Mississippi lawmakers try to make ballot initiatives more inaccessible

Political operatives face a new reality: do most of the state's voters support abortion access?

Mississippi has a ballot initiative process in which they can change the constitution to protect abortion access. Because that’s possible, Republican lawmakers in the state have sought to change the approach to exclude abortion as something its voters could weigh in on. 

Currently, they can’t start a ballot initiative process because a court ruled that the process that had been used to pass a legalized marijuana vote was not permissible to use. For ballot initiatives to be possible, the state legislature has to approve a new process. That’s where political football has taken place in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision.

I spoke to Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, about what they intend to do to overcome the obstacles to get abortion to be once again legal and available to the state’s residents. 

“Poll after poll after poll after poll shows that Mississippi doesn't want a state that doesn't have abortion care,” Roberts said. “And if you look nationwide, every time that abortion has been on the ballot since Dobbs, it has passed.” 

States like Mississippi and Alabama may seem unattainable for abortion rights activists. A Mississippi Today/Siena College poll of residents who said they would vote in the Republican primary found that 45% support repealing the state’s “trigger law” that bans most abortions in the state. Another 44% of likely Republican voters oppose repealing the ban, and 11% said they were unsure.

the one time that Mississippians voted on the issue of abortion under the old and now invalid initiative, they rejected the so-called “personhood amendment” by a 58% to 42% margin. The personhood proposal on the ballot in 2011 defined a person “to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof.” Then-Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant said at the time a vote against personhood would be “a victory for Satan,” according to Mississippi Today. 

Mississippi is a heavily gerrymandered state with a history of voter suppression. It’s also the state most associated with white supremacy in America. It is nearly 60 percent white, with about 40 percent being minorities, primarily Black. With that proportion of black voters, one would think a Democratic victory would occasionally be possible in statewide elections. The national party’s positions on abortion and gun control were cited as reasons why they couldn’t compete in the state. If abortion becomes less divisive of an issue in the state, it’s possible Democrats could compete for positions like senator and governor. 

About 20 percent of Mississippi’s population lives below the poverty line. One of the efforts in the Democratic party that may find support there is the Poor People’s Campaign that the Rev. William Barber leads. 

The thing that concerns Roberts the most is that before Dobbs, Mississippi leaders said that we should make abortion a matter once again left to the states to decide on. 

“Now that it's possible to do that, they're too scared,” Roberts said. “Because they know they'll lose.”