A committee in the Mississippi House of Representatives on Tuesday advanced a bill that would restore the state's ballot initiative process that the conservative-dominated state Supreme Court obliterated in 2021―but not for any proposals that would weaken the state’s near-total ban on abortion. State Rep. Bryant Clark, who is a member of the Democratic minority, was not happy, declaring, “It is almost like a dictatorship telling the people they have the right to speak except on this issue or that issue.”
The state’s highest court, as we wrote two years ago, decreed that the rules adopted in the 1990s requiring organizers to gather signatures from each of the state's five congressional districts in order to qualify for the ballot had become impossible to comply with because the state lost a congressional district in the 2000 round of reapportionment. This decision not only made it impossible for any future ballot measures to qualify under the current rules, it also invalidated a 2020 initiative that voters had passed to legalize medical marijuana.
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Mississippi Today’s Bobby Harrison explains that the bill that moved forward this week, though, would place restrictions on voters in addition to the ban on abortion rights’ measures. While Magnolia State denizens previously could place proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot by collecting signatures, the GOP-controlled legislature would still retain that power for itself.
Anyone looking to do an initiative to create or amend state laws would also need to collect 240,000 signatures (the equivalent of 12% of the state’s registered voters) spread evenly across however many congressional districts there are, more than twice the previous 106,000 minimum and one of the highest proportions of any state nationally that allows initiatives. House Constitution Chair Fred Shanks, the Republican whose committee advanced the legislation this week, indicated he’d negotiate with the state Senate about this high threshold should his chamber pass the bill, though he said he’d be happy with a tough ballot initiative process over none.
Shanks also said of the idea to keep abortion rights measures off the ballot, “This was just something I brought up in our discussions, and it was kind of a House position.” Shanks and his colleagues may indeed have reason to worry that, if voters had the chance, they might modify the extreme ban that’s on the books now. In 2011, an initiative failed 58-42 that would amend the constitution to define a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”
P.S. This is far from the first time that Mississippi Republicans have relied on complicated initiative laws to turn back progressives. After Initiative 42, a 2015 proposal that would have amended the state constitution to require public schools to be fully funded, qualified, the GOP legislature placed a rival Initiative 42A on the ballot to maintain the status quo.
Voters were required to answer both parts of a two-part question: They needed to first agree that they supported "either measure," which said they wanted one of the initiatives to pass; a no vote meant they didn't want either Initiative 42 or Initiative 42A to succeed. Then, voters needed to pick between 42 and 42A—there was no "yes" or "no" vote on this part. In the end, the vote for "either measure" failed 52-48. Initiative 42 beat Initiative 42A 59-41, but it didn't matter and the status quo remained intact.
