STARKVILLE – Predicting turnout in the 2015 general election in Mississippi will be difficult if not impossible, and that fact makes projecting the fate of the hottest race on the ballot — the decision regarding Initiative 42 — even more difficult.
But a look back just four years at state voter behavior provides some suggestions.
In the 2011 Mississippi general election, some 893,648 voters turned to vote in the governor’s race between eventual winner Republican Phil Bryant and Democrat Johnny Dupree.
Much farther down the 2011 ballot were three ballot initiatives.
Initiative 26 was the so-called “personhood” initiative which proposed to redefine the word “person” in the state constitution to include fertilized human eggs and undeveloped embryos. Some 500,459 (57.63 percent) voted against it to 367,991 “yes” votes, and the initiative failed.
The second ballot question was Initiative No. 27, the voter ID amendment, which sought to implement virtually the mirror image of the Indiana voter ID law in Mississippi that had previously passed muster with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Voter ID passed with 538,656 (62.07 percent) votes to 329,105 opposed. Many believed that Republicans would be motivated to turn out in higher numbers to vote for it, but in reality it apparently motivated Democrats to turn out to vote against it as well.
The third 2011 ballot initiative was Initiative No. 31, the eminent domain initiative. The ballot wording is: “Should government be prohibited from taking private property by eminent domain and then transferring it to other persons?” The voters approved it by a whopping 638,527 (73.07 percent) to 235,411 – despite this being one of the few issues in which former Gov. Haley Barbour was totally out of step with the majority of the state’s voters.
So in the cases of Initiative 42 and Initiative 42A, the first question will ask them to choose between “either measure” or “neither measure” becoming law. Then, voters will confront the actual initiative questions, which they can vote for or against, regardless of their answer to the first question.
If a majority chooses “either measure,” then the measure from the second question with the most votes will become law, so long as that measure also receives at least 40 percent of the total number of ballots cast in the election. If a majority chooses “neither measure,” then neither amendment becomes law.
In other words, initiative voting is long, unwieldy and difficult. It was designed to be so.
• Sid Salter is director of the Office of University Relations at Mississippi State University. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com.
