Nearly four years after errors in Mississippi’s election system sent many voters to wait in long lines at the wrong polling place on Election Day 2020, some of the same issues remain just 49 days before Election Day.
The Mississippi Free Press first began reporting on those issues in October 2020 while attempting to assemble a comprehensive list of voting precincts that had changed since that year’s primaries amid pandemic restrictions. But that effort proved more difficult than expected and the publication ultimately identified 38 more polling-place changes than the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office knew about.
The publication’s investigations in the years since have also uncovered a persistent issue with the State’s elections database, called the Statewide Elections Management System, containing outdated polling-place location information, missing or incomplete addresses for polling places and other errors. Such issues can cause problems for voters on Election Day because the state’s online polling-place locator tool draws from SEMS to tell voters where to go to cast their ballots.
Across state and federal primaries and elections since 2020, the Mississippi Free Press has identified 331 total precinct changes. As of the 2024 primaries, 90 precincts still had incomplete, incorrect or missing addresses.
@media ( min-width: 300px ){.newspack_global_ad.scaip-1{min-height: 100px;}}@media ( min-width: 320px ){.newspack_global_ad.scaip-1{min-height: 100px;}}@media ( min-width: 728px ){.newspack_global_ad.scaip-1{min-height: 90px;}} ‘A Bottom-Up State’
Republican Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson has repeatedly pointed out that, though he is the state’s top election official, he does not have the power to force counties to provide accurate and complete information because Mississippi is a state with “bottom-up” elections—meaning most of the process of administering elections is up to county officials. The secretary of state’s office trains local officials to run elections and certifies results.
“The state’s data is only as good as what localities provide in a bottom-up state like Mississippi,” said Dr. Mitchell Brown, a political science professor at Auburn University in Alabama who is also the founding editor of the Journal of Election Administration Research & Practice. She is the author of the book, “How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections.”
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