FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JACKSON, Miss. - The ultimate voter suppression bill is impending in the Mississippi House of Representatives. House Bill 1510 has passed the House Elections Committee and is headed to the full House for vote. The American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi issued the following statement:
"HB 1510 is a collection of election policies that have individually, and rightfully so, failed in previous legislative sessions. This extreme bill is a clear attempt by the bill’s authors and Mississippi’s Secretary of State to overhaul and undermine the voting process in our state.
The harms of House Bill 1510 include closed third-party election auditing and multiple forms of voter purging. The bill would disenfranchise voters by forcing election commissioners to remove voters from the voter rolls for simply choosing not to vote in an election. It would use faulty and outdated databases in an attempt to identify non-citizens as registered voters. HB 1510 also proposes using public dollars to fund election audits, while shielding results from public records requests.
Fundamentally, the right to vote should not be a “use it or lose it” policy. Attempts to purge non-citizens from Mississippi’s voter rolls are solutions searching for a problem. Audits meant to encourage election transparency must be fully accessible to the public.
The contents of House Bill 1510 are ripe for litigation against the state and should not become law in Mississippi. A better use of taxpayer dollars is policies and procedures that expand access to voting through online voter registration and early voting."
