This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.
Nearly four years after errors in Mississippi’s election system sent many voters to wait in long lines at the wrong polling place on Election Day 2020, some of the same issues remain just 49 days before Election Day.
The Mississippi Free Press first began reporting on those issues in October 2020 while attempting to assemble a comprehensive list of voting precincts that had changed since that year’s primaries amid pandemic restrictions. But that effort proved more difficult than expected and the publication ultimately identified 38 more polling-place changes than the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office knew about.
The publication’s investigations in the years since have also uncovered a persistent issue with the State’s elections database, called the Statewide Elections Management System, containing outdated polling-place location information, missing or incomplete addresses for polling places and other errors. Such issues can cause problems for voters on Election Day because the state’s online polling-place locator tool draws from SEMS to tell voters where to go to cast their ballots.
Across state and federal primaries and elections since 2020, the Mississippi Free Press has identified 331 total precinct changes. As of the 2024 primaries, 90 precincts still had incomplete, incorrect or missing addresses.
‘A Bottom-Up State’
Republican Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson has repeatedly pointed out that, though he is the state’s top election official, he does not have the power to force counties to provide accurate and complete information because Mississippi is a state with “bottom-up” elections—meaning most of the process of administering elections is up to county officials. The secretary of state’s office trains local officials to run elections and certifies results.
“The state’s data is only as good as what localities provide in a bottom-up state like Mississippi,” said Dr. Mitchell Brown, a political science professor at Auburn University in Alabama who is also the founding editor of the Journal of Election Administration Research & Practice. She is the author of the book, “How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections.”
Circuit clerks, election commissioners and county supervisors are all involved in election administration in Mississippi, though the way officials perform their roles when it comes to elections can differ among Mississippi’s 82 counties. For example, in some counties, circuit clerks were able to provide this publication with lists of polling places and polling-place changes immediately. In other counties, circuit clerks redirected the reporters to election commissioners or county supervisors to find that information. In some counties, local officials keep SEMS up-to-date with accurate polling-place information; in others, outdated or incorrect information can remain in the system for years—often seemingly unnoticed.
While speaking to the Mississippi Free Press on Sept. 13, Brown said there can be good reasons for decentralized elections.
“The stated principle behind having multiple offices taking care of different functions is that when you have different people touching the election, you have greater accountability to each other which is supposed to increase transparency and daylight in the process,” she said. “However, if people aren’t communicating with one another, what it does is cause confusion. … It’s not necessarily in and of itself a bad way for a state to choose to arrange offices around a local level, but it has to be run and administered well, and there has to be very good communication between the offices.”
Voting Rights Groups Warned About Disenfranchisement
In 2022, a coalition of voting-rights organizations cited the Mississippi Free Press’ reporting in a letter to Secretary of State Watson, urging him to make changes to require accurate reporting of polling places in SEMS. But in a letter in reply, the elections chief insisted that his authority was limited and that he could not force counties to keep SEMS updated with accurate information. In a followup letter on Oct. 14, 2022, the organizations told Watson that they were “concerned that your refusal to implement the specific recommendations outlined in our previous letter has and will result in the continued disenfranchisement of Mississippians.”
Despite his limited powers, though, Watson could ask the Legislature to adopt new laws giving him more power to enforce accurate reporting of election information. In fact, he’s repeatedly urged the Legislature to update election laws, including his push to require citizenship checks for applicants.
Dr. Mitchell Brown noted that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted core parts of the Voting Rights Act that allowed the federal government to intervene in state elections. The court’s majority tossed out the 1965 law’s preclearance provision, which required federal approval before the state could make changes.
“After Shelby County v. Holder, there’s no more preclearance so unless you can prove a systematic problem, the Department of Justice can’t go in there and bump heads the way they used to be able to do, so it’s an interesting problem,” the Auburn political science professor said.
A Mississippi Free Press review of 2012 precincts using data from the Center For Public Integrity shows that problems in the SEMS system existed before the Shelby County decision, too. In fact, 304 precincts that year had no address listed at all—far more than in the March 2024 SEMS report. There were 1,830 precincts in 2012 compared to 1,748 today. Watson became secretary of state in 2020.
‘Not Necessarily About Voter Suppression’
Dr. Mitchell Brown cautioned against assuming the issues with Mississippi’s election system are rooted in deliberate efforts to suppress the vote.
“Do I think it’s systematic voter suppression? Probably not,” she said. “It’s probably an administration issue.”
She also said that “changing precincts is not necessarily about voter suppression.”
Sometimes, Brown noted, officials have to change polling places to comply with the federal Americans With Disabilities Act. That happened the day before the 2023 primaries when Hinds County election officials made two last-minute polling-place changes because the ones the county had been using were not accessible to wheelchair users.
“It’s really hard to find good precinct polling places,” the Auburn professor said.
She also noted that issues with polling-place locations can result from a lack of resources. Local officials have to cover the cost of administering elections, which can put more pressure on poorer counties than those with higher tax bases.
Resources problems could make it harder to implement voter reforms meant to make voting easier, she said. Mississippi lawmakers have repeatedly attempted to change state law to allow early voting in recent years, for example, but so far, those efforts have failed to cross the legislative finish line.
“These voter-centric reforms like early voting and consolidating precincts into voting centers take a lot of money. And states that do all of those things so it’s super easy for voters put a lot of money in their election systems because, especially in bottom-up places like Mississippi, they’re all locally funded,” Brown said. “So it’s about how much money the state’s willing to put into it and how much counties are willing to put into it.”
She said it is not active voter suppression for states like Mississippi and Alabama not to implement options like early voting and mail voting, but “it is a choice states make about how easy they want it to be for their voters.”
In one-party dominated states especially, the system works well for those who already hold office with no changes, Brown said. “The state Legislature has no incentive for things to work any different,” she explained. “It’s not voter suppression. They don’t have to do anything.”
The Mississippi Free Press will publish an updated list of polling places and precinct changes in October, ahead of the Nov. 5 election. For more on elections and voting, visit the Mississippi Free Press Voting 2024 page.
This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.
This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.
