The way Mississippi deals with restoring voting rights to felons is not just cumbersome. It depends too much on the personal beliefs of one or two lawmakers.
Going into the final days of this year’s legislative session, for example, the House had approved restoring the right to vote to nine former inmates. The Senate is unlikely to concur with many of them.
The same thing happened in 2021. The House voted to restore the rights to 21 felons, but the Senate only signed off on two of them.
That’s because the chairman of the relevant Senate committee, Joey Fillingane, apparently has a tougher criteria than does his House counterpart, Nick Bain. It’s hard to tell, though, what exactly those differences are. Fillingane says his committee won’t consider restoring voting rights to those who committed violent crimes or embezzled public funds. Bain has said his committee has basically the same rules.
But something is obviously different.
Rather than forcing felons to individually petition the Legislature and hope to land in the good graces of a committee chair, a better system would be to automatically restore the rights of felons once they have completed their sentence.
The Legislature again this year rejected such a reform, leaving Mississippi one of the few states that continue to punish offenders well after they have done their time.
