Lawmakers eye changes to in-person absentee voting

Both chambers of the legislature have each passed bills to overhaul the state’s in-person absentee voting process, setting up a cross-chamber negotiation that could reshape how Mississippians cast ballots before Election Day.

Both bills seek to eliminate the longstanding ballot-envelope procedure that has governed in-person absentee voting for decades, replacing it with a machine-based tabulation system. But the two measures diverge on a critical question: How many days before an election should voters be permitted to cast their ballots?

The House bill, H.B. 447, would retain the existing 45-day in-person absentee voting window while modernizing ballot processing. The Senate’s version would compress that period to 22 days, beginning roughly three weeks before an election and continuing until noon on the Saturday before Election Day. The Senate measure would also require that in-person absentee votes be counted alongside Election Day ballots, with results announced after the polls close at 7 p.m.

State Sen. Jeremy England (R-Vancleave), the chair of the Senate Elections Committee, said he crafted the bill based on input from circuit clerks and their statewide association.

“They really want us to get rid of this absentee ballot envelope that if you go in in-person, you have to fill out your ballot,” England told a local news station over the weekend. “You put it in an envelope, sign across the flap.”

Under current law, a voter who appears at a circuit clerk’s office to vote absentee must mark a paper ballot, place it inside an official envelope, sign across the sealed flap in the presence of an attesting witness, and have the witness co-sign the envelope—a process outlined in Section 23-15-631 of the Mississippi Code. The ballot is then stored in a secure transfer case and delivered to election commissioners on Election Day, where it is opened, verified and counted separately from regular ballots.

Senate Minority Leader Derrick T. Simmons (D-Greenville) offered bipartisan support for eliminating the envelope system.

“It’s less work for all of our circuit clerks and the election commissioners who will be actually, you know, monitoring that process,” Simmons told WJTV News.

The Senate bill’s path to passage was turbulent. It initially failed on Feb. 12, 2026, by a vote of 25–24, with three senators not voting. A motion to reconsider kept the bill alive, and when it returned to the floor the following day—a deadline day for legislation originating in the Senate—it passed with 39 votes in favor and 13 against.

Both bills will now cross to the opposite chamber for consideration. As lawmakers negotiate in the coming weeks, they could merge provisions from each measure into a single bill before sending it to Gov. Tate Reeves.

The bills represent the latest chapter in a protracted effort to modernize Mississippi’s election procedures, an effort that has repeatedly stalled in the House. For three consecutive legislative sessions, England has championed early voting legislation. In 2024, his S.B. 2580 passed the Senate with bipartisan support but was killed in the House Apportionment and Elections Committee by chair Noah Sanford (R-Collins), who said circuit clerks had raised concerns about staffing and cost. In 2025, England returned with S.B. 2654, an “In-Person Early Voting Act” that would have established 15 days of no-excuse early voting. That bill passed the Senate 39–12 but was tabled in the House on a motion to reconsider.

This year’s approach marks a tactical shift. Rather than pursuing a full early voting overhaul that would replace absentee voting entirely, both chambers are moving to reform the mechanics of the existing absentee system—a potentially lower threshold for legislative consensus.

Mississippi’s restrictive approach to ballot access has deep historical roots. The state remains one of only three—alongside Alabama and New Hampshire—that does not offer some form of no-excuse early voting. Its current in-person absentee system requires voters to qualify under a limited set of criteria codified in Section 23-15-713 of the Mississippi Code: They must be over age 65, have a temporary or permanent physical disability, be required to work during polling hours on Election Day, or provide another approved excuse such as being away from their county of residence. The burden of qualification has contributed to Mississippi’s consistently low voter participation rates.

These barriers are legacies of a political architecture designed to limit democratic participation. The Mississippi Constitution of 1890 was drafted with the explicit purpose of disenfranchising Black voters—an aim that the convention’s president, Solomon Saladin Calhoon, declared without pretense. The resulting document imposed poll taxes, literacy tests and a “understanding clause” that gave white registrars unchecked discretion to reject Black applicants. Within a decade of ratification, the number of registered Black voters in the state plummeted from more than 130,000 to fewer than 1,300.

The Marshall Project has documented how those constitutional provisions set a precedent for disenfranchisement statutes adopted across the South in the decades that followed, in South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), North Carolina (1900), Alabama (1901) and Virginia (1902).

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s—powered by organizers like Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and the field workers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP—dismantled the most overtly racist provisions of the 1890 Constitution. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited literacy tests and authorized federal oversight of elections in states with histories of voter discrimination. But Mississippi’s election code retained a patchwork of procedural barriers to full participation. The excuse-based absentee voting system, while facially neutral, has functioned in practice as one such barrier, particularly for hourly workers, shift laborers, and voters in rural counties where the circuit clerk’s office may be the only polling location available before Election Day.

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The political dynamics surrounding this year’s legislation are worth noting. Republicans maintain control of both chambers of the Mississippi Legislature, though the GOP’s supermajority in the Senate was narrowed after Democrats gained two seats in 2025 special elections. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann presides over the Senate for his seventh session; Speaker Jason White leads the House.

England’s early voting efforts have drawn intraparty friction. After the Senate passed his 2025 early voting bill, Gov. Reeves publicly criticized England on social media, declaring that he opposed no-excuse early voting and “doesn’t care how many other states get it wrong.” England pushed back, noting that the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign spent heavily in 2024 encouraging GOP voters to cast ballots early. England has maintained that expanding ballot access does not shift partisan outcomes, pointing to the 47 other states where early voting has not altered fundamental electoral dynamics.

This year’s more narrowly tailored bills—focused on modernizing the absentee process rather than creating a new early voting framework—may prove more palatable to House leadership. But whether the two chambers can reconcile the 45-day window preferred by the House with the Senate’s 22-day proposal, and whether such a measure could survive a potential gubernatorial veto, remain open questions as the session approaches its critical deadlines.

The 2026 legislative timetable gives the opposite chambers until mid-March to act on general bills received from the other house. If the bills survive committee review and floor votes in their new chambers, a conference committee may be appointed to produce a final version.

For now, the voters of Mississippi continue to operate under the existing absentee voting system. The Secretary of State’s office notes that in-person absentee voting for the March 10, 2026, municipal primary elections is available at circuit clerk’s offices through noon on Saturday, March 7. Voters must present a valid photo identification and meet one of the statutory excuses. The ballot-envelope system remains in effect.

Whether that system survives this legislative session depends on what happens when these two bills meet in the middle.