Sun Herald: “Mississippi’s voter identification requirement could be at risk if the state Supreme Court strikes down the medical marijuana initiative approved by voters in November.
After all, the same process employed to put medical marijuana on the ballot was used in 2011 to enact a mandate that Mississippi voters must have a government-issued photo identification to vote.
Would it not make sense that if one was improperly on the ballot then so was the other?…In the case of medical marijuana, the city of Madison filed a lawsuit before the November general election challenging the process used to gather the signatures to place the issue on the ballot.
When the initiative process was placed in the Constitution in the early 1990s, Mississippi had five congressional districts. To successfully place an initiative on the ballot, signatures must be obtained equally from all five of those districts. The state now has four congressional districts making it mathematically impossible, the city of Madison contends in its ongoing lawsuit, to meet the constitutional mandate.
For countless initiative efforts since Mississippi lost a U.S. House seat based on the 2000 Census, initiative sponsors had been striving, based on the instructions they received from the Secretary of State, to gather one-fifth of the signatures from the five congressional districts in effect in the 1990s. Everyone accepted that as a commonsense approach.
But then along came the city of Madison and its lawsuit. The Supreme Court punted on deciding the issue before the November general election, but it has now agreed to hear oral arguments on the case in April.
If the Supreme Court does strike down the medical marijuana initiative, it only makes sense that some group would file a lawsuit demanding that voter identification also be found invalid.”