Two measures allowing some people convicted of disenfranchising felony offenses to regain their voting rights passed a House committee on Tuesday, allowing the House to consider reforming one of the most strict felony disenfranchisement systems in the nation.
The House Constitution Committee passed a measure to amend the state Constitution to revise the list of crimes that would result in someone losing their right to vote for life.
Rep. Price Wallace, a Republican from Mendenhall who leads the committee, told reporters that his focus is establishing a pathway for people previously convicted of nonviolent offenses, especially those who have not committed any other offense, to regain their voting rights.
The constitutional amendment removes bribery, theft, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery and bigamy from the list of disenfranchising crimes. It adds human trafficking, sexual battery, child exploitation or commercial sexual activity. The list of crimes already includes murder, arson, rape and embezzlement.
It can now go before the full House for consideration, where two-thirds of its members must approve it before it can go to the Senate for further debate.
The House committee also passed a bill clarifying that if someone has a non-violent felony conviction that is also a disenfranchising crime, that offense could be expunged from their record, meaning it would be erased.
If a disenfranchising felony can be expunged from a criminal record, the person would theoretically be allowed to register to vote again.
Mississippi has one of the harshest disenfranchisement systems in the nation and a convoluted way for restoring voting rights to people.
Other than receiving a pardon from the governor, the only way for someone to regain their voting rights is if two-thirds of legislators from both chambers at the Capitol, the highest threshold in the Legislature, agree to restore their suffrage.
Lawmakers only consider about a dozen or so suffrage restoration measures during the session, and it’s typically one of the last items lawmakers take up before they adjourn for the year.
Under the Mississippi Constitution, people convicted of a list of 10 felonies lose their voting rights for life. Opinions from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office have since expanded the list of disenfranchising felonies to 24.
The practice of stripping voting rights away from people for life is a holdover from the Jim Crow-era. The framers of the 1890 Constitution believed Black people were most likely to commit those crimes.
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