When Scott Crawford visited the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website to verify his voter registration information on Monday, the Y’all Vote tool asked for his name, county, date of birth and last four digits of his social security number. He typed in the information, and the website claimed he was not registered to vote.
Crawford, a retired neuropsychologist and advocate for people with disabilities, has been registered to vote at his current address in Jackson, Mississippi, for the past 19 years, and he cannot recall ever missing an election in that time. He told the Mississippi Free Press he did not know if he had registered to vote with his social security number or his state-issued identification number.
Concerned, the citizen called his county circuit clerk’s office to ensure he was still registered to vote, and the clerk said he was.
“How are we, human beings, supposed to remember that kind of trivia?” Crawford told the Mississippi Free Press on Tuesday. “I don’t understand. It should work. We need the secretary of state’s office to have a robust system that works no matter what. Otherwise, you’re going to have a whole bunch of people like me spending time and effort over nothing.”
He then contacted the Mississippi Free Press to share what happened to him. The Mississippi Free Press asked Elizabeth Jonson, the secretary of state’s communication director, if the office’s website was having technical difficulties and, if not, why it would not have Crawford’s correct voter registration information even though his registration was confirmed.
“No technical difficulties,” Jonson told the Mississippi Free Press in a Tuesday text message. “The system just looks for the specific information in which the person used to register. Sometimes people register with a driver’s license number instead of a social security number. It’s always best that if a person is unable to pull his or her information through the system to call us or the country circuit clerk to verify.”
Crawford said the whole point of using the secretary of state’s website to check his registration is because it’s supposed to be the “easy, quick, foolproof way to do it,” but “it’s the opposite.”
Three years ago, Gov. Tate Reeves signed a law that allows Mississippi election officials to purge names from voter rolls more easily by requiring election commissioners to send a “confirmation notice” to registered voters who fail to vote in any election or update voter information within a four-year period across two presidential elections.
Although Crawford’s name was not purged from the voter rolls, he has sympathy for Mississippians who are having to jump through hoops when registering and voting.
“That’s disenfranchising someone from the critical right to vote,” he said. “I mean, that is foundational. If we don’t have our right to vote, we’ve lost our control of our government.”
Under the 2023 law, everyone who receives a confirmation notice is treated as an inactive voter and may vote by affidavit even before final removal. Authorities must put the name in purge status after two federal elections from the date of the notice if the individual did not respond, did not update voter roll information or did not vote in any election after receiving the notice. Being an active or reserve military or serving on jury duty also precludes purging.
That law also grants the secretary of state the power to audit the general election yearly from 2023 to 2027.
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