Not since the civil rights era have minorities and young adults exercised their right to vote in the numbers seen thus far in the presidential primary season. But the battle for enfranchisement never ends. Currently, the voting rights of vulnerable groups are under attack in Mississippi, in a faint echo of the Jim Crow era.

A new Secretary of State, Delbert Hosemann, is championing a bill (SB 2910) in the state legislature that, if passed, would likely strip thousands of poor, elderly, and minority voters from the voting rolls, simply for missing this year’s federal election.

Whether or not that was not the intended effect of the legislation, the threat was real enough that Project Vote wrote Senator Terry C. Burton, the bill’s sponsor, a letter pointing out the bill’s flaws and its contradiction of a federal voting rights law, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

Touted as a package of generally positive election reforms, the bill includes a provision that would throw citizens off the voter rolls if they do not cast a ballot between Nov. 3, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009. Purged Mississippians would then have to re-register to vote. Not only would this disproportionately affect minority, young and low-income voters, it also runs counter to the NVRA. And because of the wording of the bill, it is possible that even absentee voters, who are primarily elderly or disabled, could be kicked off the rolls.

“[Hosemann] is apparently new in office and hasn’t yet read the federal law on voting rights,” says Washington D.C.-based attorney Estelle Rogers, a voting rights expert, and a consultant to Project Vote. “It is a 76-page bill and a lot of what’s in it should be supported — early voting, curbside voting for people with disabilities. But buried in the middle of it is a provision that is completely and utterly in conflict with federal law.”

The NVRA prohibits states from removing voters from the rolls simply for failing to vote. It also establishes a procedures states must follow before removing voters who may have moved. Unfortunately, it is a long and detailed statute that has become overshadowed by the more recent Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was enacted after the 2000 election in Florida went so horribly awry.

Among other things, HAVA requires states to create new, centralized voter databases and take greater steps to maintain their accuracy. As state election officias move to meet these new mandates, they can overlook the safeguards built in the NVRA to prevent the improper or overly-aggressive removal of voters from the rolls.

Adding to the confusion, for the past three years, the Justice Department has been suing various states to force them to more aggressively purge their voter rolls. The department has been accused by former Voting Section employees of pursuing a partisan strategy aimed at disproportionately removing voters from Democratic-leaning constituencies.

This is the national backdrop against which the issues in Mississippi are playing out. Hosemann has argued in the Mississippi press that the proposed legislation will merely clean up the voter rolls, which in some counties has more registered voters than residents of voting age. “We have in Mississippi 30 percent of our counties who have more people registered to vote than are breathing, so we have problem,” he told a Mississippi TV reporter last week.

Unfortunately, besides being illegal, the bill is unpleasantly reminiscent of the unpleasant history of voter disenfranchisement in southern states prior to the civil rights era. One tactic commonly used in those times was to force residents to re-register annually and then to make the process as hard as possible for Blacks and low-income Whites. Attorney Estelle Rogers calls the proposal “a cure far worse than the disease.”

Besides, a much more effective means of ensuring accuracy in the voter rolls is to properly maintain them in the first place. Project Vote created a model bill that can be implemented in any state to help election officials remove voters who are no longer eligible from the rolls. The model also provides clear, transparent methods of ensuring that no eligible voter is improperly removed from the rolls.

The bill passed the state Senate’s Election Committee and is poised to be heard in the Senate this week. If signed into law, the bill would take effect next January. Voters registered before Oct. 1, 2008, who don’t vote between Nov. 3, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009, will be forced off the rolls.