I found Matt Ford’s article in The New Republic on the Mississippi electoral system for statewide office rather repellantly fascinating:
Virtually every state in the Union elects its governor and other statewide offices by popular vote. Mississippi does something different. First, a candidate must win a majority of the statewide popular vote. Second, they must also win a plurality of the vote in a majority of Mississippi House of Representatives districts. If a candidate does both, they win. If they don’t, the Mississippi House chooses the winner. As with the Electoral College, the popular vote in Mississippi only matters until it doesn’t.
And why?
Though black voters outnumbered white voters in the state at the time, the 1890 constitution apportioned the state legislature to guarantee a majority of seats would be held by white lawmakers. That apportionment also affected the statewide election plan: Even if a black-supported candidate received a majority of votes, it would be almost impossible for him to clinch victory by also capturing a majority of the state House of Representatives districts. Lawmakers in those districts would then be able to elevate the second-place candidate to the governor’s mansion.
Mississippi’s white leaders did not disguise their intentions. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” James K. Vardaman, one of the constitution’s framers as well as a future governor and senator, once boasted. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics.”
The article continues to discuss the chances of a Federal lawsuit calling for the law to be stricken from the laws of Mississippi, where Mississippi is using as a defense a justification by Chief Justice Roberts himself for not interfering in the recent gerrymandering case of Wisconsin.
But this all seems a bit complex for my tastes. We already know that gerrymandering on a racial basis is not permitted (Miller v Johnson, I believe), and, if the Federal courts are willing to admit that gerrymandering is an instance of the larger category of manipulation of the electoral system for political gain at the expense of the electorate, then it’s not hard to see that this particular case is specifically concerning the manipulation of the electoral system on a racial basis. The Federal judiciary should find for the plaintiffs, in my opinion, simply based on the plain statements of Vardaman, above, back in 1890.
But there’s a deeper sociological, if not legal, issue involved here, an issue of damage. The invocation of a racial basis for selecting leaders tends to forcibly group people by race, and not by more natural interests. I wonder that Mississippi has this, to be frank, hatred-based electoral system, and also happens to be generally acknowledged as one of the unhealthiest[1] and most backwards[2] States in the Union.
Coincidental? Causative? Beats the hell out of me. But that the law continues is deeply troubling, given its avowedly racist origins, and it should be expunged, now that the Federal judiciary has the opportunity, because it seems unlikely that the citizens of the State will be able to do so on their own.
And then perhaps Mississippi can work on getting beyond race, as the racists will have one less tool to their hand for perpetuating their hatreds.
1 According to USA Today, Mississippi is #50 in life expectancy.
2 According to this Forbes story, the Mississippi public education system ranks 45th.
