But even with all these hurdles, a cadre of advocates, nonprofits, churches, and community-minded elected officials have shown up year after year for decades, working hard to protect the right to participate in democracy—especially for Black and other minority voters, who are often the most affected by voting restrictions. 

“We have organizations across the state that are part of the Civic Engagement Roundtable that’s organized by One Voice,” said Representative Zakiya Summers, a Democrat in the state house, referencing a Jackson nonprofit focused on policy advocacy. “These organizations are on conference calls every month. They have created voting rights guides and information that partner organizations can distribute in their community to get people educated and engaged.”

In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections in August, these advocates were gearing up to contend with the latest obstacle that Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature had thrown their way: Senate Bill 2358. The bill, which passed in the spring and went into effect on July 1, prohibits anyone from assisting another voter in handling and returning a mail-in ballot unless they are an immediate family or household member, a caregiver, or authorized election worker or mail carrier. Anyone caught violating the law could face up to a year in county jail and a fine of up to $3000.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised the bill when he signed it into law, saying that it would protect against “ballot harvesting,” or the practice of collecting ballots en masse, a fear that is central to the unfounded conspiracies about voter fraud that conservatives around the country latched onto since the 2020 election.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or other fraud in Mississippi elections, the bill has threatened to limit the number of volunteers and advocates involved in get-out-the-vote efforts from sending or retrieving ballots on behalf of voters they don’t live with. More importantly, it could impede ballot access for people who count on this kind of assistance. 

“It just seemed like another barrier that would prevent people with disabilities from being able to vote autonomously,” says Jane Walton, the communications officer for Disability Rights Mississippi, which includes voting access among their advocacy work. “The bill in question dealt with whether or not someone can have a person assist them. Really, it’s an issue of whether a person with a disability has the autonomy to choose to vote in a way that is most accessible to them.”

Soon after it was passed, groups including Disability Rights Mississippi and Mississippi’s League of Women Voters sued the state in federal court to block the law, stating it “impermissibly restricts voters with disabilities from having a person of their choice assist them in submitting their completed mail-in absentee ballots.” On July 26, a federal judge sided with them and temporarily blocked the law, saying it disenfranchised voters with disabilities and violated the Voting Rights Act.

The decision blocked enactment of SB 2358 just in time for the Aug. 8 primary, and will also prevent it from taking effect ahead of the general election in November, when Mississippians will vote on nearly every major office, including governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and representatives in both legislative chambers. Polling indicates that Republican incumbents who supported the bill—including the embattled Reeves, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch—are favored to win in this deep red state.

But no matter who people cast their vote for, advocates are more concerned about some residents being able to cast a vote at all. The suspension of SB 2358 offers some temporary relief, but these advocates fear that the threat of similar legislation still looms.

“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring legislation that [has]pretty much been pushed by the Secretary of State every year to deal with ballot harvesting, Jarvis Dortch, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Mississippi, told Bolts. ”That makes it harder to return a ballot by absentee, especially individuals with disabilities.”

Before the passage of this bill, advocates already had their hands full navigating existing restrictions that make it harder for citizens to vote, and for Black candidates to win. 

The state requires eligible voters to register 30 days before elections, one of the earliest deadlines in the country. This means that often, advocates must find eligible voters early, and educate them on the importance of registering long before there’s any major discussion of elections in the media, because there’s no early voting or same-day registration options as a backup. And advocates must repeat this process every year thanks to Mississippi’s odd-year elections. 

But in order to even register, eligible voters must comply with a stringent voter ID law, passed in 2011 by way of a ballot initiative that established a strict list of acceptable forms of ID, including a birth certificate, firearms permit, driver’s license, college ID card, US passport, tribal ID, or Voter ID card. 

“Voter ID targeted vulnerable populations who may not have access to ID or may not have access to a birth certificate so they can get an ID. The law was written so strongly that the state was willing to provide a free Voter ID,” says Summers.

Voting absentee by mail is also an involved process in Mississippi. As opposed to the majority of states, which offer no-excuse absentee voting, mail ballots are only available to populations with qualifying characteristics, including those living out-of-state, students, people with disabilities, people over 65, and certain others. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted. 

“We make it harder than anyone else to get folks registered and make it hard for people to vote absentee,” said Dortch. We don’t provide early voting. Now, instead of making it easier for folks to vote, we’re trying to get people off the voting rolls… and make it harder for people to actually vote absentee. When we have one of the hardest processes to vote absentee in the country. It doesn’t make sense.” 

Mississippi has also had a longtime a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of certain types of felonies, a policy which has disenfranchised nearly 130,000 Black voters, or 16 percent of the state’s adult Black population. It’s one of only three states, alongside Tennessee and Virginia, where anyone stripped of voting rights loses it for their whole life. They can only regain it if they receive an exceedingly rare pardon from the legislature or the governor.

A federal appeals court this summer struck down that system as unconstitutional, calling it a “cruel and unusual punishment,” and denouncing Mississippi as “an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement.” The state appealed the decision in late August, and the rights of hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are still hanging in the balance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all these restrictions, Mississippi has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In the 2022 midterms, Mississippi ranked eighth from last, with roughly 46 percent of voters showing up. And turnout for non-white voters was even lower.

Democrats and progressives have historically championed an increase in access to voting options in the state, and have in turn looked to Black and other disenfranchised voters for support in elections. This upcoming race is no exception. Democrat gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, for example, is betting on bases of support in majority-Black enclaves around the capital city of Jackson, as well as pockets of white and immigrant progressive and moderate voters scattered around the Mississippi Delta in his long-shot bid to oust Tate Reeves.

Ty Pinkins, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is a recent addition after previous candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race for health reasons. While Pinkins has limited time to build name recognition before the contest, he’s hoping that a campaign message of easing the state’s restrictive voting laws will connect with voters.

“Making sure people can register to vote online makes sense, making sure that we have a way for people to do early voting—that makes sense, and not restricting access to the ballot for people with disabilities,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. 

SB 2358 remains on hold until further hearings are held and a final decision is handed down. And while advocates, voters, and progressive candidates can continue to move as if the law had never been signed, the landscape for voting rights remains difficult in Mississippi. But advocates are quick to mention that they will continue to work to make progress. 

“We along with our partners and our co-counsel are absolutely prepared to do everything that we can to protect the rights of citizens with disabilities,” said Walton. “Whatever that road looks like going forward, we’re prepared to fight for accessibility in Mississippi’s voting system.”

Correction (Sept. 14): An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the communications officer from Disability Rights Mississippi.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Mississippi Organizers Navigate Difficult Voting Rights Terrain in Run Up to November appeared first on Bolts.

Each of the previous three states to consider voter-ID ballot measures—Missouri in 2016, and Arkansas and North Carolina in 2018—had approved them by at least 10 points each. In Arizona, a 2004 voter-ID measure that was less stringent than Proposition 309, had passed comfortably, too. At least on this issue, the concerns of organizations like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters kept being ignored.

But Arizonans on Nov. 8 bucked this history, despite Proposition 309’s huge fundraising advantage and the lack of organized opposition. They narrowly rejected the measure by about 18,000 votes, or 0.76 percent.

It was the first defeat in ten years for a ballot measure increasing voter ID mandates in the U.S., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ database. (Minnesotans rejected a voter ID measure by eight percentage points in 2012.)

Local advocates on both sides of the measure told Bolts that they were surprised by the outcome but explained it by naming several factors, starting with antipathy to Trumpism.

“Fundamentally, I just don’t think we can look at this one in a vacuum,” said Sarah Gonski, a Phoenix-based elections lawyer who has represented Democratic candidates in the state in recent cycles. 

The measure was placed on the ballot on a party-line vote by Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature, which spent much of the past two years rehearsing the former president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. This inextricably linked it to controversial, top-of-the-ticket Arizona candidates who ran for office this year on election denialism, local politicos said. Proposition 309 appeared just down the ballot from far-right election deniers Kari Lake, who lost the governor’s race, Blake Masters, who lost the U.S. Senate race, and Mark Finchem, who lost the secretary of state’s race. 

“I think that rejecting this initiative, which is a policy proposal that gets a lot of support usually, is intimately tied up with rejection of the Big Lie narrative that has pervaded Arizona’s political environment for the last two years,” said Gonski.

Bie Lie figures have been wildly successful in radicalizing people who previously trusted standard elections procedures. But their efforts have also made the broader electorate pay far more attention to once-obscure matters of election administration. Secretary of state races this year drew record spending, especially on the Democratic side.

Advocates in Arizona say this new context prepared many to more carefully consider proposed changes to voting rules than they may have in the past.

“I think that the population is a lot more interested in what used to be pretty dry, bureautic understandings of the way ballots are processed and the way election security is run,” said Gonski, who is now a senior policy advisor at the Institute for Responsive Government. “They’re paying attention and they’re interested to know so much more about elections and the way they work, and that does a huge amount for people understanding how secure our elections actually are.”

J.D. Mesnard, the Republican state senator who authored Proposition 309, has defended his proposals in recent years by saying that lawmakers should address people’s concerns about fraud even if there is no underlying evidence for them. In an interview with Bolts, he echoed the analysis that Arizonans voted down his initiative as part of rejecting efforts to revisit the 2020 election. 

“To the extent that anybody sees bills focused on improving the integrity and security of our elections, and thinks the only reason you’re running them is because of the 2020 election, this all gets tangled up with people’s sentiments about President Trump and 2020,” he said. 

Mesnard added that his frustration is with Democrats, not Trump: “I’m not trying to place blame on him; don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The opposition did a relatively consistent job of saying this is all feeding into the quote-unquote Big Lie.”

Then there’s the fact that Proposition 309 was a notably harsh voter ID law. It was more restrictive than the measures passed in the last decade in Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma. And it zipped far beyond the voter ID law Arizona adopted in 2004.

The measure would have required anyone voting in person to use a photo ID: This would have eliminated voters’ current ability to present two documents as alternatives to a photo ID—say, a bank statement, lease agreement, or utility bill. 

It would also have made it harder for Arizonans to vote by mail, a widespread approach to voting there. Ballotpedia found at least 75 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail in every general election between 2014 and 2020. Proposition 309 would have added more requirements for mail voters: They would have also had to fill out and enclose an affidavit including their driver’s license or ID card number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, or a unique registration number assigned to them by the state’s elections office.

The state has enabled voting by mail since the early 1990s. By 2007, when the legislature created a permanent early voting roll, “Arizona had so many people voting by mail that we literally couldn’t keep up with the applications,” Patrick said.

She added, “Arizonans have been doing this for a long time, and they love to do it, until and unless you have a presidential candidate, and then an incumbent president, suggesting voting by mail is fraudulent.”

Patrick, who now works as co-CEO of The Election Center, the national organization representing state and local elections officials, said Arizonans have had a long time to observe that stricter voter ID requirements don’t just ensnare fraudsters. Not everyone has an identification card, and some who do have ID that lacks a photo or an address.

“These are people saying, ‘I voted for that proposition in 2004, but I didn’t think it would affect me because it was just about fraud and it was just going to affect those other people,’” Patrick said. “Arizonans remember that, and they know that you can be a valid, eligible voter and not have an ID that is required under these specific types of laws.”

Native voters would have felt the brunt of the burdens proposed under Proposition 309, The Arizona Republic documented in October. Many tribes use identity cards that lack photos or home addresses, or otherwise don’t line up with state government standards.

“The reality for Native Americans who don’t have the same type of access to services whether it is the government, or any other things, this just needlessly complicates our ability to vote,” Kris Beecher, a lawyer in Arizona who is a member of the Navajo Nation, told The Republic. Nationwide analyses show that voter ID laws burden more people of color and reduce their participation.

That was of primary concern for groups that advocate for tribal communities, said Angela Willeford, intergovernmental relations project manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

“We’re nonpartisan, but we said ‘vote no on 309’, and we never do that typically,” she told Bolts. 

Arizona Republicans likely won’t be able to pass new statutes restricting voting rights for at least the next four years; the governor’s office flipped blue last month for the first time since 2009, handing Democrat Katie Hobbs a veto pen. But the GOP still controls the legislature, and lawmakers could vote again to place a measure like Proposition 309 directly on the ballot, circumventing Hobbs. Mesnard told Bolts he isn’t sure it will. 

Since their defeat, Republicans like Lake and Finchem have fanned false conspiracies about the results and some lawmakers have signaled they will take up the issue.

But Patrick said state and local elections administrators in Arizona are doing more public education than ever around how elections are run, and said she’s heartened that journalistic outlets are dedicating more resources to the elections beat. 

“We used to lament about toiling away in obscurity,” the former Maricopa County official said.

Opponents of 309 prevailed narrowly, but in defeating the measure, Gonski believes, “The people of Arizona started to say that we’re not prepared to give up easier access to democracy in exchange for more heightened security checks on top of what we have. They started to say, enough.”

The post In Rejecting Voter ID Measure, Arizonans Bucked History and Surprised Advocates  appeared first on Bolts.