Mississippi has seen too many polling-place changes in the past few years. No fewer than 163 polling-place changes by county election officials have been recorded in Mississippi between the November 2022 midterm election and the August 2023 primaries, a Mississippi Free Press investigation shows.
County election officials have changed the locations of approximately 98 polling places in Mississippi since the 2020 election, with an additional 28 changes since the primaries in June 2022. The Mississippi Free Press previously reported that between November 2020 and November 2022, officials relocated precincts 64 times, closed 19 of them and opened 12 new ones—but without proper and sufficient notice. And on the eve of the August 2023 primaries, Hinds County moved two additional precincts just hours before the polls were set to open.
Such polling-place changes put Mississippi’s democracy at risk.
Frequently changing polling places only confuse voters. In Mississippi, there is a database known as the Statewide Elections Management System, which the Mississippi Secretary of State’s polling place locator relies on to provide voters with accurate information. However, information in the database is usually not up-to-date for all counties or contains inaccurate polling place information for dozens of precincts, leaving voters confused about their polling place information.
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Voters are often sent to the wrong polling places, where they spend hours in long queues only to realize their mistakes later—an issue that reportedly affected many voters during the 2020 election. Sometimes, people get confused due to address issues.
For instance, the Mississippi Free Press found that more than 100 precincts in the database either had incomplete, incorrect or no addresses in 2022. Other issues in the data include the improper use of fields, a lack of standardization and data validation, and the absence of redistricting information in the database. Even with the recent July 31, 2023, polling place locator update, the locator updates in real-time as local election officials make any changes to SEMS, but that only works if local election officials update SEMS in a timely manner with accurate polling place information.
Polling-place changes without any prior notice also alienate voters even more,
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