have lost their rights, various advocates and others.
One question that will be explored is if any of the felony suffrage procedure can be changed without a constitutional amendment that would require approval by two-thirds of both chambers of the Legislature and approval by a majority of the electorate voting on the issue.
READ MORE: Not all ex-felons are barred from voting in Mississippi, but no one is telling them that.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.