Mississippi will not have a statewide system for reporting election night results this year after the Senate killed a bill the House passed to create one.
House Bill 1241 would have required the Mississippi secretary of state to create a system in which all municipalities and counties would periodically provide election results into a centralized, online database on election night, starting an hour after voting ends with updates coming every 30 minutes after that.
“If y’all follow election results on election night like I do, they’re spotty, they’re different based on news media, you know—and sometimes, they’re wrong. I mean, this is what just happens to me,” Mississippi House Apportionment and Elections Committee Chairman Rep. Noah Sanford, R-Collins, told his committee during a Jan. 29 meeting. “So this would be a centralized database that they could provide results—absentee results would be in one space, election-day votes in another.”
About half of the states have versions of online election night results reporting systems, he said on the House floor on Feb. 10.
Sanford said the secretary of state’s office already has the federal funds to create the system, so the State would not have had to fund any of it. The chairman of the local board of election commissioners, or a designee, would submit the results into the system and would get paid more since their job duties would increase if the State adopts the system, he said.
“We have seen in some instances where there are not Associated Press (reporters) out in those counties where there have been missing reports and that caused issues on election night,” Kyle Kirkpatrick, assistant secretary of state elections division, said at a Feb. 26 Senate Elections Committee meeting.
The AP announced that it was cutting 8% of its total workforce in November 2024 after news chains Gannett and McClatchy, which together own hundreds of newspapers nationwide, stopped buying news from AP. AP also relies on freelance election stringers to report results from numerous counties around the country and there may not always be a person available to report a particular county’s results, especially in rural Mississippi.
The House passed H.B. 1241 by a 120-0 vote on Feb. 10 with no questions or debate on the bill and the Senate Elections Committee approved it on Feb. 26. But the bill died in the Senate because Senate Elections Committee Chairman Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, did not bring it up for a vote before the March 11 deadline.
The senator told the Mississippi Free Press that he decided to kill the bill this year because he wanted to take more time to work on it to ensure that the website operates efficiently.
“I want to make sure that if we have a system like that, it’s clear that it’s unofficial results and the fact that it’s on the secretary of state’s website, there might be some confusion as to whether they’re announcing official results versus unofficial results,” England told the Mississippi Free Press on March 11.