You Have Rights When You Go To Vote—And Many Are There to Help with Trouble At the Polls
Despite all the challenges to this year’s election—long lines, calls for voter intimidation, baseless claims of fraud—voting is a fundamental civil right.
Despite all the challenges to this year’s election—long lines, calls for voter intimidation, baseless claims of fraud—voting is a fundamental civil right.
With long voting lines in the state and across the country expected on Nov. 3, voters could be subjected to more electioneering outside the polls than in years past. Electioneering is defined as “the activity of trying to persuade people to vote for a particular political party.”
Voters in two majority Black Mississippi counties have cast almost four times as many absentee ballots as they did four years ago, new data from the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office show.
After Ashton Pittman’s Mississippi Free Press story on Oct. 29, 2020, about the Madison County election commission’s office recently rezoning 2,000+ mostly Black and Latinx voters to The Mark apartments precinct, photographer Allie Jordan just had to see it for herself.
Since May, local officials in Mississippi have changed polling-place locations for at least 55 precincts—more than triple the 17 precinct changes that Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson announced last week, affecting about 65,000 Mississippi voters.
Black Church-led campaigns to expand and protect voting among African American reaches back to the years following the Civil War. At political forums held in churches, clergy educated congregants on political issues, regularly running for elected office themselves.
Jarrius Adams of Oxford and Taylor Turnage of Byram helped organize the 2020 BLM Sip anti-racism protest in Jackson; now they are organizing young voters to turn out to vote.
2,550 mostly Black and Hispanic voters in southeast Ridgeland, a historic white-flight suburb outside just north of Jackson, were quietly rezoned out of their racially mixed precinct this summer. They were placed, instead, into an already majority non-white one.
Trump’s tweets speak to an imagined and well-to-do stereotypical suburban resident who fears the bogeymen of poverty and crime. That combination of threats has historically had a Black or Latino face.
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