House plans to reintroduce suffrage bill in 2025

While about 50,000 state residents with past felony convictions will have to wait another year to potentially regain their voting rights, state lawmakers passed 21 individual suffrage bills this past legislative session.

That represents roughly half of the individual requests made between 2021 and 2023 by people who were previously convicted of felonies seeking to regain their voting rights.

In Mississippi, people who commit certain disenfranchising felonies lose the right to vote, and the only recourse for them to have those rights restored is to request a lawmaker to file a bill. That bill may or may not be brought up in a committee, taken up on the House or Senate floor and then advance through the other chamber. If it makes it that far, it then goes on to the governor who may sign the bill, let it pass without his signature or veto it.

House Judiciary B Chairman Kevin Horan, R-Grenada, told the Clarion Ledger the bills his committee moved forward to the floor were from residents who had committed nonviolent felonies and whose sentences had been fully completed, including jail time, fines and other requirements.

The Senate Judiciary Division B Committee, led by Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, took the same policy when considering several bills this year.

Horan said a time comes when individuals who have paid their debt to society start contributing to society by paying taxes and making other contributions.

“There’s no reason those individuals shouldn’t have the right to vote,” Horan said.

The move to restore as many people’s voting rights as possible this year may or may not have come about after House Bill 1609 died in the Senate last month. That bill would have restored the right to vote to all Mississippians who were previously convicted of certain nonviolent felonies.

However, before making its way to the Senate, the House passed HB 1609 99-9, garnering wide bipartisan support, including that of first-year House Speaker Jason White, R-West.

That bill did not sway Sen. Angela Hill, R-Picayune, who chose not to bring the bill up in the Constitution Committee by the legislative deadline to do so. When asked why she let the deadline pass, Hill said the state’s constitution speaks for itself.

Read about suffrage bill dying Voting bill, which would have helped non-violent felons, dies in MS Senate

Disenfranchisement was adopted by the Mississippi Legislature in 1890 with the purpose of stripping voting rights from Black voters by listing crimes lawmakers thought Black people were likely to commit such as murder, timber larceny, possession of stolen property and murder, James K. Vardaman, who served as both governor and U.S. senator at the time, declared.

House Constitution Committee Chairman Price Wallace, R-Mendenhall, said he was disappointed in Hill for failing to pass HB 1609 out of her committee and that he plans to continue working on the legislation throughout the summer and to bring it up during the 2025 legislative session.

“We’re going to get together after session in the summer or early fall, sit down and see if we can draft something that hopefully can please everyone,” Wallace told the Clarion Ledger in April. “I felt that the bill we had was good.”

More on suffrage bills Mississippi lawmakers hope to return 32 peoples’ voting rights

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves as of Wednesday afternoon had not yet signed any approved individual suffrage requests from any state residents.

Grant McLaughlin covers state government for the Clarion Ledger. He can be reached at gmclaughlin@gannett.com or 972-571-2335.