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Mississippi Counties Change 54 Voting Precincts, But Incorrect Information Risks Sending Some Voters to the Wrong Place on Election Day

This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.

A small brick home with three pairs of dark red shutters sits alongside several similarly modest houses across South Lake Street from hundreds of rows of green crops in a wide, flat field in Shelby, Miss. There should be a voting precinct here—at least, that’s what the state’s polling place locator tool says—but neither the little brick house nor its neighbors appear prepared to accommodate the Liberty Chapel precinct’s roughly 630 voters.

That’s a situation some Bolivar County voters could find themselves in come Election Day if nothing changes. In fact, while the State of Mississippi’s My Election Day tool will direct most voters to the correct precinct, the tool could send thousands of voters in 20 precincts across the state to the wrong place on Nov. 5—unless local officials correct entries for polling place addresses in Mississippi’s Statewide Election Management System.

The MFP also found that local election officials have changed at least 54 precincts across 24 counties since the March 2024 primaries. But not all those changes are reflected in SEMS, the database from which the My Election Day polling place locator tool pulls its information. Over the years, voters have told MFP that their local election officials failed to notify them of changed precincts or that the online polling place locator tool sent them to the wrong place on Election Day.

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In an interview on Oct. 21, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson explained that his office houses SEMS and oversees its operation, but “our clerks and folks at the county level are the ones sending information in for polling locations.”

“I do think it’s important for people to know that though we house SEMS, the data that’s put into SEMS comes from our counties, especially when it comes to our poll locations. So those are coming directly from the ground on the county level and those—the county supervisors, the (circuit) clerks—are the ones who decide where

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