Republican meddling has hurt our state before. They're still doing it.

Mississippi used to have five members of Congress. We lost our fifth seat, not because Mississippi shrank, but because Republican leaders in Washington decided their political survival mattered more than an accurate count of the American people.

Here's what happened.

Going into the 2000 census, the U.S. Census Bureau had a plan to use statistical sampling, proven scientific techniques to account for people who are historically hard to count. Poor people. Renters. Minorities. Children. The kind of people who live in Mississippi.

The Census Bureau said: we have the tools to fix chronic undercounting. Let us use them.

Republicans in Congress said: no.

Their real concern was simple. A more accurate count would make some congressional districts more Democratic. The people most likely to be undercounted, minorities, renters, low-income families, were also the people most likely to vote Democratic. So Republicans fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. Mississippi was undercounted. We lost our fifth congressional district, a seat that had existed since 1855, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and two World Wars.

But that's only half the story.

In 1992, Mississippi voters amended the state constitution to give themselves a ballot initiative process, the ability to bypass the legislature and put issues directly on the statewide ballot. The language required signatures from five congressional districts.

Mississippi had five when they wrote it. Then they had four.

In 2020, over 200,000 Mississippians signed a petition to put medical marijuana on the ballot. The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in May 2021 that since there were no longer five districts in which to collect signatures, no initiative could be valid. The court's own majority wrote that the ballot initiative process "cannot work in a world where Mississippi has fewer than five representatives in Congress."

The Republican legislature has refused to fix it. The bill to restore the ballot initiative died again in the 2026 session without even getting a floor vote. Mississippi is now the only state in the country to have adopted and then lost the ballot initiative process twice.

One party's decision to manipulate a census for partisan gain cost us a seat in Congress. That lost seat broke our constitution. And the same party that caused the problem keeps refusing to clean it up.

Mississippi deserved better in 2000. We deserve better now.