U.S. Supreme Court Leaves Jim Crow-Era Voting Ban in Place

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era practice of removing voting rights from people convicted of certain felonies, including nonviolent crimes such as forgery and timber theft.

The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Mississippi residents who have completed their sentences, but who have been unable to regain their right to vote.

Petition for a writ of certiorari — Read the Hopkins v. Watson plaintiffs’ petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court’s action let stand a ruling by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that rejected the claim that permanent loss of voting rights amounted to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution. Mississippi legislators, not the courts, must decide whether to change the laws, the 5th Circuit said.

Using different legal arguments, lawyers failed to get the Supreme Court to take up the felon disenfranchisement issue in 2023, over a dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Mississippi’s list of disqualifying crimes was “adopted for an illicit discriminatory purpose,” Jackson wrote.

After the state adopted that law as part of its 1890 constitution, along with other provisions like poll taxes and literacy tests, James K. Vardaman, one of its drafters, explained the goal: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter … Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n–ger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the n–ger.”

No justice noted a dissent from Monday’s order.

Most of the people affected are disenfranchised for life because the state provides few options for restoring ballot access. Lawyers who brought the case to the court argued that the state is an outlier and its bar on voting is a vestige of segregation.

An old black and white photo portrait of a man in a dark suit sitting in a chair — James K. Vardaman, a former Mississippi speaker of the House, governor and U.S. senator, seen here in 1912, was known as “The Great White Chief.” He said he and other Mississippi lawmakers designed the 1890 Mississippi State Constitution to “eliminate” Black voting power. Photo courtesy U.S. Library of Congress.

Authors of the state’s 1890 constitution based disenfranchisement on a list of crimes they thought Black people were more likely to commit, the lawyers noted in their arguments. But the state responded that the Supreme Court has previously made clear that states may refuse to deny the right to vote to people convicted of felonies.

About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black. Nearly 50,000 people were disenfranchised under the state’s felony voting ban between 1994 and 2017. More than 29,000 of them have completed their sentences, and about 58% of that group are Black, according to an expert who analyzed data for plaintiffs challenging the voting ban.

To regain voting rights in Mississippi, a person convicted of a disenfranchising crime must receive a governor’s pardon or win permission from two-thirds of the state House and Senate. In recent years, legislators have restored voting rights for only a few people.