Mark Baker #wingnut jacksonfreepress.com

At a Tupelo campaign stop on Monday, Mississippi State Rep. Mark Baker, a Republican candidate for attorney general, said the 1965 Voting Rights Act violated Mississippi's "sovereignty."

Current Attorney General Jim Hood, Baker said, should have joined other red states that successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to strike down the VRA's preclearance requirements in 2013.

"With preclearance, Mississippi and a few other southern states were put in a group and (told), 'You cannot manage your own elections. Your sovereignty is of no value at the federal level,'" Baker, who represents Brandon in the state House, said. "Our attorney general decided that the federal government's thumb on our elections was important in this day and time."

Under preclearance, the U.S. Department of Justice had to approve any changes to voting laws in certain southern states like Mississippi. When it passed the act in 1965, Congress singled out those states because of their notorious history of denying African Americans the right to vote.

"We used to pass bills in the Legislature, and although they were law once the government signed them, they were not effective until some nameless, faceless, party apparatchik on the third floor of the Department of Justice signed off on it,” Baker said Monday.

The Daily Journal's Caleb Bedillion first reported Baker's comments on Thursday.

Hood, who is a Democratic candidate for governor, did not respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.

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