| | Court strikes down Missisissippi governor's effort to manipulate Senate race
Former RNC chair sought to put Senate race at bottom of ballotThe Mississippi Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the special election to replace Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) – who resigned last December – will appear near the top of the November ballot.
The court ruled 8 to 1 that the ballot layout approved by Republican Governor Haley Barbour violated state election law by listing the race at the very bottom of the ballot. Barbour was chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997.
The ruling is a victory for Trudy Berger, the Pike County election commissioner who filed suit on September 9 to stop the Barbour ballot.
 “We're ecstatic about the ruling,” said Berger’s attorney, Charles Griffin, “All along, my position has been that everyone deserves a fair opportunity to vote in this election.”
In Mississippi, the governor chooses the layout of the ballot from options put forward by the secretary of state. The current secretary of state is Republican Delbert Hosemann. Attorney General Jim Hood, a Democrat, argued that the ballot design was illegal, but Barbour and Hosemann disregarded the state’s top lawyer.
Many saw Barbour’s choice as a hardball political tactic to discourage voter participation in a close Senate race. Democrat Ronnie Musgrove is within striking distance of unseating former Republican congressman Roger Wicker, whom Barbour appointed last winter to replace Lott. (Barbour and Wicker are pictured together above.)
Musgrove and Barbour have their own political rivalry. Barbour defeated Musgrove, who was then the incumbent, in a bitterly contested race for governor in 2003.
Barbour’s ballot design was widely criticized as an attempt to disenfranchise voters, particularly African Americans.
The governor’s preferred design appeared to exploit what political scientists call ballot drop-off: The lower a race appears on the ballot, the fewer people will cast a vote.
Conventional wisdom has it that the Mississippi voters who are most susceptible to drop-off are also more likely to vote Democratic.
Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a September 16 statement that the Barbour ballot violated federal voting rights law and urged the Justice Department to investigate.
Attorney Charles Griffin stressed that while he had no direct evidence that Barbour intended to disenfranchise anyone, the ballot design would have had that effect.
Griffin agreed that drop-off doesn’t affect all voters equally. Less sophisticated voters are more likely to quit before they get to the end of a long ballot.
“A significant number of voters from the Delta, where I'm from originally, may be subject to that,” Griffin said.
Mississippi law stipulates that all national races must appear above state and local contests. There is no provision for treating special elections differently as far as ordering is concerned. A Senate election is a race for national office. Therefore, the Supreme Court reasoned, the special election for Senate must appear near the top of the ballot.
Barbour argued that the Musgrove/Wicker race should be at the bottom of the ballot because it is a special election. Special elections have appeared at the bottom of the Mississippi ballot on previous occasions. However, this is the first time anyone has challenged the practice in court.
Some dismiss the ballot battle as mere political posturing. Tom Freeland, an attorney from Oxford, Mississippi, disagrees. Freeland has been watching the controversy “about as closely as anyone” and reporting the legal twists and turns on his blog, folo.
“I'm in the camp that this is an issue that matters,” Freeland said, “It could suppress votes.”
Freeland also sees the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision as an important check on executive power. In his view, Barbour attempted to override a clearly written election statute for political purposes, an overreach of his authority.
“Barbour is very much a national Republican who is buying into the expansive and extreme view of executive power that the national Republicans have,” Freeland said.
“Now that the issue is settled we fully expect Governor Barbour and Secretary Hosemann will follow the law and fulfill their constitutional responsibility,” Musgrove’s campaign said in a statement issued Thursday afternoon.
Barbour’s office did not return RAW STORY’s call for comment.
The governor signaled his acquiescence to the judicial branch in a one-sentence statement on his website Thursday afternoon: "The Supreme Court has spoken; so be it."
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Lindsay Beyerstein is an investigative reporter for Raw Story, regularly covering national issues relating to civil liberties, corruption, and women’s rights. She writes regularly for other publications, such as In These Times, and her photography has been published in The Austin Chronicle, Aftenposten (Norway's second largest newspaper), and Earth Island Journal. Lindsay can be reached at lindsay@rawstory.com.
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