Ballot mess delays outcome of Mississippi race between GOP governor and Democrat related to Elvis

By Emily Wagster Pettus, The Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. — A hard-fought contest between Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and Democrat Brandon Presley in the Mississippi governor’s race was disrupted Tuesday by a voting mess when polling places in the state’s largest county ran out of ballots and voters endured long lines in a key Democratic stronghold.

Hinds County election commissioners — all Democrats — were said to have underestimated the turnout and failed to have enough ballots on hand.

Long lines of frustrated voters were kept waiting for batches of ballots that arrived and then ran out again. Judges extended added an extra hour of voting time for the whole county, then a second hour for some precincts.

“Sheer incompetence,” said Perry Perkins, an organizer for Working Together Mississippi, a nonpartisan group that coordinates voter mobilization. “This is a travesty.”

A Hinds County supervisor, Democrat Credell Calhoun, was furious at the election commissioners when so much was at stake. “As hard as we worked to get the vote out and then you’re going to have stupidity to not have enough ballots,” Calhoun said.

One judge ordered all polls in the county to remain open an extra hour, until 8 p.m. CST. Another judge said four polling places in some suburbs of Jackson, the capital city, had to extend voting until 9 p.m.

Both parties and a nonpartisan group, Mississippi Votes, petitioned for the additional voting time. More ballots were provided to the locations, but seemingly not always enough.

One precinct in Clinton had 100 people in line but only 14 ballots available at 6:45 p.m., while another ran out of ballots three times but only received 100 more each time, according to a court filing by Mississippi Votes.

One precinct in nearby Byram had no ballots for two hours while a second had just 25 to 30 ballots and a long line of voters, the group said. A third location ran out of ballots and poll workers told people to leave because the precinct would not receive more ballots and the workers would not allow voting by affidavit ballot, according to the filing.

Republicans dominate in the conservative state, but Democrats were making an aggressive push for a rare victory in a governor’s race in the Deep South.

Presley voted in his hometown of Nettleton, in the northern part of the state just a few miles from where his second cousin, Elvis Presley, was born and raised. Reeves voted in downtown Jackson.

Edward McCall, 66, holds onto his son’s mug as he and others stand in line waiting for the polls to open at this north Jackson, Miss., precinct, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)AP

Heading into Election Day, Reeves told voters that Mississippi had momentum with job creation, low unemployment and improvements in education. He said liberal, out-of-state donors to Presley’s campaign were trying to change Mississippi.

“For you to believe Brandon Presley in anything that he says, you’ve got to believe that everything in Mississippi is bad,” Reeves said last week during the candidates’ only debate.

Presley, a state utility regulator, said Reeves had hurt the state by refusing to expand Medicaid to cover people working lower-wage jobs that do not provide health insurance. Presley pledged to clean up government corruption, pointing to welfare money that was spent on pet projects for the wealthy and well-connected rather than aid for some of the poorest people in one of the poorest states in the nation.

“He’s not going to open his mouth about ethics reform,” Presley said of Reeves. “He is the poster child of this broken, corrupt system.”

But the voting problems in Hinds County were also drawing much attention.

“I’ve been doing this work for 45 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this in my whole life,” said Perkins said. “People were telling me they were coming back for the fourth or fifth time to vote. The poll workers were telling me they were they were running out of ballots constantly.”

Perkins said he had “never seen this much widespread sheer incompetence.” He said group organizers who were sent to encourage voters to stay in line found those waiting and returning to cast a ballot “in good spirits” and “determined to vote.”

Republicans have held the Mississippi governorship for the past 20 years. They hold all statewide offices and a wide majority in the Legislature. The last time a Democrat won the presidential vote in Mississippi was 1976, when Georgia’s Jimmy Carter was on the ballot.

For the first time, Mississippi had the possibility of a runoff in the governor’s race if no candidate received at least 50% of the vote. An independent candidate, Gwendolyn Gray, announced weeks ago that she was dropping out and endorsing Presley, but she did it after ballots were set.

Mississippi voters in 2020 repealed a Jim Crow-era method of electing a governor and other statewide officials, which required a candidate to win both the popular vote and a majority of the 122 state House districts. Without both, a race was decided by House members who were not obligated to vote as their districts did. Contests were seldom decided by the House, but the method was written by white supremacists with the intent of keeping Black candidates out of office.

Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, receives his ballot from Jackson, Miss., poll worker Joyce Lewis, 67, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. Reeves, who is seeking reelection, faces Democratic nominee Brandon Presley. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)AP

Reeves, 49, served two terms as state treasurer and two as lieutenant governor before winning an open race for governor in 2019.

Presley, 46, was mayor of his small hometown of Nettleton for six years before being elected in 2007 to the three-person Mississippi Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities.

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann won a second term Tuesday by defeating a Democratic challenger who had spent little money, business consultant D. Ryan Grover. In a contentious Republican primary in August, Hosemann defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel.

Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, whose office led the legal fight to overturn Roe v. Wade and change abortion access, won a second term by defeating Democrat Greta Kemp Martin, an attorney for Disability Rights Mississippi.

Associated Press reporters Michael Goldberg in Jackson, Mississippi, and Matthew Brown in Washington contributed to this report.