Law and Government
As with all other U.S. states and the federal government, Mississippi's government is based on the separation of legislative, executive and judicial power. Executive authority in the state rests with the Governor, currently Phil Bryant (R). The Lieutenant Governor, currently Tate Reeves (R), is elected on a separate ballot. Both the governor and lieutenant governor are elected to four-year terms of office. Unlike the federal government, but like many other U.S. States, most of the heads of major executive departments are elected by the citizens of Mississippi rather than appointed by the governor.
Mississippi is one of five states that elects its state officials in odd-numbered years (the others are Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey and Virginia). Mississippi holds elections for these offices every four years, always in the year preceding Presidential elections, the most recent of which was in 2011.
Uniquely, Mississippi was the last state to give shares of its popular vote exceeding 85% and 90% to one candidate in a presidential election: in 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt won nearly 94% of Mississippi's popular vote, and in 1964, Barry M. Goldwater carried the state with 87% of votes.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Mississippi
Famous quotes containing the words law and/or government:
“The older I get the more I trust in the law according to which the rose and the lily bloom.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.”
—Sojourner Truth (c. 1777–1883)