Multiple property owners have bemoaned a situation to me they consider “taxation without representation.” They have businesses or land within Columbia but don’t live inside the city limits. That means they pay property taxes but don’t get a choice in electing the aldermen who set those taxes.
For example, a city resident would have votes for mayor, alderman-at-large, alderman of their ward and county supervisor. A county resident owning property in the city limits — a very common scenario — would only have a vote for county supervisor — and supervisors are typically wary to get involved in city business even if the area is included in their district.
It’s a legitimate complaint, but there’s not much anyone can do about it right now. Mississippi law requires residency to register to vote. More specifically, you must have lived within an incorporated municipality for at least 30 days before becoming eligible to cast a ballot. Property ownership has nothing to do with it.
Changing that would require action by the Legislature, and maybe U.S. Justice Department OK to make sure any changes in voting law didn’t have racial motivations, although that pre-clearance is no longer mandatory on every voting law change since a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
So it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, but other states have demonstrated that it can be done.
The Constitution originally set no qualifications for voters, leaving it up to states. Most states restricted it to white men (Mississippi’s original constitution of 1817, interestingly, required men to serve in the militia to get a vote). States later approved amendments to the Constitution that made it illegal to base voter qualifications on gender or race. But there still remains a lot of leeway for states in other regards of how voter qualification works. We typically think it’s all based on where you live but there are exceptions.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 12 states allow some form of non-resident voting. Connecticut, Delaware and New Mexico allow non-residents to vote in city elections, and nine states have laws that leave it up to cities to decide whether to give ballot access to nonresident property owners or permit it on special votes such as issuing bonds or water districts.
It’s particularly common in places with seasonal residents. They have a legitimate interest in the affairs of the place where they own a second home and live for part of the year, even though their official domicile remains in another state.
Three-quarters of the property owners in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for example, are non-residents, and so the tourist town on the Atlantic Ocean with a population of 1,300 gives them votes. Non-residents have even won seats on the city council, according to a brief by the American Constitution Society.
A plan that might work in Mississippi comes from Connecticut. It lets property owners vote if their annual tax bill is at least $1,000 unless a municipality limits that right. That would seem like a reasonable law; someone paying that much of a tax bill should have some say-so.
A potential pitfall, though, would be in hurting minority voter strength. In cities throughout Mississippi, whites own the majority of property, while blacks make up the majority of the population. Allowing property owners to vote could be a way of trying to get black elected officials out of office, something the feds would quickly clamp down on as a violation of the 15th Amendment.
But Mississippi could figure out a way to give non-resident property owners their due without doing it in a racially discriminatory way.
Federal courts in a case involving a Colorado resort town, for example, found that cities could enfranchise more voters by expanding the rights of non-resident voters but not disenfranchise voters by taking votes away.
This is an area where experimentation on a small scale is needed. Let someone propose a law in the legislature, based on a model that has worked elsewhere, to get the discussion started, and then let a couple of cities give it a try.
I know quite a few property owners in Marion County who would be happy to let Columbia be one of the test cases.
• Charlie Smith is the editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Contact him at csmith@columbianprogress.com.
