Mississippi legislators won’t smooth the path this year to restore voting rights after some felonies

JACKSON, ma’am. — Kenneth Almons says he began a 23-year sentence in a Mississippi prison just two weeks after graduating from high school, and that one of his armed robbery convictions stripped him of the right to vote that he still hasn’t regained decades later .

Now 51, Almons told lawmakers Wednesday that he has worked hard and been law-abiding since his release, and he wants to be able to vote.

“It would mean I’m no longer considered a nobody,” Almons said. “Because if you don’t have a voice, you’re nobody.”

Mississippi is one of 26 states that revoke people’s right to vote because of criminal convictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Mississippi’s original list of disenfranchisement crimes dates back to the Jim Crow era, and attorneys who filed a lawsuit challenging the list say the authors of the state constitution revoked voting rights for crimes they believed black people who were more likely to commit.

Under the Mississippi Constitution, people lose the right to vote for ten crimes, including bribery, theft and arson. The state’s previous attorney general, a Democrat, issued a ruling in 2009 that expanded the list to 22 crimes, including timber theft and carjacking.

In 1950, Mississippi removed burglary from its list of disenfranchisement crimes. Murder and rape were added in 1968. Attorneys representing the state in one lawsuit argued that these changes “cure any discriminatory taint,” and the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 2022.

To restore voting rights, people convicted of any of these crimes would need to be pardoned by the governor or convince lawmakers to pass individual bills specifically for them, with two-thirds approval from the House of Representatives and the Senate. Lawmakers have passed few of those bills in recent years, and they won’t pass any in 2023.

Two lawsuits in recent years have challenged Mississippi’s disenfranchisement. The U.S. Supreme Court said in June that it would not reconsider the 5th Circuit’s 2022 decision.

The same appeals court heard arguments on the other case in January and did not rule.

In March, the Republican-controlled Mississippi House voted 99-9 to pass a bill that would have allowed automatic restoration of voting rights for anyone convicted of theft, obtaining money or property under false pretenses , forgery, bigamy or ‘any crime interpreted as disenfranchisement’. in subsequent opinions of the Attorney General.” Reinstatement would occur five years after conviction or release from prison, whichever is later.

Senate Constitution Committee Chairwoman Angela Hill, a Republican from Picayune, called the bill moot when she failed to submit it for consideration before the March 21 deadline. In response to questions Wednesday, Hill told The Associated Press that she was blocking it because “we have already implemented a number of processes” to restore voting rights one person at a time.

Rep. Kabir Karriem, a Democrat from Columbus, led a hearing in the House of Representatives on Wednesday and said restoring voting rights “is a fundamental human rights issue.”

“Let us not forget that the fight for voting rights is a fight for justice, equality and democracy itself,” Karriem said.

Rep. Zakiya Summers, a Democrat from Jackson, served as elections commissioner before winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 2019. She said a voter called her upset one year because he was going to his old precinct and his name had been removed from the list of registered voters. Summers discovered that the man had been convicted of a disenfranchisement crime.

Democratic Senator Hillman Frazier of Jackson introduced a bill to restore men’s voting rights, and the Legislature passed it. But Summers said about 55,000 Mississippians with felony convictions still don’t have the right to vote.

“It shouldn’t matter if you have a relationship with your legislator so you can get your voting rights restored,” Summers said.

More than fifty bills have been introduced this year to restore voting rights to specific people. Lawmakers could consider them until the end of the four-month session, scheduled for early May.