Polls have closed in Mississippi, where some pre-election polls showed Republican Gov. Tate Reeves in a tight race with Democratic challenger Brandon Presley. However, several precincts in Hinds County (the state’s largest county and likely to vote heavily for Presley) ran out of ballots and there are dueling judicial orders over polling places remaining open and whether votes cast after the closing time will count. Looks like a shit show.
If I lived in Hinds County, I would be pissed.
In Mississippi, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley told supporters that he has conceded the race to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves. The Associated Press and The Post have not officially called the race for Reeves.
I thought it was looking up once they finally started counting Jackson. I guess not enough.
That’s one way to prevent too many of the “wrong” people from voting. “Sorry folks, there’s only 3 ballots here at the county courthouse; you’ll have to fight amongst yourselves on who gets to fill them out.”
How do you not make sure you have enough ballots for all the registered voters in a precinct? Almost seems deliberate to me, although as the saying goes what may appear to be malice may just be attributable to stupidity. I’ll be curious to hear more about this.
I think it came down to poor planning. I saw several cites that the people in charge of the ballots in the affected areas were democrats. They just screwed up and underestimated the turnout.
Now the reaction was pure partisan asshattery, Republicans trying to block people waiting in line from voting after they finally got ballots in. It’s so telling that Rs will grasp and finagle and twist themselves into pretzels to deny as many people as possible the right to vote at every junction. Almost as if they know the majority of people would vote against their platform if given the opportunity…
I had likewise assumed that this was part of the standard Republican playbook of throwing up barriers to voting in heavily Democratic areas, but the reporting is that printing and distributing ballots was the responsibility of the county’s election commission (which is all Democrats).
General rule of thumb is that a clusterfuck created by Republicans is attributable to malice, and a clusterfuck created by Democrats is attributable to gross incompetence.
Reeves won by almost 5 percentage points, a lead of 37,000 with 96% in. Hinds didn’t have enough turnout even with sufficient ballots to make the difference.
Couldn’t realistically expect more this year, but a good sign for the future.