Anthony and his wife, Annie, pulled into the gravel driveway where a lone tiny, brown building has long served as their polling place off the side of Highway 51 in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, late on Election Day 2024. There, they found three other cars with frustrated voters—but no signs of an election taking place.
The couple has long tried to vote in as many elections as they can at their polling place in Lincoln County. But with both working from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., they don’t always have time to make it to the ballot box. Polls in Mississippi are open on Election Day from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., with few options to vote early.
“So most times, we can only vote for big presidential elections where people are willing to let you leave work early,” said Anthony, who asked the Mississippi Free Press not to use his or his wife’s real names because his job does not allow him to speak to the press about political topics.
When they arrived to vote on Nov. 5, 2024, another voter told the couple that a note on the door said their polling place had moved. Officials, it turned out, had merged the precinct into the Bogue Chitto Volunteer Fire Department, about a four-mile drive away.
“When we pulled up, there were three other cars there, and because we live in a mostly Black community, it was three different Black families, and two of them were furious that they couldn’t make it, because they were already running late to pick up their kids,” Anthony told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 11, 2026.
Neither Anthony, Annie nor any of the voters who showed up at the old location had been notified about the change, he said.
Anthony and Annie, who are both white, were able to make it to the new polling place and cast their ballots that day. But he double-checked, finding no evidence of any effort from local election officials to notify his family before the election. Even the Mississippi secretary of state’s polling-place locator tool, known as My Election Day, still directed him to his old polling place.
It’s not an unfamiliar story. Since 2020, the Mississippi Free Press has identified hundreds of polling-place changes and heard repeatedly from voters who said they did not receive notifications.
In many cases, local officials did not update information on polling-place locations in the Statewide Election Management System, also known as SEMS—the database from which the online polling-place locator tool pulls when it tells voters where to go to cast a ballot.
Those errors often send voters to the wrong polling place, and like the voters Anthony and Annie ran into in Bogue Chitto, some give up on casting a ballot altogether. A copy of the SEMS list of polling places from October 2024 confirmed that officials had not yet updated the location for Anthony and Annie’s precinct, though it was updated as of October 2025.
In a state like Mississippi, which has no universal early-voting options and only limited absentee-voting options that most can’t take advantage of, knowing where to go on Election Day can make a difference. Election experts say that even small hurdles can add up and help explain why, during the 2024 election, just 57.5% of eligible Mississippians turned out to vote—the sixth-lowest voter-turnout rate in the country.
As Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson has long explained, while his office has oversight and the responsibility to train local election officials and provide guidance, Mississippi has a “bottom-up” election system. County supervisors decide when to move, close or open a new polling place, and county circuit clerks and election commissioners are typically tasked with implementing those changes, notifying voters and updating the information in SEMS. Watson’s office is not involved in choosing polling-place locations or even maintaining information in the statewide database.
“I do think it’s important to know that the information people are seeing (in SEMS) is coming straight from the counties,” Watson, who is now running for lieutenant governor, told the Mississippi Free Press in an Oct. 21, 2024, interview.
The information that counties enter “goes immediately live from SEMS how they entered it directly through My Election Day,” said Assistant Secretary of State Kyle Kirkpatrick, who joined Watson for the October 2024 interview.
“So there’s nothing that needs to be done on our end to make that live. So whatever they have entered is what is going to show to voters,” he said.
Watson acknowledged during the same interview that the information in the system is not always correct. “Sometimes, we have to call and remind them, ‘Hey, we need that information,’” he said. “When we hear about it, we’ll check, double down on it to make sure we’re getting the right information out.”
Watson, now in his seventh year as secretary of state, said he has worked to build relationships with local election officials in all 82 counties, which his office maintains while continuing to work to train local officials. He said Kirkpatrick and other members of his office reach out to local election officials to remind them to keep their information up-to-date in the system.
This month, Watson’s office pointed the Mississippi Free Press to the requirements local election officials are supposed to follow that already exist in state law. Watson’s office noted that state law already requires counties “to notify the Office of the Secretary of State of the boundary of each supervisors district, sub-precinct and voting precinct as then fixed and shall indicate the voting place in each such district.”
“The counties, and more specifically, the circuit clerks have always been responsible for implementing those changes in the Statewide Election Management System (SEMS),” a May 4 statement from his office said. “At least 45 days prior to an election, this office will begin sending out reminders to the counties to make certain that all changes are reflected in SEMS.”
‘A Very Long, Tumultuous Election Day’
When Larnee Satchell arrived to monitor the polls at the designated location for Hinds County’s Precinct 84 for the primaries on March 12, 2024, as part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Election Protection Program, she quickly discovered that there were no polls to monitor nor much of anything else.
The address in the Statewide Election Management System had told her that this was the location of China Grove Baptist Church, which Hinds County uses as a polling place for the precinct. Before her, instead, was an empty field in a residential neighborhood, with no building nor any signage to suggest voting was happening there or where it might be instead.
Satchell, who is the field coordinator for the LDF’s Black Voters on the Rise, said she immediately reported the issue to the organization’s command center to let others in the Election Protection Program, including local community partners, know about the problem.
“We got in touch with the circuit clerk’s office, who did not believe that the address was incorrect,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 13, 2026. To prove it, she took a photo of the empty field and sent it to the circuit clerk’s office.
After searching online, Satchell located the church’s correct address, about a half mile away, and drove there and told the poll manager about the problem.
“We worked with the poll manager to call into the Hinds County Circuit Clerk’s Office, because initially they didn’t take our word that the address was incorrect,” she said. “So we were like, here’s this picture and also here is this poll manager telling you that the address we are both standing at is not the address that is listed on the secretary of state’s website or the county website.”
The Election Protection team also got in touch with the district’s county supervisor to ask for a sign to be placed in the empty field to alert voters to the correct address for the polling place.
“The board finally sent someone out to put up the sign. And even though I told that story in about five minutes, this took us several hours, with back-and-forth conversations with the poll manager and the board of supervisors and the circuit clerk’s office to finally have someone from the board of supervisors’ office come out and put up the correct address,” she said.
The Mississippi Free Press confirmed that the address for the precinct was incorrect in a March 2024 SEMS report, but was correct as of an October 2024 SEMS report. Satchell’s team also went to work to correct the address Google and Facebook had provided voters, which was also based on the erroneous information in SEMS.
“Eventually, the secretary of state’s website, Google and the county’s website all had the correct polling-place location for the church and not the empty field,” she said.
Satchell lives in Georgia, but her election work focuses primarily on Alabama and Mississippi. She says it is not every day that she runs across an empty field while traveling to a polling place, but errors aren’t rare, either. The Black Voters on the Rise field coordinator said that situations like the one in Hinds County demonstrate the necessity of programs like the Election Protection Program, while stressing that the goal is “to work collaboratively with election officials to be able to support voters.”
“And when election officials have not done their due diligence to ensure that all of the systems are correct from the county systems to the Secretary of State’s Office, and to make sure all of those systems are working, it makes our jobs 10 times more difficult to be able to then assist voters,” she added. “And then when you see that, not in one county, but in five counties, it makes for a very long, tumultuous election day.”
While advocacy organizations and even news organizations can help, though, multiple election experts and people with first-hand experience voting in other states say Mississippi has a buffet of potential solutions at its disposal that could help solve or at least ameliorate these common problems.
Bottom-Up or Top-Down
Solutions to these problems are possible.
Mississippi could opt to take a drastic approach in an attempt to remedy its polling-place problems by converting to a top-down system, where the Secretary of State’s office would have a direct hand in polling-place selection. This would be a more uniform and accountable system that wouldn’t involve 82 different sets of local officials, all with slightly different ways of doing things. Other states have switched from bottom-up systems to top-down systems in recent years, recognizing the weaknesses and data disparities inherent in bottom-up systems, a May 2024 report from the Institute for Responsive Government notes. Those states include Washington, New Jersey and Nevada.
At the turn of the century, all but three states had bottom-up systems in which counties, cities and townships handled voter-registration databases; Michigan, Kentucky and Alaska were the only exceptions. But in the aftermath of the controversies surrounding the disputed 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, requiring states to create a “single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the state level that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the state.”
After HAVA became law, some states, like Oregon and Colorado, adopted top-down systems, believing that the old bottom-up systems would make it more difficult to manage a state-level voter-registration system without inaccuracies. This, those states believed, would help avoid data errors caused when voters move into a new county but remain registered in an old county—a scenario with potential for fraudulent double voting.
But other states, like Mississippi, opted to remain a bottom-up state, where local officials are in charge of registering voters, determining polling locations, and cleaning and purging voter rolls. Following HAVA’s passage, Mississippi debuted the Statewide Election Management System in 2006 to comply with its requirements.
Pennsylvania is one of those bottom-up states. It is not immune to polling-place errors. In a collaboration with Votebeat, Spotlight PA’s Carter Walker reported in September 2024 that the “official government online tool designed to help Pennsylvanians find their polling places is riddled with misspellings and other quirks that make it difficult for some voters to use.”
The analysis found that the errors affected as many as 85,000 voters. A spokesperson for Pennsylvania’s current secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, told Carter that “the data entered into SURE is not managed by the Department, but rather by the counties.” SURE is Pennsylvania’s election system, akin to SEMS.
Former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who authored the 2024 IRG report with John Lindback, served as her state’s top election official from 2019 to 2021.
She told the Mississippi Free Press that “mistakes happen,” since humans are in charge of election administration, but there are practical steps election officials could take to tighten their systems and better ensure accuracy. For one, election officials should have a consistent and formal system to check that the entries in the election system are correct.
“There have certainly been times that I have heard from voters, where my team heard from voters that something was wrong or needed updating,” she said on Feb. 12. “But I feel like, generally, the more you have any data-entry task, there has to be a second set of eyes and a quality-control process where somebody understands that this is one of the usual checklist things that you have to check off and report that somebody’s checked that. Just like anything else, you’ll have a better chance of those errors not happening. But if you don’t have that expectation, then those errors are going to happen all the time.”
The Democratic former secretary of the commonwealth, who has since founded election systems and security consulting firm Athena Strategies, rejects the idea that simply converting to a top-down election system would be a complete fix.
“Frankly, whether it’s top-down or bottom-up, (errors) are going to happen, right? Because it’s not necessarily about who is responsible for it as much as it is that there is another set of eyes and a recognition that this is an important task to get done,” Boockvar said. “Whoever is assigned to that duty, they need to understand that this is a really, really critical task.”
Bottom-up systems have advantages, too, she noted. After Republican President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Democratic President Joe Biden, he whipped up baseless conspiracy theories of election fraud in the swing states he lost, including Pennsylvania. Democratic officials, he suggested, had engaged in a mass conspiracy to rig the votes and steal the election.
But under Pennsylvania’s bottom-up system, where local officials across 67 counties are in charge of 9,000 election districts, such fraud simply would not have been possible, Boockvar told the Mississippi Free Press. That is because there are “layers upon layers of eyes on this process at the most local level, all the way up.” Even when one party dominates the commonwealth’s statewide offices, the bottom-up approach ensures that a bipartisan slate of officials is overseeing elections from the local level.
“Can a local town council race, maybe, which has one or two polling places, pull off a fraud? Yeah, it happened before, and it will happen again,” she said. “But a presidential race or a governor’s race? The bottom-up approach is—yes, it’s complicated—but it actually lends security because think of how hard it would be to infiltrate 9,000 different election systems.”
In a state like Mississippi, with its history of Jim Crow laws designed to keep Black people from participating, a bottom-up system can also be a bulwark against some forms of voter suppression, too—particularly in majority-Black areas where local officials often better reflect their voters.
In 2018, then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp faced accusations of suppressing votes while he was running against Stacey Abrams, a Black Democrat, for governor. Opponents said he should have resigned his office, alleging that he purged Black voters from the rolls and abused his power as election chief to influence the election. He denied those allegations, saying the purges were about voter-roll maintenance, not suppression, and narrowly defeated Abrams.
In 2019, after then-Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann launched his first campaign for lieutenant governor, Democratic opponent Jay Hughes called on him to resign his office to avoid similar concerns.
“Our office does not run or administer elections, or have any authority related to voter-roll maintenance,” Hosemann’s communications secretary at the time, Leah Rupp Smith, told the Jackson Free Press in 2019.
There are still other ways to suppress voters in a bottom-up system, of course, Boockvar told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 12.
“There are a lot of ways to mess with the system, like legislatively, drawing districts that are completely unfair and not representative of our actual communities, and designing laws that don’t give sufficient access,” she said. “And so there are lots of ways to make it hard for eligible voters to vote, but I am a proponent of the decentralized system. I wanted both—I want it designed well at the top in such a way that gives access to eligible voters, but also has strong security, integrity and audits. I’m a big fan of post-election audits and all that stuff, but I want them to continue to be run at the local level in our communities, by our neighbors. I think there’s a lot to be said for that.”
‘A Fairly Simple Database Question’
Dr. Kayla Stan’s eyes widened as she leaned forward over her desk in the University of Southern Mississippi’s Walker Science Building, her mouth agape, as this reporter explained some of the problems with errors in Mississippi’s election system during a January meeting.
The geography professor, a native of Alberta, Canada, who has extensive expertise in Geographic Information Systems, had suggested that one way Mississippi could improve its systems would be to set it up to automatically check to see if local officials have changed addresses for polling places.
It’s “a fairly simple database question,” in which the system would simply need to be programmed to check current information in SEMS against what was listed in those fields on a prior date, she told the Mississippi Free Press on Jan. 22. That way, she said, state officials could detect changes and confirm their accuracy.
But with SEMS, that isn’t so easy. This reporter explained to her that State officials cannot go into SEMS and see what the information in it looked like previously, not even just one day before; changes immediately override what was listed in the system earlier, with no way to compare differences by date.
“You look horrified,” this reporter said as Stan’s mouth dropped.
“Oh no, no. Why? Why would you overwrite it?” she said.
It’s one of the limitations of the now 20-year-old SEMS system. When the Mississippi Free Press asked for copies of older SEMS reports several years ago, secretary of state officials explained that the State does not have archived copies of earlier versions of the SEMS database. Since starting voter precinct factchecks in 2020, the Mississippi Free Press has had to rely on PDF copies of SEMS reports that reporters obtained via public-records requests during prior elections in order to make comparisons with the latest information in SEMS.
The process is more complicated than a direct comparison, though. Since officials often enter information erroneously in SEMS, the reporters have to reach out to local election officials in all 82 counties over emails and phone calls in an attempt to confirm changes and confirm the correct locations and addresses.
That process can vary from county-to-county; in some counties, circuit clerks are highly familiar with polling-place information; other counties redirect the reporters to election commissioners or supervisors. Once, while attempting to confirm a polling-place change in Hinds County, the circuit clerk redirected the reporters to an election commissioner, who redirected the reporters to a county supervisor, who redirected the reporters back to the circuit clerk.
Stan said that as a Canadian citizen, she is reluctant to suggest major changes to Mississippi’s system. But even with a bottom-up system, the geography professor said that it would likely require infrastructure upgrades to implement the kinds of technical fixes that she thinks would be most helpful.
“Just because it’s a bottom-up system doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know what’s happening. … If you’re going to keep that system, then you have to make whatever your backend system is essentially foolproof,” she said. “And keep records of it with dates so that you can ping them.”
By implementing time-series data that makes it possible to detect changes in SEMS and compare, she said, the secretary of state’s office could even automate check-ins with counties.
“From a Mississippi level, they’d be able to tell if (local officials) haven’t updated a polling place in three or five years, or however many years, right? You can build in a system where, if this hasn’t been updated in three years, it automatically sends an email asking, ‘Have you updated your SEMS?’ Now, that won’t solve everything, but it could potentially help,” she said.
Such a system could also help detect anomalies, she added.
“That’s not a top-down system,” Stan said. “That’s just making sure that your system is functioning correctly, and that if you adjust it so that you have those sorts of databases, then you can go and see if there’s places that do have consistent problems, and if they have consistent problems, then maybe it’s something where they need to get more training. … But you can’t flag those things if you don’t have time-series data—if you don’t know that these places are consistently a problem. Or you may notice other things, like there’s a county that keeps changing where their precincts are located.”
Any efforts to significantly overhaul or even replace SEMS could prove costly and take years to implement, though. During her time as secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar began an endeavor to upgrade her state’s election system, which is called SURE; that effort is still ongoing under her successor amid repeated delays and troubles with vendors.
During the meeting on Jan. 22, Stan suggested that another way the Secretary of State’s office could improve the data is by making it public. Currently, there is no way to see a list of all polling places in the state; the polling-place locator tool only shows users the polling place attached to their home address. Though some counties make their lists public, the Mississippi Free Press has to make a public-records request ahead of each election for the full statewide list of the state’s more than 1,700 precincts.
“Open data, being under scrutiny—people will message you. People will message them and tell them what’s wrong with it,” she said.
‘Colorado Is the Gold Standard’
Mississippi could solve its voting precinct problems by eliminating voting precincts entirely.
Ahead of each election, when she still lived in Colorado, Dawn Pineda would receive a ballot in the mail, fill it out, slip it into an envelope and sign it, and then, during her daily walk, she’d slip it into a drop box at the recreation center in her neighborhood. Soon after, she would get an email letting her know that her ballot had been received.
“Easy peasy,” she said in a Feb. 11 interview with the Mississippi Free Press. “You put it in the mailbox and move on.”
Colorado has a range of voting options, including in-person early voting and mail voting. Those who opt to vote in-person on Election Day can go to any voting center in their county, rather than being assigned to one specific polling place in a precinct. Voters can even vote in statewide races at voting centers outside their counties, but cannot vote on local races.
When Pineda moved from Colorado to Clinton, Mississippi, to work as a professor at Mississippi College School of Law in 2021, she encountered a much different system—one she describes as “a HAM,” using an acronym she says she learned in Mississippi that means “hot ass mess.”
Her very first experience with voting in Mississippi, after filling out a voter-registration form at a DMV, was having to spend five or six hours calling local officials because her middle name, Greer, had been entered into the system as “Greek,” meaning she wasn’t technically registered. And while people can register to vote all the way up to the day of an election in Colorado, in Mississippi, voters have to be registered 30 days in advance.
After several hours of persistence, Pineda was able to vote, but it wasn’t a pleasant first experience.
“I’m committed. I’m committed to voting for dog catcher, and this tried my patience. So I can imagine somebody who doesn’t have that flexibility in their time to take a phone call or deal with business during the work hour or the workday,” she said.
Since those issues have been sorted out, she said, voting in-person in Madison County isn’t all that difficult. But she misses the system in Colorado, where she would get her ballot and have time to read up on candidates and issues before marking her choices and dropping it off.
“It was easy, and you know, you get more people participating in the system,” she said.
Pineda also noted that not everyone has the same luxury of time and determination to vote in person as she does.
“Just think, if you’re running here, all different ways, trying to get kids to school, trying to work, and you don’t have a job that allows you to scan and get the document over and chase after it, then you have these tight timelines,” she said.
Beth Hendrix, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Colorado, praised her state’s system in a Feb. 10 interview with the Mississippi Free Press.
“I believe that Colorado is the gold standard,” she said, pointing to its same-day voter registration, early voting, drop box and mail-in ballot options.
While early voting would not solve all problems all of Mississippi’s problems, it could make it easier for voters who would have multiple days—potentially even weeks—to cast a ballot. Even if they do run into issues when going to vote, they would have time to rectify them by Election Day.
For several years now, Mississippi Sen. Jeremy England, a Vancleave Republican, has attempted to pass an early voting bill. It came close to becoming law after initially earning approval in both the Mississippi House and Senate in 2025, but faced heavy criticism from Gov. Tate Reeves and ultimately died on the calendar.
In the October 2024 interview with the Mississippi Free Press, Secretary of State Michael Watson said that he is an “old-school guy” who prefers in-person voting on Election Day, calling it “the safest vote.” But if the Legislature does eventually pass early voting, he said, he wants the secretary of state’s office to be involved.
“You’ve got to talk to your circuit clerks, your commissioners, we talk about resolution boards, the logistics—if we’re going to have these small courthouses where you have folks funneling in there to vote early, that’s not all they do,” he said. “They’ve got court cases. They’ve got marriage licenses. They’ve got, you name it. So we have to think about the logistics.”
Mississippi does offer some limited absentee mail voting options for some people who fit specific criteria. But those options require a notarization for most voters. This reporter asked Hendrix if voting by mail in Colorado requires any notarizations.
“No. That is insane,” she said.
Because Colorado voters who choose to vote in person are not tied to any single polling place, Coloradans don’t experience the sorts of problems with showing up at the wrong polling place on Election Day that Mississippians do.
“We want people to vote here,” Hendrix said. “We want every eligible citizen to vote.”
Amir Badat, a Meridian, Miss., native who previously worked on voting and polling-place issues as an attorney with the Legal Defense Fund and now works with Fair Fight, told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 11 that a similar system would help voters in Mississippi.
“One of the solutions that I think would solve this problem in many ways (is) not penalizing folks for showing up at the wrong precinct, allowing people to vote at whatever precinct they come to in their county,” he said. “And it’s a system other states use, like in Texas, they have countywide polling locations. So it’s definitely possible. It would change how election administration works—in some ways, making it a little more complicated, in some ways making it more simple.”
Kathy Boockvar, the former secretary of the commonwealth for Pennsylvania, told the Mississippi Free Press that she’s interested in the idea of voting centers like Colorado, Texas and other states use. Despite early voting and other options that make voting easier, Pennsylvania still uses a precinct system like Mississippi.
“I’ve always been really interested in the idea of vote centers because, in my experience, there have been times that I’ve lived in a place where the polling place I was assigned was never on my way to work, to anything I did—it just happened to be in the other direction,” she said. “And so I love the idea that if there were vote centers, that you could vote at any one in your county, or in the state. … I do think there’s a lot of advantages to that.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “maybe you have to go further to any vote center (than to a precinct), depending on how many you have in your county. And do your laws require a certain number of voters per center, per population, or do they take into account the geographic distribution of the population?”
She pointed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she noted that there are a lot of precincts that are neighborhood-based. Most people walk to those polling places, she said, but under a system with voting centers, polling locations might be fewer and further apart.
“Flexibility-wise, it seems to offer a lot, but I think the details matter,” she said. “You really have to design it to fit the different forms and shapes that our communities take.”
Ted Allen, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and computer science engineering at The Ohio State University, agreed that any state ditching precincts in favor of county-wide voting centers has to consider the details. He is a member of the MIT Election Lab with expertise in the election system in Ohio, another bottom-up state.
“When you do that voting-center approach, from a waiting-in-line point-of-view, there could be a problem if everybody chooses to go to the same one,” Allen told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 11. “But it hasn’t been a huge problem that I’m aware of. It does seem like voting centers are just a really nice feature. … Obviously, that would be one way to solve the precinct issues.”
He said that Ohio, which also uses the traditional precinct system, has some issues with voters going to the wrong polling place on Election Day.
“If you really wanted more participation—which to me, I think would be a good thing, and it’s not obvious that it would benefit either party in the short run—you should do automatic voter registration and this voter center idea,” he said.
All-Mail Voting
Emily Sisson, who lives in eastern Washington state, can barely remember life before mail-voting. Like other residents of the Evergreen State, she doesn’t have to worry about what “precinct” she’s in, or where any polling places or voting centers are. Washington is an all-mail voting state.
“They mail you a ballot a couple of weeks early, and it has to be turned in either in a drop box by 8 o’clock on Election Day or mailed and postmarked by Election Day,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 11. “… You can actually print one off online and mail it in. You mail it in with a signature sheet and your barcode (showing that), this is from Emily Sisson. So even if you get two ballots and you send both in, they know that they don’t count one. It’s easy to vote, and I think it’s pretty hard to cheat.”
Voting works similarly for Washington’s neighbors to the south in Oregon, which became the first all-mail voting state in 2000. Barbara Klein, the 1st vice president of the League of Women Voters of Oregon, wasn’t a big fan of mail-in voting when she moved to Oregon from Arizona over a decade ago.
“I thought, oh, it’s a U.S. responsibility of our citizens to go to the polls and blah blah blah,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 11. “To me, Election Day was almost like a holiday to be celebrated. And I think it is, but not necessarily in-person with the community. So I came to Oregon with an attitude that mail-in voting was not as good. And it’s been very interesting. I’ve been here over 10 years and I am absolutely amazed by the system.”
While Mississippi voters often show up to their polling places and scratch their heads as they look through a list of unfamiliar names on their ballots—with no opportunity to look them up—Klein echoed Dawn Pineda’s sentiment about the value of being able to treat a ballot like a take-home test.
“Kitchen-table voters are able to sit down and really go over your ballot and know what you’re voting on, hopefully knowing who you’re voting on,” Klein said. “Whether it’s the who or the (ballot) measures, it’s really important. And people do that. I’m a total convert. … It makes voting here an educational experience, something you can take really seriously, and that you don’t have to take off work for or stand in line for long periods of time and become very frustrated. You don’t have to have harassment at polling sites.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, other states scrambled to change their election rules, with many others adopting mail-in voting and expanded early voting options (with the exception of Mississippi, which focused instead on changing polling places to allow for more social distancing). In Oregon, though, Klein said it “was almost business as usual” for Beaver State voters.
Mail-in voting has come under fire in recent years, particularly after President Donald Trump went on a scorched-earth campaign after losing the 2020 election, making unproven claims of voter fraud and targeting the vote-by-mail options that were abundant during the pandemic specifically. But Ted Allen, the professor from The Ohio State University, noted that concerns about mail voting are overblown.
“There could be potentially some security issues. Of course, that’s true for many different ways of voting,” he said. “But, generally speaking, states that have been doing vote-by-mail have not reported major issues with fraud.”
Several voters who have experience with mail voting systems described experiences where election officials scrutinized their signature on a ballot or the signature of someone they know. Dawn Pineda said one of her friends in Colorado received an email notifying her that officials “had concerns about her signature” and needed her to validate her vote.
Isham Reavis, a voter in Washington state, told the Mississippi Free Press that he has voted in every election in Seattle since moving to King County in the early 2000s.
“My ballot was challenged because my signature had drifted over the years,” he said on Feb. 11. “They reached out and I had to say, yes, indeed, this is still my signature, even though it doesn’t look the same as it once did. So, there are safeguards in place.”
Allen also said that any concerns about the cost of adopting a vote-by-mail system are overblown. In fact, “the vote-by-mail strategy is cheaper—a lot cheaper,” he said.
“Vote-by-mail majorly saves money, partly because then precincts do not need to be secured and poll workers do not need to be trained and hired,” he said. “Combining vote-by-mail with registration reform can be important to driving increased participation and voter satisfaction.”
Despite partisan debate over the merits of vote-by-mail, Allen pointed to studies from August 2020 and June 2020 that found that it had no partisan impact on turnout or voter share.
Voting Rights Coalition Urged Specific Guidance
Hundreds of people stood in a line that wrapped from The Mark Apartments, around a shopping center and down a road in southeast Ridgeland, Miss., on Nov. 3, 2020. Conner Smith, a volunteer for election commissioner candidate Carol Mann, was busy shuttling people to and from a bank down the road, where a third parking lot had been filled up.
“The line is moving so slowly,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Election Day 2020.
Some voters waited in line for two hours to vote at the Mark Apartments precinct that day. But it was even worse for those who first went to their longtime polling place at Ridgeland Recreation Center, only to find out after waiting in line for a half hour or more that their polling place had moved to the Mark Apartments in recent weeks. One of those voters was Jackson Free Press Deputy Nate Schumann, who is now the features editor for the Mississippi Free Press.
Weeks earlier, the Madison County circuit clerk’s office had transferred thousands of voters from the Ridgeland Recreation Center Precinct to the Marks Apartments, which local officials said was done to rectify issues stemming from 2011 redistricting. Some voters, like Steve Cunningham, learned of the change while Mann was out canvassing their neighborhoods, and told the Mississippi Free Press that local officials had not informed them that their precinct had changed. The Mississippi Free Press published a story about the change on Oct. 29, 2020.
It would be one of many unexpected changes the Mississippi Free Press reported on between 2020 and 2025. Ahead of the 2020 elections, Secretary of State Michael Watson reported in late October that 17 precincts had changed based on information local officials had shared with him. But a Mississippi Free Press analysis of the information in SEMS showed that officials had changed at least 55 precincts since the primaries earlier that year. And not all the information in SEMS was accurate, either.
On March 17, 2022, a coalition of voting rights groups—including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU of Mississippi, Black Voters Matter, the Mississippi Center for Justice, the Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP, One Voice and the Southern Poverty Law Center—sent a letter to Watson. The letter cited the Mississippi Free Press’ reporting, including on the issues at the Madison County precinct, and noted that “Mississippi law requires county Boards of Supervisors to provide notice to the Secretary of State before implementation of any polling site changes, but it appears that there is inconsistent compliance with the law and confusion about whether county or state officials must update SEMS.”
The group made three recommendations for changes that it said Watson should implement using the powers of his office:
- “Promulgate rules instructing Election Commissioners or other authorized election officials to timely enter polling site changes into SEMS.” The coalition urged him specifically to issue rules to “require that no polling site changes be made within 60 days of an election, except in exceptional circumstances.” The coalition also urged him to require local officials to “enter polling site changes into SEMS within 10 days if the change is made more than 90 days before an election; within 3 business days if the change is made within 90 days of an election; and within one (1) day if the change is made within 30 days of an election.”
- “Issue guidance establishing a timeframe and process for county Boards of Supervisors to report polling site changes to your office.” The letter urged Watson to instruct Boards of Supervisors to report location changes within 10 days if made more than 90 days before an election; within three days if made within 90 days of an election; and within one day if made within 30 days of an election.
- “Issue guidance establishing requirements for the timing and adequacy of notice to voters about polling site changes.” The letter said Watson should advise local officials to not only issue written mail notice to voters about polling place changes within 14 days of an election, but also publish changes in television, radio, local newspapers, county websites and social media accounts. “If the change occurs fewer than 14 days before an election, your office should encourage Election Commissioners to also conduct outreach to affected voters by telephone,” the letter adds.
In response, though, Watson repeated a familiar mantra: “It is no secret that Mississippi is a bottom-up state, meaning local officials run our elections.” The role of his office, he said, “is limited to the administrative process of housing the SEMS database and the data stored thereon,” and “any rules promulgated by our office would likely be restricted” unless the Legislature granted him additional authority.
“In regards to our polling place locator, we will continue to explore possible improvements and work closely with county officials to ensure polling place information is accurate and easily accessible to Mississippi voters,” he wrote.
A follow-up letter in October 2022 from the coalition—joined this time also by the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights—urged Watson to reconsider. The letter pointed to the Mississippi Free Press’ June 2022 report that found 70 changes to polling places since 2020, many of which “were not reflected in SEMS at all” or “were incorrectly reported or recorded in SEMS.” The letter argued that Watson already has the authority to issue the rules the group recommended.
“But even if you did not, most of our recommendations are for the issuance of non-binding guidance,” the letter said. “Nothing precludes you from doing this. … Indeed, your office routinely issues guidance to clerks and other local officials to assist them with election administration.”
Amir Badat, who was still with the LDF when it spearheaded the 2022 letters to Watson, told the Mississippi Free Press that more training with local election officials could help, too. Secretary Watson’s office provides training before elections each year, but Badat argues that the State needs to do more.
“If you compare Mississippi’s Secretary of State Office to other states, including states in the South, just take Texas, for example, the Texas Secretary of State Office has so much more infrastructure and training for local election officials than Mississippi does,” he said.
But there are easy options the secretary of state’s office could do with the resources it has, he said.
“There was a year where we sent letters to Michael Watson’s office, and a few days or weeks later, he sent a message to all circuit clerks to encourage them to make sure that all of their polling place information was updated,” Badat said. “That’s a best practice that the secretary of state could adopt for every election—they could do follow-ups with every county. They could do outreach to every county, they could call every clerk by phone.”
State Now Limits Polling Changes Within 60 Days of an Election
In the years since the voting-rights coalition first urged the secretary of state’s office to implement new guidance, errors in SEMS have persisted, and last-minute polling place changes continued even after the pandemic-era rush to adjust for social-distancing requirements.
In 2023, Mississippi House Rep. Zakiya Summers, a Jackson Democrat, pushed back after she learned that the board of supervisors motioned to close several precincts within her district—including merging her own precinct into another district outside the one she represents.
“We have a lot of constituents that walk to their precincts because of a lack of transportation. So merging all of those precincts into one location would create long lines, a lot of confusion on ballots, et cetera,” she told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 13.
Summers said she argued against the change at the next board meeting, citing her concerns, and the board repealed the motion.
After that experience, she proposed legislation that mirrored one of the voting rights coalition’s suggestions in its 2022 letter to Watson in response to Mississippi Free Press reporting: prohibiting polling-place changes within 60 days of an election except in “exigent circumstances.” Exigent circumstances would include issues beyond officials’ control, like when a tornado damaged polling places in Sharkey County in 2023, necessitating some relocations.
“What I wanted to do with this legislation was to say, we’ve actually seen this done many times in Hinds County and probably in other counties across the state, where these polling-place locations are changed at the last minute; voters go to vote on Election Day only to find out that they have no idea where their new voting location is,” Summers said.
One of those examples happened just a few months before she first proposed the bill. During the August 2023 primaries, the Mississippi Free Press reported on how Hinds County election officials moved two polling places the day before the primary because they were not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act—a determination that officials should’ve made long before the eve of an election.
“And so the goal of this legislation was to say, you cannot do it within that 60-day window. However, if there is some type of emergency circumstance where that needs to happen, then these are the steps you need to follow to make it right,” Summers told the Mississippi Free Press.
But she said a situation like the one in the August 2023 primaries is not an “exigent” circumstance.
“It’s a failure in the first place to not have already ensured this,” Summers said. “No, I don’t consider that an exigent circumstance. I’m a former election commissioner. And it is a part of our duty to assess precincts regularly and make sure they are in compliance.”
Summers’ bill passed the House unanimously in 2024, but died in the Senate. When she tried again in 2025, it earned approval from both chambers—perhaps one step toward alleviating some of the issues voters face with polling-place changes.
But what about the other suggestions from the voting rights coalition’s 2022 letter, like the suggestion to mandate that local officials update SEMS to reflect polling place changes accurately within a set period of time?
“I would be interested in proposing something like that,” Summers told the Mississippi Free Press. “Next session, if there’s an opportunity to tighten the bill that we passed in 2025 on precincts, that would help clarify (the system) to ensure that the information’s being (updated) in a timely manner. That’d be something I’d be interested in.”
Still, she said she understands why polling-place changes happen—especially in a county like Hinds that has 108 precincts.
“And many of them were schools that have closed over the years,” she said. “So I know that changes are inevitable. But nevertheless, you have to ensure that you’re inputting that information because voters need to know. And the precinct managers and the poll workers need to know as well.”
When asked in 2024 about the possibility of the Legislature passing a law requiring up-to-date information in SEMS, Secretary of State Michael Watson did not endorse the idea, but said it was an option. The Pascagoula, Mississippi, native served in the Senate from 2008 to 2020.
“The Legislature can do what they want to, for sure,” he said. “Being a former member of the Senate, if that’s their will, they can pass anything they want when it comes to a statute demanding those changes be up-to-date.”
