These are three anecdotes about issues at the ground level involving voter suppression in Mississippi. The first took place in the Mississippi Delta, a predominately black area of Mississippi that voted for Obama. The other two are in a county with one of the state's universities. This is a slightly expanded version of a blog entry I did on www.folo.us, where there has been a lot of discussion about voting issues in Mississippi and the south.
I think it is critical to work through and understand these sorts of issues for next time.
Part One
One of the magnetic cards for a box in a populous delta county was lost as of 10 PM election night.
Lost.
I’m trying to ascertain whether it once was lost but now was found.
Lesson here: Maybe the most effective methods of voter suppression involve accidents. If we can just be a little careless, there won’t be as many bad votes.
Part Two
The "rules" on who got to vote varied from precinct to precinct in Lafayette County, and the rules about how the poll workers dealt with people not on the roles seemed to have a certain amount of slack depending on where one voted...
...and who one was.
There was one precinct that was particularly dominated by Republican poll workers. They were actually providing names of voters as they voted to the Republican poll watchers and refusing to do so for Democratic watchers, and they were consistently turning away black voters with registration issues, refusing to allow them to file affidavit or provisional ballots. I was there, insisting they follow the rules (and was threatened with ejection for doing so in a polite way) and witnessed all of this– I got called in for the crisis that was ongoing there. I had the sense that the people being turned away were overwhelmingly black, and that I was not at that polling places seeing the usual mix of people with problem registrations.
Last night, I talked to an undergraduate student who used to work for me. She’s a relatively standard issue Ole Miss coed– attractive, blond, could be a sorority girl. And she showed up at the place that would be correct for voting if she’d changed her registration when she’d moved. She was not on the rolls.
I dealt with over a dozen people on election day who were in exactly that situation. They were not allowed to enter an affidavit ballot, even, (as is their right) although state statute mandates that someone moving within the county be allowed to vote at their new residence without re-registering. They were being required to go to the courthouse, get a new voter registration card, then come back and then do an affidavit ballot (a pretty annoying process involving multiple trips and line waits).
So what did they do with this coed, whose self-description is "I probably look like a McCain supporter"?
They just let her vote. She wasn’t on the rolls. She wasn’t required to make an affidavit ballot. She just voted.
Lesson: First, there’s a need to not just understand the rules ourselves, but deal with the decisions (which aren’t necessarily consistent with the rules) by the poll workers about how they’re going to run the show. This is going to require a lot of homework to resolve, and perhaps some litigation.
Part Three
In at least three different counties, representatives of the parties or candidates were excluded from witnessing the counting of affidavit ballots and absentee ballots. This is particularly absurd with the former, because the elections commissioners are making a judgment call about whether these people are entitled to have their votes counted. In my county, we had assembled documentary proof that many of the voters should be counted, and the commissioners would not let us close enough to make sure the proof was matched with the affidavit. I’ve been allowed to participate in municipal elections, and it went smoothly.
Lesson: We need to both prework (and defeat in election, possibly) some elections commissioners in some of these counties. I think the Republicans already have figured this one out.