Three of the five Rankin County Election Commissioners have completed verifying their affidavit ballots.
About 20% of affidavit ballots processed in Rankin County so far have been rejected, the county’s provisional ballot records show.
Voting at the wrong precinct is the most common reason for affidavit votes to be rejected in Rankin County, making up just over 50% of rejected affidavit ballots.
Poll workers look for each voter in the poll books, and send the ones they cannot find to the affidavit ballot table, where those poll workers do an advanced search to find their voter registration.
“If they still can’t find it, then what they’ll (typically) do is they’ll pull up a precinct finder tool on the poll book, and that will tell them if they’re in the wrong location,” Rankin County District 2 Election Commissioner Andrew Sorrentino told the Mississippi Free Press.
When making the rounds through the seven precincts in his district, Sorrentino overheard some explanations as to why certain voters might still choose to vote at a precinct they know is wrong.
“I heard multiple reasons as to why they weren’t going to their other one, which were ‘I’m headed to work’, which I understand, ‘I’m not going all the way back that way’, ‘I’ll just do it here’ and ‘I don’t care,’” Sorrentino told the Mississippi Free Press.
There is no cure process to fix affidavit ballots cast in the wrong precinct in Mississippi, even if the ballots are the same in both locations, Sorrentino told the Mississippi Free Press.
“A lot of times I think the public thinks that an affidavit ballot is going to self-correct itself once it gets into our office, … they think that if it’s an affidavit, we get to come behind and do a little bit of a cleanup,” Sorrentino said. “We don’t.”
