Voter Voices: Longtime poll watcher has seen problems, politics
By Jerry Mitchell | Originally published by Mississippi Today
“Voter Voices” is a series of Mississippians sharing their thoughts on voting rights, the state’s history of voter suppression and the new gerrymandering push embroiling Mississippi, the South and the nation.
Since 1988, Bill Gray has been a poll watcher for various Mississippi political campaigns.
During that time, he has seen many Mississippians blocked from voting because they went to the wrong precinct. Sometimes this happened because the precinct had changed, and voters failed to receive notices. Sometimes voters missed the notices. Sometimes voters received incorrect notices.
Mississippi Today, after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Louisiana redistricting case gutted the federal Voting Rights Act, has solicited voters’ stories of their experiences as debate heats up here and nationwide over gerrymandering and voting rights.
In 2019, Gray worked as a poll watcher for the Jim Hood campaign for governor. While working at a Rankin County voting precinct, a man walked in wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.
Gray told the poll manager that the man couldn’t wear a hat like that, and the manager responded that the hat wasn’t political, he said. “And I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And so he gets the Rankin County election commissioner out there. Then he and I go at it because he’s telling me it’s not political.”
He questioned why the secretary of state is now using Experian credit data — and nothing else — to have local election officials clean up Mississippi’s voting rolls.
The Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office spent $50,000 to run nearly 2 million checks of Experian’s unverified commercial data on registered voters, saying it did so to verify their addresses and help determine their status in a push starting last July to “strengthen the integrity of elections” statewide.
The office handed those unverified addresses to election commissioners, which led to the removal of numerous legitimate voters without their knowledge over the past two years.
Gray saw the problem with this approach firsthand after someone stole his credit information.
“They were showing me as previously living in Chicago,” he said. “It took me four or five years to finally clear it up.”
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
