It’s been half a decade since Mississippians could propose new laws or constitutional amendments directly on the ballot for a vote on election day, and that will likely continue after a bill to restore the ballot initiative process died in the state legislature.
While state Sen. Jeremy England fulfilled a pre-session vow to push his colleagues to consider a ballot initiative measure, the effort ultimately proved fruitless. His measure allowing citizens to play a more integral role in the legislative process failed to pass in the Senate ahead of a major deadline on Thursday. No similar legislation exists in the House of Representatives.
“People want this back. It’s guaranteed to them in the Constitution, so we need to do that,” England said earlier in the session, before his measure died on the calendar.
The ballot initiative process was stripped by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2021 over challenges to signature-gathering requirements and a change to the state’s congressional districts. England, a Republican from Vancleave, has long maintained that citizens are constitutionally entitled to propose new statutes that their local lawmakers fail to enact. Many of his fellow GOP members of the Senate have expressed a multitude of concerns with the concept.
This year is far from the legislature’s first rodeo, arguing over the ballot initiative process. In recent showdowns, lawmakers have sparred over the nuances of the initiative process — how many signatures would be needed for citizens to propose a measure and what could or could not go on the ballot for a statewide vote, among other concerns.
England, this time around, proposed requiring 10% of active Mississippi’s registered voters, or around 189,000 people, to sign a petition to bring a measure to a statewide vote. The bill mandated that one-third of the signatures gathered would have to come from a single congressional district. His proposal also served to prevent a measure from depriving another citizen of “his or her right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of property.”
The most recent round of objections centered on the fear of big money influencing the citizen-led initiative process. A couple of detractors contended that, with this version of the ballot initiative in place, billionaires, notably George Soros, could legalize a left-wing agenda of sorts by financially incentivizing registered voters to put certain measures on the ballot.
“We saw this with medical marijuana. We saw this with Medicaid expansion. You have these big groups that have the ability to raise a bunch of money to put something on a ballot,” State Sen. Joel Carter, R-Gulfport, said. “How do you combat a group that’s pushing some type of issue and flooding money into the state and pushing one side of an issue versus the other side of an issue? How do you combat that?”
England pushed back, saying that, regardless of these fears, Mississippians are entitled to an initiative process by the state constitution, and that voters are sophisticated enough to avoid falling for ploys that would be a detriment to the state’s future. Nonetheless, the Senate failed to move forward with England’s proposal, meaning the chances of the ballot initiative being restored this year are slim to none.