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Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

About 235,000 Mississippians can’t vote because of felony convictions – the highest percentage in the nation.

Mississippi now denies a higher percentage of its residents the right to vote because of felony convictions than any state in the country, according to a recent study.

In Mississippi, 235,150 people, or 10.6% of the state’s voting age population, have lost their right to vote, according to a recent study by The Sentencing Project, a national nonprofit that advocates for voting and criminal justice issues. Since 2016, Mississippi has moved from second to first highest percentage in the nation.

Mississippi also has the third highest percentage of disenfranchised Black residents of any state in the nation: 130,500 Black Mississippians, or 16% of that voting age population, cannot vote. Mississippi is third to Wyoming (36.22%) and Tennessee (21.65%).

Both Mississippi percentages are well above national averages: total felony disenfranchisement is 2.3% nationally, and the national average for disenfranchised African Americans is 6.3%.

The Mississippi Constitution, written by white lawmakers in 1890, contains a list of crimes for which a person convicted of a felony loses voting rights. The original list of crimes deemed to be disenfranchising has been updated by official opinions from the attorney general’s office through the years to coincide with modern criminal law.

Disenfranchising crimes include: arson, armed robbery, bigamy, bribery, embezzlement, extortion, felony bad check, felony shoplifting, forgery, larceny, murder, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, rape, receiving stolen property, robbery, theft, timber larceny, unlawful taking of a motor vehicle, statutory rape, carjacking and larceny under lease or rental agreement.

There are other crimes, such as crimes connected with the sale of drugs, where a person convicted of a felony does not lose the right to vote and actually is eligible to vote while incarcerated.

Felony disenfranchisement language was added to the state Constitution in the 1890s as one of several attempts to prevent Black Mississippians from voting. With African Americans still being disproportionately convicted of crimes, that continues to be the effect of the disenfranchisement language.

A 2018 analysis by Mississippi Today found that 61% of the Mississippians who have lost their rights to vote are African American, despite the fact that African Americans represent 36% of the state’s total voting-age population.

Most states restore voting rights for people convicted of felonies at some point after they finish their sentence or complete their parole and probation. But in Mississippi, people convicted of many crimes — some of the crimes violent, and some not — never have their rights restored unless done so by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of the Legislature or by a gubernatorial pardon.

READ MORE: Not all ex-felons are barred from voting in Mississippi, but no one is telling them that.

Legislation to automatically restore voting rights to felons at some point after serving their sentence is introduced most years in the Legislature and in past years has passed one chamber, but died in the other. There are federal lawsuits pending claiming that permanent disenfranchisement violates the U.S. Constitution.

In the 2020 session, the Legislature restored the right to vote to six felons. In 2019, legislators restored suffrage to 16 – the most since 2004 when voting rights were restored to 34. Between 2000 and 2020, the Legislature averaged restoring voting rights to 7.3 felons per year.

In a 2016 study, The Sentencing Project estimated that Florida was first in the nation for total felony disenfranchisement at 10.4%, and Mississippi was second at 9.6%.

Florida voters approved a citizen-sponsored initiative in 2018 to restore voting rights to most after their sentences were completed. Still, 7.7% of Floridians convicted of felonies have not had their rights restored in large part because they have not paid off fines and fees mandated by the Florida Legislature.

But no such major reform has passed in Mississippi.

“Mississippi is one of those states with indefinite disenfranchisement, essentially lifetime disenfranchisement,” said University of Minnesota professor Christopher Uggen, the lead researcher on the Sentencing Project report. “Many of the other states have pared back those restrictions… In Mississippi, it is for life.

“That means if you had a felony conviction in 1972 you are still locked out of that process without some extraordinary effort,” Uggen continued. “And frankly the number of restorations in Mississippi, the people who go through the formal process, is tiny. Clearly, in my view, this is a vestige of the long civil rights process where we had very restrictive laws in the 19th century, and some of them exist today.”

The Sentencing Project held a recent conference call to release the report that detailed how the number of disenfranchised felons had dropped from more than 6.1 million in 2016 to about 5.2 million in 2020 as states like Florida and others have reformed their laws. In many states, governors have issued executive orders restoring rights to thousands of felons.

Shahur Abdullah, who served 41 years in prison in Nebraska and founded JustUs 15 Vote, had his rights restored when the state of Nebraska changed its law from a permanent ban to a ban for two years after being released from prison. He said voting was particularly important to him because his father, a Mississippi native, was not able to vote in his home state after fighting for the United States in the Korean Conflict. Abdullah’s father later moved his family from Philadelphia, Mississippi, to Nebraska.

“Given my own personal history, and this country’s history of systemic racism and white supremacy, I felt the full weight of my ancestors behind me when I voted for the first time,” Abdullah said. “We ought to remember that this country was founded on the principle of no taxation without representation. I was immediately required to pay taxes upon my release from incarceration, but my vote wasn’t accepted. This should never be the case.”

The post Study: 11% of all Mississippians, 16% of Black Mississippians can’t vote because of felony convictions appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A new charter school will be opening its doors in Canton in the 2022-2023 school year.

The Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board last week approved SR1’s application to open the SR1 College Preparatory and STEM Academy. The school will serve kindergarten and first grade in its opening year, then expand each year after to serve kindergarten through fifth grade. The school would serve 450 students once expansion is complete.

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Tamu Green, founder of SR1 (Scientific Research)

SR1 (Scientific Research) was founded by Tamu Green in 2005 and collaborates with public and private partners to decrease disparities in Mississippi, specifically among minorities. The group applied to open a school in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and was denied, but has since worked with the board to address deficiencies.

The board also denied an application by Voices for Education to open a school in the North Bolivar Consolidated School District.

The board followed the recommendations of School Works, an educational consulting group out of Massachusetts hired to evaluate the applications.

Charters are public schools that do not charge tuition, and are held to the same academic and accountability standards as traditional public schools. By law, charter schools have the capacity for more flexibility for teachers and administrators when it comes to student instruction. Unlike traditional public schools, charters do not have school boards or operate under a local school district, although they are funded by school districts based on their enrollment.

Charter schools can apply directly to the authorizer board if they’re planning to open in a D or F district. If an operator wants to open in an A, B, or C district, they need to get approval from the local school board.

Each year the authorizer board goes through a months-long process to screen potential operators and grant them the authority to open a school in Mississippi. This year the timeline for the 2020 application cycle has been slightly pushed back because of the pandemic.

The post Canton’s first charter school will open in 2022 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

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Mississippi has fewer persuadable voters per capita than any other state. Can Mike Espy persuade the unpersuadable to win the Senate race?

Mississippi is nicknamed the hospitality state, but when it comes to voting, it is the state of entrenchment.

Mississippi is the most inelastic state in the nation when it comes to voting, according to a study by the FiveThirtyEight political blog. In simpler terms, the hospitality state has fewer persuadable voters per capita than any state in the nation. Only the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., a Democratic stronghold, has fewer persuadable voters, based on the updated study.

The lack of persuadable voters highlights the obstacles faced in Mississippi by Democratic candidates and Mike Espy, specifically, in his race against Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. In a sense, all the momentum appears to be on Espy’s side. He has raised far more money than Hyde-Smith this year and is dominating the television airwaves across the state.

Yet the Cook Political Report, a national political website that forecasts elections, ranks the Mississippi Senate race in the “solid Republican” category. The aforementioned FiveThirtyEight gives Hyde-Smith a 91% chance of winning.

The national forecasters give Democratic Senate candidates in Kansas, Montana and Alaska better odds of winning than they give Espy. What gives? Are those states more Democratic than Mississippi? In the 2016 presidential election, Trump won Mississippi by 18%, compared to more than 20% in Montana and Kansas and by almost 15% in Alaska.

The issue, according to FiveThirtyEight, is not that Mississippi is more Republican than those states, but that it has fewer voters willing to cross party lines. The blog says elastic voters are more likely to be swayed by political events — the economy, a scandal, a pandemic.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend here is how inelastic the country is as a whole. The study describes Mississippi and many other Southern states as having “ lots of white evangelical Protestants and white voters with conservative views on racial issues who rarely if ever vote for Democratic candidates.” The study identifies Kansas, Montana and Alaska as very white states, but “not as evangelical or racially conservative.”

Another issue that might make Mississippi a little different than states like Kansas is that Mississippi also has a high number of Democrats who also are difficult to persuade to cross party lines. Generally speaking, the vast majority of those unpersuadable Democrats are Black voters.

While not giving some of the Southern Democratic Senate candidates as much of a chance as it gives the Democrats in Kansas, Montana and Alaska, FiveThirtyEight does say the high percentage of Black voters in those Southern states gives Democrats a chance in an election cycle where it appears all the momentum is on the side of the Democrats.

A key caveat for Espy, though, is that there are more persuadable Republicans than Democrats in Mississippi. To win in November, Espy has to entice people to the polls who do not normally vote.

Many believe these are progressives who have not been enthused with the generally conservative Democrats who have run for statewide office in Mississippi. Espy, who has largely centered his 2020 campaign on race and social justice, has tried to attract those voters by embracing the national Democratic ticket to an extent that most Mississippi Democratic statewide candidates have not in past election years.

In addition, Espy must convince a small percentage of those Mississippi Republican voters to come over to his camp. Espy is trying to do that with recent ads touting the need to change the state’s trajectory to ensure young people do not leave the state, and by highlighting his willingness to work across party lines, like he did in the 1980s and 90s with Republicans like Sen. Thad Cochran and President Ronald Reagan.

To win, Espy must do both of those things: inspire new, mostly younger progressives and convince some of those traditionally unpersuadable Republicans.

Espy maintains that he will win if Black voters in the Nov. 3 election make up 35.5% of the total vote, and that if he increases his share of the white vote from the 18% he garnered in his 2018 Senate special election against Hyde-Smith to 22%. Based on early absentee voting numbers, there is a strong likelihood that the African American turnout will be higher than the 32.5% the Espy campaign says he earned in the 2018 special election.

If that’s the case, that might leave Espy just needing to persuade those unpersuadable Mississippi voters to win. It’s a tall task, but time will tell if it’s possible.

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The pandemic continues to play havoc with college football — Southern Miss football, in particular.

The Golden Eagles’ scheduled Saturday game with UTEP at El Paso has been postponed indefinitely because of COVID-19 cases within the Southern Miss team.

This makes the second straight week, Southern Miss will not play because of the pandemic. The Oct. 10 Florida Atlantic (FAU) Conference USA game, which was scheduled to be played in Hattiesburg, was also postponed — that one because of COVID-19 issues within the FAU program.

Jeremy McClain

“The health and safety of everyone involved continues to be our guiding force which made the decision to postpone the game the appropriate one,” USM athletic director Jeremy McClain said. “We are disappointed for our student-athletes who will not get a chance to participate for a second straight weekend, however, we will work with UTEP, in conjunction with Conference USA to reschedule this game for later this season.”

Earlier this week, McClain said he hoped the FAU game could be rescheduled at the end of the regular season, currently scheduled to end with a Nov. 27 game at UAB. That FAU-USM game presumably would be played the first weekend in December.

Southern Miss has not played since 41-31 victory over North Texas on Oct. 3 at Denton, Texas. The Eagles’ next scheduled game is against Hugh Freeze-coached Liberty University Oct. 24 at Lynchburg, Va.

In all, Southern Miss has had seven scheduling changes forced by the pandemic for a season that is now seven weeks old.

Nationwide, 32 NCAA Division I games have been postponed or canceled because of the pandemic.

Two Southeastern Conference games, scheduled for Saturday, have been postponed: LSU at Florida, and Vanderbilt at Missouri. Both have been tentatively rescheduled for Dec. 12.

All this football scheduling news comes amid news of a resurgence of COVID-19 cases around the country, including Mississippi.

The post Yet another COVID-19-induced schedule change for USM: UTEP game postponed appeared first on Mississippi Today.