Safeguarding Mississippi elections has always been important to me, which is why I made it a priority in our 2019 campaign for Secretary of State. I traveled the state visiting with many of you who expressed concerns for maintaining integrity in our elections. Upon taking office, we went right to work to restore Mississippi voters’ confidence and make it harder to cheat. Over the last three years, we have delivered on implementing many safeguards and will continue to do so. Thankfully, the Mississippi legislature passed, and the Governor signed Rep. Brent Powell’s House Bill 1310 into law, which capped off our legislative agenda for our first term.
Through our work with the legislature, we obtained additional funding mechanisms for enhanced security and adopted numerous safety processes. To ensure our state elections are being run by and voted in by Mississippians, we passed legislation to prevent private money from being used to fund election administration, implemented multiple procedures to ensure only U.S. citizens are voting in Mississippi elections, and codified voter roll maintenance practices.
In order to verify Mississippi has clean Election Day processes, we gained authority for the Secretary of State’s Office to conduct post-election audits, required all voting machines to have a voter-verifiable paper ballot, and implemented a grant program to help counties purchase machines with this capability. Additionally, we secured annual Elections Support Fund increases to each county plus a one-time $3 million disbursement split between all 82 counties to administer elections, strengthen cybersecurity, train local elections officials, and many other enhanced measures.
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson celebrated the passage of new voting restrictions on March 14, 2023, saying that banning “ballot harvesting” is necessary “to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat” in Mississippi elections. Photo by Ashton Pittman
Knowing the work that goes into Election Day is much more than just a 24-hour day, we thoroughly reviewed our absentee voting process and worked to close loopholes. Anyone who now fraudulently requests an absentee ballot application for another person can be convicted of voter fraud. Many Mississippians probably also assumed ballot trafficking, or
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