On Martin Luther King Jr Day this year, hundreds of Mississippians gathered on the steps of the state capitol building in support of protecting voting rights in the state. The Mississippi house representative Zakiya Summers and state senator Johnny DuPree, both Democrats, introduced legislation that would create a state-level version of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The move comes after years of the supreme court weakening protections formerly guaranteed by the act, and aims to prohibit the dilution of minority voters in the state.
The legislation would create a Mississippi voting rights commission, which would require certain jurisdictions to obtain pre-clearance approval from said commission for any changes to election policy or practice. It would also establish protections for people with limited English proficiency along with additional measures.
“Mississippi obviously has a long and sordid history related to racial discrimination in the context of voting and redistricting,” said Amir Badat, southern states director and senior adviser of Fair Fight, an organization that works to prevent voter suppression and increase voter turnout.
“We have gone through a number of different experiences in this state where Black voters have been blocked from political participation. And that’s not something that is long ago history. It’s something that persists today,” he said, pointing to polling location changes, voter purges that disproportionately affect Black voters, long lines at polls and difficulties for voters with disabilities or limited English proficiency as a few of the barriers to the ballot box that people in the state face.
At the federal level, the supreme court has weakened the Voting Rights Act through cases like Shelby county v Holder in 2013 and potentially will do so again with Louisiana v Callais, which threatens section two of the Voting Rights Act.
“Section two has been really transformational for this country and for our democracy and literally pulled us out of Jim Crow in 1965,” Badat said. “And the court could potentially send us back to that type of environment by gutting section two at the federal level. When you take all of that into account it’s almost a no-brainer that we would need state-level protections to protect us and to protect Black voters in particular against discrimination in the voting process. That’s really kind of what was driving us in Mississippi, coalition members and community members across the state to push for this type of legislation because there’s really no time like the present to be able to pass something.”
DuPree, whose election to the Mississippi senate last year helped break the state’s 13-year two-thirds Republican supermajority, said that he was not certain whether or not he would even be a senator were it not for section two of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed Mississippians to challenge the way their senatorial districts were drawn.
“Although Mississippi has a history of having problems in voting, we still have a history of trying to do what’s right,” DuPree said.
Carroll Rhodes, a civil rights attorney in Mississippi, understands the importance of the Voting Rights Act – a lawsuit he pressed forced redistricting and the special election last year that led to breaking the supermajority. He said that state level voting rights acts were “long overdue”.
“A bunch of state constitutions, and even Mississippi’s constitution, would allow for the Voting Rights Act to be more expansive and be more protected,” he said. “Some state constitutions are even better at protecting voters’ rights than even the federal constitution.”
‘We can no longer depend upon federal protection alone for the right to vote’
Some states are already in contentious positions with regards to compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act. If federal protections are lost, advocates are concerned that existing voting issues would only worsen.
Beginning with California in 2002, eight states – California, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, New York, Connecticut, Minnesota and Colorado – have enacted state-level voting rights acts, while others have introduced legislation to create such an act. Every year since 2018, besides 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a state voting rights act has been enacted. And each year, the acts get stronger and more comprehensive, Adam Lioz, senior policy counsel with the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) said.
“We’re now at a point where we have an explosion of interest partially because of the escalating attacks in the Trump administration and partially because of the case that’s now pending in the supreme court. We’re now seeing increasingly folks go forward, especially in the south,” Lioz said, referencing pending, proposed or potential voting rights act bills in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Texas. “We’re seeing an incredible amount of momentum.”
In January, the LDF, along with Campaign Legal Center, Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, released model legislation that states can use to create their own voting rights acts. State voting rights acts take “the best parts of the federal voting rights act, lengthen them, streamline them, and codify them into state law and then often surround them with complementary provisions,” Lioz said.
The model legislation is a starting point that provides a template for comprehensive state-level acts. States tailor the provisions to the particular needs and conditions of their localities. The model has eight core provisions, many of which were taken from the federal Voting Rights Act, and includes annotations, which provide guidance, and an appendix that can be useful for lawmakers and advocates.
“We can no longer depend upon federal protection alone for the right to vote.,” Lioz said. “The federal courts and the [justice department] used to be a primary protector of voting rights. It’s where Black voters and others could turn to when their rights are being threatened. States need to step up and take an active role in protecting their own voters. We can’t depend on the whims of the courts and the [justice department].”
Lata Nott, Campaign Legal Center’s director of voting rights policy, said that state-level voting rights acts help give power back to the voters. The federal Voting Rights Act was an innovative, “landmark piece of legislation for fighting discrimination in elections and voting”, she said, that gave voters the ability to enforce their own rights.
But chipping away at the federal act has diluted much of that power. It is harder for plaintiffs to bring and to win cases.
“We think it’s important for states to pass the voting rights act to ensure that their residents will always have this tool, this mechanism where they could challenge these discriminatory laws or systems in court,” she said. “Regardless of what happens on the federal level, they will have it.”
Summers said that, though they are in talks with the committee chairs on both the house and senate sides of the Mississippi legislature, lawmakers and advocates understand that the bill could have a difficult time getting beyond the committee. Still, she sees it as an opportunity to build public awareness around what’s at stake – and to provide a possible solution to what the supreme court may do.
“We are living in some very difficult times,” she said. “If we are serious about ensuring that we have voters’ rights protected … then we make democracy work. Mississippi has an opportunity, despite or in spite of what the supreme court does, to stand on the right side.”
