In 2009, the Mississippi Legislature overwhelmingly passed a proposal to require elected municipal and county school board members to receive a majority vote instead of a plurality — meaning that if one candidate did not receive 50 percent of the vote plus one, the top two candidates would have to meet in a runoff.
The change was not radical. It is the same system used in the state’s party primaries and in nonpartisan special elections, such as the one being held this month for the mayor of Jackson.
The legislation received bipartisan and, even more importantly when it comes to election changes, biracial support.
The vote among black House members, where the bill originated, was 34-2 in favor on the first go-round. The Senate amended the bill, and 12 black senators joined in the unanimous vote in that chamber. When the bill went back to the House for concurrence, the two initial black dissenters voted for the proposal.
However, the U.S. Justice Department, through which all of Mississippi’s election-related changes had to be precleared at the time, had reservations. Even though the feds had earlier OK’d an identical requirement for the election of school board members in consolidated districts, they paid little to no heed to their own precedent.
The Justice Department asked Mississippi to furnish the racial identity of every candidate who had run for any of the 402 elected county and municipal school posts over the previous decade. More problematically, the feds requested the state to furnish the race of every voter registered in the affected school districts as well as every voter who actually cast a ballot in the previous school board elections.
Since Mississippi does not register voters by race, it was impossible to comply with the latter requests. In the end, the Department of Justice objected to the law, blocking it from implementation.
That contradictory and capricious decision is the only statewide “voting rights violation” logged against Mississippi in the past 15 years, according the Secretary of State’s Office.
Yet, under a proposal in Congress, it would be enough to tilt the balance and force Mississippi and every one of its local jurisdictions to again have to go through the expense and delays of getting any election change — no matter how miniscule — approved by the federal government before implementing.
Such a formula for deciding who merits special scrutiny from the federal government is not much better than the antiquated one that the U.S. Supreme Court threw out as unconstitutional last year.
The reason that part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act got tossed was it was stuck in a time warp: It continued to treat states that had historically discriminated against blacks and other minorities as if they had not changed in the past 40 years.
The justices, by a 5-4 vote, said Congress could make some states jump through more hoops than others on election changes, but lawmakers would have to adopt more contemporaneous standards than the ones the federal government had been using to put Mississippi and parts or all of 15 other states into that category.
The proposed response — the Voting Rights Amendment Act — demonstrates what a stretch it is to find any state nowadays that should be singled out for this disparate treatment.
The legislation uses as its threshold five voting-rights violations in the past 15 years, with only one of those violations having to be statewide. Even that low of a barrier would net currently only Mississippi and three other states — Louisiana, Georgia and Texas. And as the case of Mississippi demonstrates, what’s defined as a modern-day voting rights violation can be arbitrary and illogical. It doesn’t come anywhere close to the blatant, rampant and state-sanctioned discrimination that preclearance was created to combat when the original Voting Rights Act was adopted a half-century ago.
In 1965, Mississippi deserved to be presumed guilty until proven innocent when it came to impeding minority participation in elections and thwarting the election of minority candidates. The state, though, has not deserved that ignoble distinction for a while.
If federal preclearance is still a good idea, it should be a good idea for every state, not just a handful of Southern ones that make convenient targets.
