Latest lawsuit continues long trend of fighting efforts to improve Mississippi voter access

It should not be a surprise that the entire Mississippi Election Commission, made up of Gov. Tate Reeves, Attorney General Lynn Fitch and Secretary of State Michael Watson, have joined a lawsuit trying to stop federal agencies from working to improve access to voting.

After all, Mississippi politicians have a decades-long history of opposing federal efforts to improve voter access in Mississippi.

Most of the Jim Crow provisions of the state’s notorious 1890 Constitution designed to deny Black Mississippians access to the ballot were not struck down by Mississippi politicians, but by federal courts and the U.S. Congress.

In the modern era, Mississippi is one of only three states without some form of no-excuse early voting and one of seven that does not allow online voter registration. And to vote by mail with an excuse, a Mississippian must get two separate documents notarized.

In the 1990s, Mississippi was the last state to conform to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known as “motor voter,” and did so with some Mississippi politicians kicking and screaming.

The motor voter act required states to allow eligible citizens to register to vote at drivers’ license bureaus and some other locations where public assistance was offered.

For a period after the act was passed by the U.S. government, local election officials in Mississippi were forced to maintain two voter rolls — one for state elections where people who registered under motor voter could not vote, and another for federal elections where motor voter registrants could participate.

County circuit clerks and election commissioners who oversaw the elections said maintaining the two voter registration lists was a nightmare. Many of them urged the Legislature to change state law to conform to motor voter.

Then-Gov. Kirk Fordice opposed the change. He complained the law should have been named “welfare voter” instead of “motor voter.” He said allowing Mississippians to register to vote under motor voter “could open the floodgates” allowing, gasp, just about anyone to vote.

A majority of the legislators supported changing the law, but for a period the change was blocked by Fordice and the chair of the House Elections Committee.

Fordice said with no evidence that legislators who supported motor voter had won election through fraud.

Finally, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered Mississippi to adopt motor voter. The Legislature passed it, but Fordice vetoed it, saying he would not approve it unless it included a voter identification provision.

The Senate could not garner the two-thirds majority to override Fordice’s veto.

Finally in 2000 under Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, motor voter was approved.

This year Mississippi election commissioners – Reeves, Watson and Fitch – are arguing the Joe Biden administration has exceeded its constitutional authority by instructing federal agencies to develop strategies to improve voter participation and work with states to make voter registration easier in some locations, like military recruitment offices.

“We fully support encouraging voter registration and promoting an engaged electorate,” Fitch said in a news release. “But putting the full weight of the Oval Office behind an effort first developed by partisan activist groups and then hiding the agency activities from public scrutiny goes too far. The law does not allow it. Mississippi will not stand for it.”

But Lisa Danetz, an adviser for the Brennan Center for Justice, a national nonprofit which promotes voter access, said the Biden executive order is not nefarious. She said it “directs federal agencies to provide access to voter registration application opportunities and reliable voting information when eligible citizens are already interacting with the federal government. The order also aims to improve access in other ways, such as by requiring the government to examine obstacles to voting for people with disabilities.”

Mississippi has been accused before of making it difficult for people with disabilities to vote. In 2023 a federal judge threw out a portion of a Mississippi law saying it could curtail the ability of Mississippians with disabilities to vote.

Yet again, Mississippi politicians are carrying on a long standing legacy of working to make it more difficult for Americans to vote. Mississippi politicians have believed for decades that the harder it is to cast a vote, the better it is for them.

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