The 2020 Mississippi Legislature embraced runoff elections despite racist origin

By Bobby Harrison | Originally published by Mississippi Today

Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson’s recent reminder that there will be no possibility of runoff elections in Mississippi’s upcoming U.S. Senate and House races conjures up memories from the historic 2020 legislative session.

The 2020 session of the Mississippi Legislature will be remembered for removing some long lingering links to the state’s racist past, and for that, lawmakers should be commended.

The Legislature, most notably, removed the old state flag that displayed the Confederate battle symbol prominently in its design.

Replacing the flag was not the only action taken by the 2020 Legislature to deal with vestiges of the state’s racial sins.

They also removed a Jim Crow provision of  the 1890 state constitution designed to make it more difficult for Black Mississippians to be elected to statewide office.

At the strong insistence of U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan of the Southern District of Mississippi, the 2020 Legislature put on the ballot a proposal to amend the state constitution to remove a provision saying that if no candidate for statewide offices (not federal posts) garnered a majority of the vote and the most votes in a majority of the 122 House districts, the House would select the winner from the top two vote-getters. The provision, it was clear from the narrative of the day, was put in the 1890 constitution to prevent Black people, who at the time constituted a majority of the state’s population, from winning the office of governor or any of the other Mississippi statewide posts.

Surprisingly, Vermont is now the only state that still has a provision throwing statewide elections to its Legislature if no candidate obtains a majority of the vote.

While Mississippi legislators removed some of those bygone connections to racism and the state’s Jim Crow laws during that historic session, they embraced another – runoff elections. They replaced the House electoral process for statewide officeholders with a runoff.

It should be noted that the Legislature opted to place on the ballot for voters to decide a proposal to adopt the runoff in place of the electoral process. Legislators could have just as easily not included the runoff provision in the proposal or at least have allowed voters to decide whether to have a runoff or do like the vast majority of states and recognize the person with the most votes – a majority or not – as the winner of the election.

 By adopting the runoff, Mississippi joined Georgia as the only other state that mandated a runoff if no statewide candidate garnered a majority in a general election. The Georgia provision applies to both federal and state offices while in Mississippi, as Watson pointed out, the runoff occurs only for state offices.

So, in the Nov. 3 U.S. Senate election in Mississippi, the candidate – Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Democrat Scott Colom or independent Ty Pinkins – who captures the most votes, majority or not, will win the post.

Interestingly, Georgia imposed its runoff in the 1960s when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s electoral provision that was remarkably similar to Mississippi’s that was removed in 2020.

According to published reports, Denmark Grover, the then-Georgia legislator who played a key role in creating the runoff, did not try to hide his intent.

“If you want to establish if I was racially prejudiced, I was,” he said years later. “If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was.”

Louisiana also has a runoff election, but the circumstances are different since the state does not have traditional party primaries. Instead, candidates from all parties are on the same ballot and the top two vote-getters, if no one obtains a majority,  advance to a runoff.

A handful of states, mostly those from the South where Jim Crow ruled for decades, have runoffs for party primary elections if no candidate obtains a majority.

But only Georgia and Mississippi go that step further to require runoffs in the general election.

As Georgia trends blue or toward the Democratic Party, it will be interesting to see if there are efforts to remove the runoff there.

And if that happens, Mississippi will be the only state with a general election runoff and it is not a remnant of the state’s racial past. It was adopted in the 2020s. 

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article