The state House is again trying to reinstate Mississippi voters’ right to place issues directly on the ballot.
But the latest measure, again, would not allow voters to consider any abortion issues.
A House committee on Wednesday passed House Concurrent Resolution 30, which is still several legislative steps away from being finalized. It would reinstate citizens’ ability to gather signatures to propose modern state laws or change existing laws. The measure also would not allow them to amend the state Constitution.
“I’m trying to give something to the people,” House Constitution Chairman Price Wallace told reporters after the committee vote.
The House leadership’s previous recent proposals also would have barred voters from considering any initiative related to abortion. However, the Senate has blocked voters regaining any right to ballot initiatives.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated a person’s constitutional right to an abortion, Mississippi’s so-called “trigger law” went into effect that banned abortion in most instances.
But after the nation’s highest court ruled in 2022 that state governments have the authority to set abortion laws, voters in several conservative-run states elected to protect abortion access.
The current House proposal would require petitioners to gather signatures from 12% of the number of people who voted in the last presidential election, which Wallace estimates to be around 145,000 people.
One change from past proposals is that the current legislation would require petitioners to gather an equal number of signatures from the state’s three Supreme Court districts, instead of from Congressional districts.
“We looked at the Supreme Court districts, which is a lot easier to get the signatures,” Wallace said. “That’s why we went with that.”
Mississippi law establishes three distinct Supreme Court districts, commonly referred to as the Northern, Central and Southern districts. But these districts have not been redrawn since 1987, and a federal judge is currently considering a case to redraw those districts.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private law firms on behalf of a group of Black Mississippians including state Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville, sued state officials in April 2022 arguing the districts as currently drawn do not allow Black citizens to elect a candidate of their own choosing.
If U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock orders the state to redraw the districts while the state implements a modern voter initiative process, it could lead to voter confusion or further delay.
Wallace said he was not aware of the lawsuit and it was not a factor in his decision to require petitions to gather signatures from the Supreme Court districts instead of congressional districts.
Population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau and voter data from the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office analyzed by Mississippi Today show that the number of people and energetic voters in the three areas are not equal.
There are 659,920 energetic voters in the Northern District, 621,181 in the Central District and 699,806 in the Southern District.
This is now the fourth year in a row that lawmakers have attempted to reinstate some version of a ballot initiative after the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2021 ruled the state’s initiative process was unworkable because of a technicality of the number of the state’s congressional districts.
The Senate killed a similar House bill in 2023, and it failed to pass its own version of a ballot initiative proposal last year. The Senate has not yet advanced its own ballot initiative proposal out of a committee this session.
