The legislator in this case was John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, Senate Accountability, Efficiency and Transparency chair. He demanded that a crucial change be made to the final agreement restoring the initiative just before the 2022 session ended. The demand led to the end of efforts to restore the initiative. Polk proposed a change that would have more than doubled the signatures required to place an issue onto the ballot. It is not known if rank-and-file legislators would have supported Polk’s proposal. Polk did not propose the change to legislators for them to debate publicly. He instead tried to get the change through closed-door negotiations at the end. Polk is not the first or last legislator to exercise such influence. It is ironic that Polk influenced a proposal that would allow citizens to bypass the Legislature and put issues on the ballot. Nearly all the legislators supported the restoration of the initiative, which was invalidated in a May 2021 controversial ruling by the Mississippi Supreme Court. According to the Supreme Court justices, the language meant that signatures must be collected equally from all five U.S. House district as they existed in 1990. A 2000 U.S. Census resulted in the loss of a congressional district. READ MORE: The session ends without the legislature reviving the ballot initiative. Several bills were filed to repair and restore the process at the beginning of the 2022 session. Since the Mississippi Constitution created the initiative, Speaker Philip Gunn has assigned the majority of the House bills the Constitution Committee. Lt. Gov. Most of the Senate bills were assigned to Polk’s Committee by Delbert Hosemann. The Senate bills were all tossed out by committee. House Concurrent Resolution 39 was the only way to revive the initiative. The House Constitution Committee approved the proposal and it was then passed by the full chamber. The proposal required that registered voters must sign a petition to put an issue on the ballot. This would be equivalent to roughly 90,000 signatures. This was the threshold for the original initiative that was thrown out by the Supreme Court. He finally accepted the House proposal to restore the initiative on a deadline day. The bill was amended to include a “reverse repealer” which would allow it to be repealed immediately if it passed. As a way to keep a bill alive and prevent it from being passed without further discussion, reverse repealers are common in the legislative system. The Senate approved the original language that required signatures equal to 12% of votes in the last gubernatorial elections. This language was not changed by Polk or anyone else. Polk placed the reverse repealer in his bill to ensure it went to conference. The final details of this bill would be negotiated in conference by three House members and three senators, but in fact Polk and House Constitution Chair Fred Shanks. Polk advocated that the required number of signatures to place an issue onto the ballot be equal to 12% (those who are registered to vote), or approximately 238,000, as opposed to the original proposal which had about 90,000. In a conference report, Polk advocated for this position that legislators couldn’t change. They had to either accept, reject, or send back the proposal for further negotiations in the last days of session. Shanks refused to agree. Gunn, who supported Shanks, stated that Polk wanted to set “an extremely high threshold that citizens would never achieve.” Polk said the threshold was necessary because it “makes Mississippians more concerned about the issue being raised.” Hosemann also said he supports Polk’s position. Hosemann stated that there was concern about “…it being so easy to get people signed.” “… “I think that was both the House and Senate concern.” Maybe it is legitimate concern. Any legislator could have amended the bill and held public debate on the required number of signatures to place an issue onto the ballot. Polk was the only one to do so at the end of the session.