The Mississippi Senate passed part of a plan to restore the ballot initiative process on Thursday, meaning the conversation hasn’t died yet in the east corridor of the capitol.
Lawmakers narrowly approved Senate Bill 2770 with a 26-21 vote and little Republican support after an hour and a half of conversation on the floor. The legislation did not include a signature count needed for a proposed law to be put on the ballot by citizens. However, it did provide a list of requirements that could be part of a new ballot initiative process in Mississippi.
“If we do not adopt this bill, there’s no reason for us to discuss the number of signatures required,” Sen. David Parker, a Republican from Olive Branch who wrote the bill, told the floor prior to the vote.
Stipulations included in the statutory implementation were: an initiative must contain a single subject, its sponsor must be an elector of the state and identify the source of revenue for the issue and how it would be funded without imposing on the Capital Expense or Rainy Day Fund, and it must be submitted 90 days before the start of a legislative session. The third of which would give lawmakers a chance to pass an initiative petition before it goes on the ballot.
The Legislative Budget Office would produce a fiscal analysis of what implementation of an initiative would look like with a 50-word fiscal impact being included beside each measure on the ballot. Parker and company also decided that only two initiatives would be allowed on a single ballot, going against the wishes of some lawmakers, and initiatives could only go up for a vote during presidential or gubernatorial elections due to the higher rate of voters Mississippi typically sees in those elections.
The most controversial part of SB 2770 was an amendment approved to require 67 percent of total votes cast to pass a ballot initiative. The original text had the number at 60 percent, which was still higher than the previous initiative process stripped by the Mississippi Supreme Court over a technicality issue that arose after medical marijuana was successfully passed by voters in 2020.
As some lawmakers pointed out that they only need 50 percent plus one vote to win an election, Parker fired back during proceedings, saying that changing state law calls for a higher threshold.
“I think the higher the threshold, the more important the issue is,” Parker said.
One of the fears of those in opposition to the 67 percent mark is that grassroots campaigns will struggle to gain traction with such a high number at play while supporters of the higher threshold believe it will prevent out-of-state interests from flooding money into the state to get issues on the ballot.
Unlike a ballot initiative bill passed in the House of Representatives earlier this session, the Senate’s did not include room for the legislature to place an alternative on the ballot. In the past, alternatives have been created by lawmakers to compete against petitions a majority of both chambers disagree with.
While a separate Senate resolution that would have decided the number of signatures needed to propose a new law died on calendar Thursday night, the House was clear in its bill that eight percent of total qualified voters – or 166,000 based on the 2023 election – would need to sign a petition. In previous sessions, the Senate has thrown around numbers much higher than that with last year’s recommendation sitting at 240,000.
The House plan also included a couple of GOP-led caveats in its version of restoring the ballot initiative process, including not allowing people to make changes to the state constitution, abortion laws, PERS, or local laws. Some of that was set to be considered as part of the Senate’s companion resolution that died.
If any bill to restore the ballot initiative process is passed by lawmakers before sine die in early May, it is expected to be a hefty mix of both chambers’ initial ideas.
