JACKSON, Miss.—One month after ballot shortages in Hinds County left people waiting for hours to cast a vote in Mississippi’s Nov. 7 statewide elections, organizers and lawyers say they are still seeking transparency from local and state election officials about what happened on Election Day.
“Hinds County voters still have questions,” NAACP Legal Defense Fund Voting Special Counsel Amir Badat said at a press conference on Thursday, Dec. 7. “The events that happened on Election Day are unacceptable.”
Amir Badat, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said during a press conference on Dec. 7, 2023, that Hinds County voters deserve an explanation for the confusion they experienced when several voting precincts ran out of ballots during Election Day on Nov. 7, 2023. “The events that happened on Election Day are unacceptable,” he said. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad
The Mississippi Democratic Party filed an emergency petition with the Hinds County Chancery Court to extend the voting hours. Chancery Judge Dewayne Thomas approved the order allowing precincts to stay open until 8 p.m. to give voters additional time to vote.
Voters in at least nine precincts in Hinds County reported ballot shortages on Election Day. Some said their polling places ran out of ballots as early as 8:30 a.m., while others reported waiting as long as two hours in line in order to cast a ballot.
Hinds County District 5 Election Commissioner Shirley Varnado initially blamed an “unexpectedly large turnout as the problem,” WLBT reported on Nov. 7; once officials had counted all ballots, however, the results showed that fewer people voted for governor in this year’s statewide elections than in 2019 Later on Nov. 9, WJTV reported that the Hinds County Election Commission attributed the shortages to officials using the wrong forms for ballot orders and that “the commission said they take full responsibility for what occurred during the general election.”
“In order for us to really understand what happened, we need some information from the election commissioners and circuit clerk about why the ballot shortages happened. What were the issues with printing? What caused the confusion?” Badat told