On May 14, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the statewide initiative process can’t be used any longer, unless or until the legislature passes a bill reinstating it. The initiative process is in the State Constitution. Here is the decision in Butler v Watson, 2020-IA-01199.
The decision is 28 pages and the dissents are somewhat longer.
Ever since 1992, the Mississippi Constitution has provided for the initiative but has said that no more than one-fifth of the signatures can come from a single U.S. House district. Back in 1992, there were five districts, but after the 2000 census, Mississippi went from five to four districts. The election code still has the boundaries for the five districts that were passed in 1991. The current boundaries, for only four districts, were drawn by a U.S. District Court because the legislature never bothered to draw new boundaries. Until now, the state has recognized initiative petitions if they followed the statutory boundaries of the old five districts, and several initiatives won at the ballot box even though they had submitted petitions based on the five-district plan. Those initiatives have not been invalidated.
But, the new decision says that the medical marijuana initiative passed in November 2020 is invalid, because its petition was invalid, because it was based on the “shadow” five-district map. The majority decision says that the problem could be fixed if the legislature passed a law saying for purposes of the initiative process, the five-district boundaries should be used.
“Ever since 1890, the Mississippi Constitution has provided for the initiative but has said that no more than one-fifth of the signatures can come from a single U.S. House district. Back in 1890, Mississippi had seven U.S. House districts.”
This is at odds with ballotpedia: “The 1992 constitutional amendment that granted the power of citizen initiative in Mississippi required signatures to be collected evenly from all five congressional districts that existed at the time. It mandated no more than one-fifth of the required signatures could be collected from any single congressional district. ” https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_process_in_Mississippi Which one is correct?
Thank you, Wilbur. You are right. I have fixed the post. I was thrown off because the first line in the decision is, “In article 15 of our State’s Constitution of 1890, the people reserve the power to propose and enact constitutional amendments by initiative.” So because of the reference to 1890, I thought the initiative itself was passed in 1890, but I mis-read it.
Could the decision be used to retroactively invalidate all the other initiatives passed since the 2001 redistricting? I get that it doesn’t automatically, but that would seem to be an easy lawsuit given this ruling.
MORE MS MORONS at work – unable to detect that the number of USA Rep dists can and do change.
UNEQUAL voters pet sigs – blatant violation of USA 4-4 RFG and 14-1 AMDT EPC.
Too many really MORON conlaw *lawyers* in ALL election cases.
Richard, you know what? Hell will freeze over before the Miss Lege fixes this. The Mississippi Supremes having put the kibosh on the initiative process, Legiscritters ain’t changing that.
Some states seem to recently have an issue about initiatives being on the ballot. My grandfather use to tell me “the best way to solve a problem is put it up for a vote”. That’s what needs to be done in America.
First we must tackle the epidemics of illegal voting and biased vote counting.
ALL ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymander regimes in ALL 50 States – with/without voter Const amdt/law inits.
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PR
APPV
TOTSOP