The Mississippi Legislature is back to its usual mischief.
Every year, a few silly bills are presented, most of which aren’t really designed to be signed into law, but offered to pander to the base of the bills’ authors.
But there are cases when it goes beyond mischief and represents real harm.
In this year’s session, two very similar bills are working their way through the Mississippi Senate and House of Representatives that weaken one of our fundamental rights as Americans.
If either is passed into law, it will mean your right to vote has an expiration date. It’s basically a “use it or lose it” proposition.
House Bill 4 and Senate Bill 2588 will allow election officials to purge people from the registration polls if they haven’t voted over a four-year period that includes two federal elections and have failed to respond to a notice asking them to confirm their residency.
Supporters of House Bill 4 and Senate Bill 2588 say keeping voter rolls up to date can be difficult, and poorly kept rolls can make it challenging for courts to find enough people for jury duty.
Critics say the proposals would endanger constitutional rights in a state whose history on Black voter suppression is well-established.
It should be noted this sort of logic is not applied to other rights. For example, I’ve yet to see a bill that says if you don’t shoot your gun over a certain period of time you will be deprived of your Second Amendment rights.
It seems only fair to view these bills with a healthy degree of suspicion, based not only on history but more recent events.
At the end of Reconstruction, Mississippi imposed a series of changes to election laws guaranteed to disenfranchise Black voting strength at a time when the majority of the state’s residents were Black. Almost immediately those laws — including literacy tests and poll taxes — ended meaningful black participation in the state government. Mississippi was in fact the blueprint for Jim Crow rule in the South.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended those practices immediately, but also provided future protections against the kind of efforts represented by the two election bills currently being considered by our Legislature through what was known as “clearance.”
Clearance dictated that any election laws that could negatively affect minority voting strength in state’s with a history of voter suppression (essentially the Jim Crow states) must be approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But in 2013, the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, removed the clearance requirement.
Chief Justice John Roberts said there was no reason to believe that those states under the clearance requirement should be still held to a different standard than the other states.
It has, and continues to be a disastrous ruling. Southern states have continuously changed election rules, making it more difficult to vote through Voter ID requirements, gerrymandering and other changes that disproportionately affect minority voters.
What Shelby County v. Holder really proved is that clearance was effective in protecting minority voting rights. What has happened since confirms as much.
While not everyone may agree on whether things like Voter ID are a modern means of restoring Jim Crow rule, what we do know is that virtually none of the legislation passed by Mississippi’s legislature has made it easier for people to vote, especially Black people.
We know that our state’s Black population is less likely to be home-owners and, as a result, more transient. We also know that Black Mississippians are less likely to vote than white citizens, HB 4 and SB2588, we suspect, are efforts to exploit those facts.
I will be blunt. I believe these bills are based on racism and fear.
The timing of these bills supports it. When red-state Georgia and Arizona went blue in November, it sent shockwaves through reliably red states, Mississippi included.
These bills represent today what the legislation of the post-Reconstruction era in Mississippi represented then: an effort to maintain white domination at the polls.
It was shameful then. It’s even more shameful now because we should know better.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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