Mississippi Today
Lawmakers move bill to eliminate 5-day period to count mailed ballots
The Senate Elections Committee on Tuesday advanced legislation to eliminate the five days local elections workers have to count mail-in absentee ballots.
The majority-Republican committee passed Senate Bill 2579 with little debate, sending it to the full Senate.
“In my opinion, when we have votes that are being counted after Election Day like this, whether there's any bad intent or not, it's not received by the public well,” Senate Elections Committee Chairman Jeremy England, author of the bill, said.
To address concerns with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the GOP-dominated Legislature passed a law to allow local election workers to count mailed absentee ballots for up to five days after the election date, but only if the ballots were postmarked by the election date. Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed the bill into law.
The legislation comes at a time when the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi GOP and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi have filed federal litigation against Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson and several local elections officials to prevent the five-day timeframe from being used in federal elections.
A veterans advocacy group and a disability rights organization are currently attempting to intervene in the litigation to argue the lawsuit should be dismissed. U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. has not issued any substantive rulings on the suit.
England, R-Vancleave, told Mississippi Today that the pending federal litigation did not have any influence over his decision to advance the legislation.
“It's time to move this back to the way we had it before COVID,” England said.
The second-term lawmaker also said he plans to pass legislation out of the Senate committee that creates in-person absentee voting and reforms the state's campaign finance laws.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1892
MAY 21, 1892
Crusading journalist Ida B. Wells published a column exposing the lynchings of African-American men and denouncing claims that the lynchings were meant to protect white women.
Her anti-lynching campaign came after a mob killed three of her friends, who had reportedly opened a grocery store that competed with a white-owned store in Memphis.
Upset by Wells' writings, a white mob destroyed her presses and threatened to kill her if she ever published again. She left Memphis for Chicago, but she continued to expose lynchings, calling for national legislation to make lynching a crime.
In 1898, she took her protest to the White House.
“Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 and 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless,” she wrote. “We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which opened in 2018, features a reflection space in honor of her.
Congress finally passed an anti-lyncing law in the 2021-22 session. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act defines lynching as a federal hate crime.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1961
MAY 20, 1961
A white mob of more than 300, including Klansmen, attacked Freedom Riders at the Greyhound Bus Station in Montgomery, Alabama. Future Congressman John Lewis was among them.
“An angry mob came out of nowhere, hundreds of people, with bricks and balls, chains,” Lewis recalled.
After beating on the riders, the mob turned on reporters and then Justice Department official John Seigenthaler, who was beaten unconscious and left in the street after helping two riders.
“Then they turned on my colleagues and started beating us and beat us so severely, we were left bloodied and unconscious in the streets of Montgomery,” Lewis recalled.
As the mob headed his way, Freedom Rider James Zwerg said he asked for God to be with him, and “I felt absolutely surrounded by love. I knew that whether I lived or died, I was going to be OK.”
The mob beat him so badly that his suit was soaked in blood.
“There was nothing particularly heroic in what I did,” he said. “If you want to talk about heroism, consider the Black man who probably saved my life. This man in coveralls, just off of work, happened to walk by as my beating was going on and said ‘Stop beating that kid. If you want to beat someone, beat me.' And they did. He was still unconscious when I left the hospital.”
To quell the violence, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent in 450 federal marshals.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: The controversial day that Robert Kennedy came to the University of Mississippi
Retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Edward Ellington talks with Mississippi Today's Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender about former U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's speech at the University of Mississippi less than four years after the riots that occurred after the integration of the school. Ellington, who at the time headed the Ole Miss Speaker's Bureau as a law school student, recalls the controversy leading up to the speech.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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