Mississippi Today
Key legislator wants runoff provision for all Mississippi elections

Legislation passed by voters would have enacted runoff elections for the first time in Mississippi history if a candidate for any of the eight statewide offices had failed to garner a majority vote last week.
At least one key legislator wants to extend runoffs to all offices – both local and districtwide, such as elections for legislative seats or county positions. Senate Elections Chair Jeff Tate, R-Meridian, says he will file a bill in the upcoming 2024 session to create runoffs for all offices in Mississippi.
“I don’t want to see people elected with a small percentage of the vote,” said Tate. “We want to see people elected with support from a majority of the electorate. I do not know what the appetite of the (Elections) Committee is to consider that. But I will file that bill.”
Tate is in position to have input on the runoff issue as chair of the Senate Elections Committee. There is no guarantee Lt. Gov Delbert Hosemann will reappoint Tate as Elections Committee chair for the new four-year term starting in January, though it would be unusual for him not to be reappointed.
A runoff can occur in statewide offices between the top two vote-getters when no candidate obtains a majority of the vote, or 50% plus one. A runoff was enacted for the office of governor and the other seven statewide elections in 2020 when the Mississippi Constitution was changed to remove an antiquated provision that mandated the state House select a winner from the top two vote-getters for any statewide office where no candidate obtained a majority of the popular vote and won the most votes in a majority of the House districts.
During the recently completed 2023 November general election, there was a candidate receiving a majority vote in each of the eight statewide elections, thus eliminating the need for a runoff. Incumbent Republican Gov. Tate Reeves came the closest to not capturing the majority vote in his reelection bid against Democrat Brandon Presley. With votes still being counted, Reeves is winning win 52% of the vote and avoiding a runoff by about 25,110 votes.
The publicity surrounding the possibility of a runoff for the eight statewide posts confused many people into thinking there would be runoffs possible in all general elections. At one point after the Nov. 7 election, some counties in southwest Mississippi believed there would be runoffs in supervisors elections where no candidate garnered a majority vote.
But that was not the case, though Tate would like it to be.
The original 1890 Constitution mandated runoffs if no candidate obtained a majority vote in party primary elections, but not general elections. Instead, the constitution contained the language sending the eight statewide offices to the House to be decided.
There have been many instances in Mississippi history of candidates winning general elections with less than a majority vote. For instance, in 1987 Margaret “Wootsie” Tate won the state Senate District 47 post on the Gulf Coast with 42% of the vote in a three-way race.
Perhaps the most notable instance of a Mississippi politician winning an important seat without garnering a majority vote came in the 1978 race for the open U.S. Senate seat when Republican Thad Cochran won the three-way race with 45% of the vote. Cochran went on to win six more contests for the U.S. Senate – most by comfortable margins or with no opposition. There was not in 1978 and still is no requirement for a runoff in a general election for a federal office in Mississippi.
Under the state constitution, if a non-statewide general election is a tie, its outcome is to be determined by a game of chance. Mississippi has over the years seen some races determined by drawing of straws or some other game of chance.
Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia are the only states with general election runoff provisions. And the dynamics are different in Louisiana since there are no party primaries. In Louisiana candidates from all parties run together and if a candidate does not obtain a majority vote the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff.
Some states are beginning to enact what is known as ranked-choice voting. The system allows voters to select a top choice for an office and then a second choice, third choice and so on.
If a candidate wins a majority of the vote, the ranked-choice voting is not a factor. But if no candidate wins a majority, the losing candidate is eliminated and the votes of that candidate go to other candidates based on the rankings voters gave to the losing candidate.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies
April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”
He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914.
In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.”
In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.”
In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness.
Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget
On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.
Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.
Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.
Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.
The fight centers around multiple factors, including:
- Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
- Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
- Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
- Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.
It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.
But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.
It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.
According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.
The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.
As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.
But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.
In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Mississippi Today
1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed
April 26, 1964

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention.
The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.”
In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity.
In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election.
The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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