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The post Marshall Ramsey: The Election’s True Heroes appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Editor’s note: Erica Hensley reported from Hinds, Rankin and Madison counties. Tom Wright reported from Harrison, Stone, Forrest and Simpson counties. Kate Royals reported from Lauderdale and Neshoba counties. Anna Wolfe reported from Lawrence, Franklin, Jefferson, Pike and Amite counties. Aallyah Wright reported from DeSoto, Panola and Coahoma counties. Kelsey Davis Betz reported from Bolivar, Attala and Washington counties. Alex Rozier reported from Lee and Oktibbeha counties. Brittany Brown reported from Lafayette and Yalobusha counties.

Across the state, thousands of Mississippi voters found themselves in long lines outside their polling places waiting to cast a vote. Though the wait in some places took more than an hour, many voters said the process felt easy and safe.

In the metro Jackson area, lines were already filled with hundreds of voters when the polls opened at 7 a.m. Most voters Mississippi Today spoke to were upbeat and happy to stand in line, though they all said they’ve never seen a wait like this, which averaged about 45 minutes depending on the precinct.

Around 9 a.m. at the Fondren precinct in Jackson, one voter near the end of a long line shouted out to someone exiting the polling place: “Excuse me, ma’am, how long did you have to wait?” Her response, yelled across the parking lot: “About an hour!”

Lines in Madison were even longer. The new split off from Ridgeland Recreational Center to The Mark Apartments wrapped down Lake Harbour Drive on Tuesday morning.

In Canton, waits hit up to two hours at a 1,300 voter precinct, where the poll manager shuts down the in-person voting whenever there are curbside voters, of which there were five by 12:30 p.m. Poll manager Kimberly Archie understood this to be the expectation from the secretary of state’s office.

A few hours north, poll workers Vicki Jarrett and Deborah West said it was a busy morning at Lee County’s busiest polling location, the Tupelo Furniture Market. About 2,800 people had voted there before 4 p.m., they said. With people still coming to vote after work, they expect the total will easily surpass the roughly 3,500 cast there in the 2016 presidential election.

They said voters adhered to COVID-19 guidelines, with all but one person so far wearing a mask. About 20 voters used the curbside service, which was available to voters who could not enter the building or were showing symptoms of COVID-19.

“We’ve been wiping down, there’s been somebody going around sanitizing the poll booths,” Jarrett said. “I’m really pleased with the reaction of the community as far as abiding by the guidelines.”

At another Tupelo precinct by Legion Lake, poll worker Chris Murphy said they already had the biggest turnout in more than 10 years, despite a recent location change that wasn’t reflected on the secretary of state’s precinct list as of last week. Murphy said they had already received about 80% of that precinct’s eligible votes by about 3 p.m.

The line of voters at the Oxford Conference Center, the largest precinct in Lafayette County, was wrapped around the parking lot on Tuesday morning. The same scene played out at the county’s second largest precinct, the Lafayette Civic Center serving 5,162 active voters.

A few people in Oxford said they had not seen lines at the polling places in recent elections. One voter, Alonzo Hilliard, a University of Mississippi alumnus and Oxford resident, called the long lines “encouraging.”

“It’s record-breaking,” Hilliard said. “It’s just time for a change.”

Historic turnout was not reserved for large, populated precincts. In Water Valley, the voting scene was much different and calmer than the polls in Oxford. There were no lines wrapped around parking lots or buildings, but a slow and steady stream of voters coming in and out of their polling places.

Yalobusha County election commissioner Steve Cummings said the longest line he had seen at his precinct was probably 20 to 25 people but said Tuesday’s election “could be the biggest” for the county. Another Yalobusha County election commissioner, Missy Kimzie, said the courthouse was busy with voters Tuesday morning, which she called “very unusual.”

In rural southwest Mississippi, even the smallest communities saw unusually crowded polling places. But while some people had to spend more time waiting than usual, there were few complaints of the overall process.

At the Tangipahoa precinct, a standalone polling place in unincorporated Amite County, a line of voters stretched down a hill to the country highway. They had collected more than 200 votes from their 636 registered voters by mid-afternoon. One elderly man, who’s voted there for 40 years, told Mississippi Today it was the first time he hadn’t been able to walk straight into the building to cast his ballot. And he drove by three times before finally joining the line.

At one of the state’s tiniest precincts called NOLA in the unincorporated community Sontag, a voter arrived at 6 a.m. to cast his ballot, a poll manager said. Twelve out of 67 registered voters had visited in the first three hours of the day, but there have been elections in the past where 12 votes was the day’s total, workers said.

Workers at the Navilla Baptist Church polling location in McComb, one of the largest precincts in Pike County, were especially overwhelmed tending to a steady line of several dozen well into the afternoon with no signs of slowing down. They’d recorded 508 votes out of 1,703 registered voters by about 2 p.m.

Gulf Coast voters stood in extremely long lines on Tuesday. On Tuesday morning, voters wrapped around the Lyman Community Center and around St. Joseph Catholic Church in Gulfport.

Voters lined up in the sun D’Iberville Civic Center, with some reporting a 90-minute wait shortly before 1 p.m.

The lines in many voting locations in Meridian remained short on Election Day morning, the Lauderdale County Circuit Clerk’s office was buzzing with voters trying to find their correct voting locations. District 1 Election Commissioner Chuck Overby said it was a chaotic but good day.

“There’s people who are voting (today) that haven’t voted in years,” Overby said. Despite the confusion for some, though, he emphasized people were not being turned away.

“They all get to vote because they just vote affidavit,” he said. “We don’t turn anybody down to vote.”

Some voters in Meridian were confused Tuesday because their polling places had been changed recently, and they either did not receive notice or misunderstood when they were notified. But for many, the process was smooth.

First-time voter Jermaine Scott and several others who voted at the Raymond P. Davis County Annex Courthouse Building downtown, the process went well.

“It was actually quick, and I felt safe and comfortable,” Scott said, noting everyone inside was wearing a mask. “It was a calm environment.”

In Coahoma and Panola counties, voters said the process was easy, citing short wait times and adequate safety precautions.

At the Lee Drive Fire Station in Clarksdale, several voters waiting on the six machines said they could not safely distance from one another due to the minimal space in the fire station. But Patricia Cachafeiro, 53, said otherwise, voting there was calm and organized.

“It just went very smoothly,” she said.

To avoid the high traffic morning crowd at the Batesville Courthouse — one of the largest polling locations in the area — Kiffney Smith, 39, voted a little before noon. Inside her precinct, rows of pews separated the voters to ensure social distance. She said it took her only 10 minutes to cast her ballot. “The process was faster than I expected,” Smith said.

In Sardis, about 10 miles north of Batesville, Linden Leakes echoed Smith, stating his voting experience was great. His polling place, the Sardis Courthouse, had fewer than five voters inside at the time he voted.

Polling locations in Shaw, Mound Bayou and Cleveland were busier than usual, but did not see as long of lines as metro areas around the state.

Jacqueline Mitchell, a poll worker in Cleveland, said about 500 people had already voted there by 10 a.m., which is much higher than what she saw in 2016. That polling location serves 1,667 people, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

For Jamelle Banks, who moved from Atlanta to Cleveland six months ago, the quieter polling location was a welcome change.

“This is so much better,” Banks said. “In Atlanta when I voted, lines were around the corner for hours. So this is a big difference. It’s a big change for me, but it’s a nice one.”

In Shaw, Cora Jackson said the consistent activity she’s seen at her polling location reminds her of what she knows about what voting in the civil rights era was like.

“I’ve watched some of the videos from voting in the 60s, and this too resonates with some of that same kind of foresight that people feel the need to go out and cast their vote,” Jackson said.

The post ‘How long did you have to wait?’ Long lines, record turnout the story of 2020 Election Day in Mississippi appeared first on Mississippi Today.

MERIDIAN — Some Lauderdale County voters said they received no notification they had a different polling place after county officials, less than two months before Election Day, moved polling places for about 1,650 voters.

The Lauderdale County Board of Supervisors made the move on Sept. 8 to provide more space for social distancing and enhance voter privacy and parking access, according to board documents. The changes were requested by the county’s Election Commission and voted on by the supervisors.

While some residents did hear about the change, they were confused by the correspondence they received from the county.

One voter, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said he and his mother received a letter stating the Raymond P. Davis Building County Courthouse Annex in downtown Meridian was their “new voting location for county elections,” with “county elections” underlined.

But since Tuesday’s election is a federal election, he and his mother took that to mean they would continue voting at the Central Fire Station as they had in previous elections. When he showed up at the fire station Tuesday before 7 a.m., no one was there and no signage was posted.

Kate Royals/Mississippi Today

The Raymond P. Davis Building – County Courthouse Annex in downtown Meridian is the new location for those who used to vote at Central Fire Station.

“It was about 7:55 a.m. before a gentleman showed up and told us that we are not supposed to be there to vote and that we were supposed to be at the Raymond P. Davis Annex building,” he said.

District 2 Election Commissioner Consuela Rue said the letter was written that way because residents of that part of her district vote at one precinct for city elections and another for county elections.

“For municipal elections, they have different precincts,” she said, noting that she has recommended to city officials that they also transfer those municipal precincts to the Annex Building to decrease voter confusion.

Kate Royals/Mississippi Today

Reginald Cole acts as a “stander,” or a person who stands and redirects voters at a closed precinct, at the Central Fire Station in Meridian. A handwritten sign taped to his car directs people to their new polling location.

On Tuesday around 11 a.m., Reginald Cole was parked outside the Central Fire Station acting as a “stander,” or someone who redirects voters to the correct precinct. Cole had two handwritten signs taped to his car directing people to vote at the Annex Building about a half mile away. Voters would drive by and roll down their windows, and he directed them away.

He estimated that by that time, about 50 people had come to the fire station to attempt to vote.

One of those was Ina Campbell, who was planning to vote on her lunch break. She told Mississippi Today she received no notification of a change.

Two other precincts, Prospect and Andrews Chapel, were merged together into a single precinct at Gracepointe Fellowship to improve its compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and to provide a larger room for voting.

“… such improved facilities for disabled voters and elderly voters will enhance the voting process for all persons involved,” the board of supervisors’ Sept. 8 order states.

County officials also approved relocating the polling precinct at the First Baptist Church of Lauderdale to the Gateway Church. The decision was made after First Baptist Church requested to no longer be a polling place, according to the order.

Gateway is a handicapped accessible facility with sufficient parking and an “adequate area” for voting, the order stated.

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When Mississippians go to the polls Tuesday, they will have the opportunity to do something they have never done on their own — remove a Jim Crow-era provision from the state’s 1890 Constitution designed to prevent African Americans from holding office.

Language in the Constitution mandates candidates running for the eight statewide offices must garner a majority of the vote and win the most votes in a majority of the 122 House districts. Under the constitutional provisions, if no candidate is able to do both, the election is thrown to the House to decide between the top two vote-getters.

Other Jim Crow provisions of the 1890 Constitution, such as the poll tax, literacy test and separate but equal school districts were found unconstitutional by federal courts or banned by federal law, but were not removed from the Constitution by Mississippi voters until years later.

In regards to the elections being thrown into the House, often called Mississippi’s version of the electoral college, a lawsuit was filed in 2019 challenging the constitutionality of the process. In response to the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan of the Southern District of Mississippi indicated that if the state did not remove the provision he might be forced to do so. Mississippians will have an opportunity Tuesday to act before possibly being forced to by a federal judge.

No other state has provisions that would prevent the person garnering the majority of the vote from being seated. If voters approve the change to the Constitution, the state will still be outside of the mainstream in terms of electing candidates. Most states – 46 – require a candidate for statewide office to win only a plurality of the vote. The provision Mississippians are voting on would mandate a runoff among the top two vote-getters if no candidate garners a majority of the vote.

The 2019 lawsuit alleged the process of throwing the elections into the House dilutes Black voter strength. Black Mississippians are more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate, but because House districts are drawn to maximize the number of Republicans serving in the House, it is difficult for Democratic candidates to win the most votes in a majority of the House districts, the lawsuit claimed.

The language was placed in the Constitution in 1890 at a time when African Americans were a majority in the state. The lawsuit cited a volume of the Mississippi Historical Society as saying the Constitution was written in 1890 in a manner to ensure the white minority controlled the House of Representatives and was “the legal basis and bulwark of the design of white supremacy in a state with an overwhelming and growing negro majority.”

In the 1990s,  three races were thrown into the House. In two elections for lieutenant governor, the losing candidate — Brad Dye in 1991 and Eddie Briggs in 1995 — asked the House to select the candidate who won the most votes. In 1999, Republican Mike Parker, who lost the popular vote, unsuccessfully took the election to the House where Democrat Ronnie Musgrove, who garnered the most votes, was elected by the representatives.

The post Mississippians can make history by removing Jim Crow-era provision on their own appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Republican political strategists, anxious in 2018 that Democrat Mike Espy would defeat Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in a special election runoff for the Senate, recommended that President Donald Trump fly to Mississippi to campaign for the appointed senator.

Those election eve rallies — in Tupelo and Biloxi, two of the state’s critical GOP strongholds — ultimately shored up Hyde-Smith’s 7.5-point victory over Espy, the former congressman and U.S. secretary of agriculture.

Two years later, as Hyde-Smith again faces Espy in a Senate election for the full six-year term, the senator has received nothing more than a single supportive tweet from the president.

If Hyde-Smith wins on Tuesday night, it won’t be because she received help from a president or other national Republicans. It won’t be because she ran a methodical campaign, or because she articulated a message of change for Mississippians who have long suffered from the many problems that plague the state. She’d win because a majority of Mississippians are Republican in this most-polarized election.

Hyde-Smith’s 2020 campaign strategy has been one of hope — hope that her reliance on Trump’s popularity in Mississippi and red-meat Republican talking points will guide her to victory. She avoided tough questions on the campaign trail, and she spoke little about critical issues facing Mississippians. She refused to debate her opponent, and she received meager financial support.

This election’s penultimate question, begged through inaction by Hyde-Smith and GOP leaders: Can a Republican in a reliably red state still win an election without much campaigning, even against a formidable Democratic challenger?

Financial reports from the final days of the 2018 and 2020 elections perhaps best illustrate how little Hyde-Smith has done on the campaign trail this year.

Three weeks from the 2018 runoff, Hyde-Smith’s campaign had spent $3.4 million. Three weeks from the 2020 general election, Hyde-Smith’s campaign had spent just $2.6 million. That’s a decrease of 24%.

Three weeks from the 2018 runoff, Espy’s campaign had spent $2.2 million. Three weeks from the 2020 general election, Espy’s campaign had spent $6.4 million. That’s an increase of 190%. 

Gov. Phil Bryant, the historically popular Republican who appointed Hyde-Smith to the Senate, stumped hard for her in 2018 and helped raise in-state money through the Mississippi Republican Party apparatus.

This year, Gov. Tate Reeves, significantly less popular than Bryant, did virtually no campaigning or fundraising for Hyde-Smith. Several Republican operatives privately questioned the timing of Reeves — eight days from Election Day — hosting a $10,000-per-photo fundraiser for the state Republican Party as Hyde-Smith struggled to raise cash in the final stretch.

Two years ago, Hyde-Smith received millions in support from super PACs and independent groups, which flowed cash into Mississippi to ensure Hyde-Smith and Republicans retained their seat in the U.S. Senate.

This year, Hyde-Smith has none of that outside support.

“I just really figured there’s no reason to even set up a Super PAC this time, you know. She should be fine,” Henry Barbour, the national Republican strategist who helped steer millions to support Hyde-Smith in 2018, told Mississippi Today last week.

In 2018, Hyde-Smith benefitted from what former Republican Party Chairman Lucien Smith heralded as “the largest data-driven, get-out-the-vote effort we’ve ever had in Mississippi.” At least 15 full-time staffers knocked doors and made calls across the state for the senator, and during the three-week runoff, national Republican groups at least doubled that number of canvassers.

This year, Hyde-Smith’s campaign had a goal of hiring “six or seven” full-time field staffers, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager Justin Brasell said earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith’s Democratic opponent Espy has run one of the most expensive and robust campaigns in the state’s history.

Espy raised and spent just shy of $10 million, which is about $7 million more than Hyde-Smith this year. That total crushes previous records for any Democrat in Mississippi’s history, and, for reference, is almost twice what Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood raised and spent in his 2019 bid for governor.

His campaign staff, hoping to close the partisan gaps that have haunted modern Democrats since the early 2000s, deliberately dropped cash to target specific voters in specific parts of the state.

If Republican operatives were correct about their largest-ever field game for Hyde-Smith in 2018, Mississippi Democrats, led by strategist Jared Turner, easily topped it in 2020, building the largest data-driven, get-out-the-vote effort in the state’s history — for either side of the aisle.

The Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign, working on Espy’s behalf, placed paid canvassers in 52 of the state’s 82 counties for the final month of the race. For weeks, they’ve knocked doors, phone banked and aired television, radio and online advertisements.

Race has been central to this campaign during a national reckoning on racism in politics. Espy, a Black man who has already broken racial barriers in politics, faces a white incumbent who has continued to make questionable comments about race. As millions of Americans protested racial inequality and Trump continued to galvanize Black voters, Espy made race a central theme of his messaging this year. As a result, Democratic operatives believe more Black Mississippians will vote in 2020 than any year in the state’s history, including when President Barack Obama was on the ballot.

Espy maintains he needs the support of 22% of white Mississippi voters, so he targeted white women in suburban counties during the final stretch. He also spent many of his campaign’s final hours speaking to young voters. Across the nation, young voters, who always skew more Democratic, have voted early in record numbers.

To win, Espy needs record turnout, and he needs that broad coalition of support. 

Democrats say that regardless of outcome, Espy’s 2020 candidacy helped them build an infrastructure to succeed in future elections and showed them that the state’s political needle is moving toward center. They say that even a closer Espy loss than 2018 helps them make a clearer case to national Democrats for continued investment in the state.

While many Republican strategists are comfortable in 2020 banking on Mississippi voters being too conservative to elect a Democrat, some are suggesting that Hyde-Smith’s 2020 strategy has done long-term damage to the party.

“Campaigns and outcomes matter, but so do margins,” a veteran Mississippi Republican operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, told Mississippi Today. “These things do have consequences. Cindy Hyde-Smith may get elected, but it’s very possible she’ll get elected with the lowest share of any Republican Senate candidate in the state’s modern history. She’ll be seen as weak and vulnerable in Washington. Her choice not to care at all about this race definitely hurts Republicans in Mississippi in the long run.”

The post Cindy Hyde-Smith and Republicans test the limits of Mississippi’s redness in Senate race against Mike Espy appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Mississippi voters on Tuesday will adopt or reject the “In God We Trust” state flag.

Mississippi voters on Tuesday will adopt or reject the “In God We Trust” state flag, a design with a magnolia blossom instead of the Confederate battle emblem that flew over the state for the last 126 years.

An appointed commission reviewed thousands of public submissions for flag designs over the summer and chose the new design with a magnolia and stars — a combination of multiple submissions.

The Legislature in June, after decades of debate and under mounting pressure from religious, business, sports and community leaders, removed the 1894 flag with its divisive Confederate emblem. It left ratification of a replacement up to voters.

READ MORE: Mississippi furls state flag with Confederate emblem after 126 years.

The new design before voters has a magnolia — the official state tree and flower — blossom on a blue background surrounded by stars with gold and red vertical stripes on the ends. It has one prominent star made of diamonds, representing Native Americans who first inhabited the area, and a ring of smaller stars denoting Mississippi becoming the 20th state in 1817.

The Legislature, when it voted to remove the old flag, stipulated in law that whatever design is put before voters, it must have the words “In God We Trust” on it, and that it could not have the Confederate emblem.

If a majority of voters do not approve the new flag on Tuesday, the redesign commission will go back to the drawing board and pick another design to put before voters next year.

One group, Let Mississippi Vote, hopes to overturn the Legislature’s removal of the old flag. It plans to mount a petition drive to place on the ballot — as early as 2022 — an initiative that would allow voters to restore the 1894 flag, or select other options including the one on the ballot Tuesday. The group said it plans to have people at polls on Tuesday collecting names and information for its drive.

MORE ELECTION COVERAGE: Check out Mississippi Today’s Voter Guide for more information about everything that’s on the Nov. 3 ballot. 

The post Mississippi voters will adopt or reject a new state flag on Tuesday appeared first on Mississippi Today.

As of Sunday, a record of more than 231,000 Mississippians had voted absentee — about 19% of the more than 1.2 million total people who voted in the 2016 election.

By comparison, in 2016, a little over 101,000 absentee votes were counted, about 8% of the total turnout that year. Although some of this year’s absentees are likely to be rejected, the number received marks a 128% increase over 2016’s absentee count.

Secretary of State Michael Watson on Monday reported that as of Sunday 248,335 absentee ballots had been requested, 247,650 had been sent out and 231,031 had been returned to circuit clerk’s offices.

Saturday was the final day to vote absentee in person, but mail-in ballots postmarked by Tuesday and received within five business days will still be counted.

Circuit clerks statewide have reported heavy absentee voting and most expect a heavy in-person turnout on Tuesday. Some, including more populous counties, have seen astounding increases in absentee voting this year. For instance, Hinds County in 2016 counted 5,255 absentee votes. As of Sunday for this election, the county had received 16,917 absentee votes.

Watson said last week that more than 113,000 new voters had registered in Mississippi this election cycle.

Mississippi’s early voting laws are among the most restrictive in the nation, and it’s the only state not to provide all citizens an option to vote early rather than go to crowded precincts on Election Day during the pandemic. Only people who are going to be away from their home area on Election Day, those 65 and older, and people with disabilities are allowed to vote absentee, either in person or by mail.

A federal lawsuit filed against the Mississippi secretary of state this year and settled last week resulted in two new rules for this election.

Voters must receive correspondence from election officials about any problems with the signature verification on their absentee ballots, and the voter will have 10 days to correct it.

Also, election officials must provide curbside voting opportunities on Election Day for people experiencing COVID-19 symptoms or who have been exposed to the coronavirus.

The post Mississippi absentee records shattered: 128% increase over 2016 vote appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today

Voters wait their turn to cast absentee ballots on Oct. 31, the last day to do so in person, at the Hinds County Courthouse in Jackson.

Mississippians are expected to vote in record numbers on Tuesday, and already have set absentee voting records for this election, typically a bellwether for in-person turnout.

Here are some tips and rules for Mississippi voters as they prepare to vote:

• Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. statewide. State law says anyone in line by 7 p.m. must be allowed to vote even if polls are closing.

• To make sure you know where to vote, go to the secretary of state’s Polling Place Locator.

• Secretary of State Michael Watson said people wanting to avoid long lines, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, should avoid going to the polls in the early morning, during lunch, or after 5 p.m.

• Mississippi voters are not under a mask mandate, although they are urged to wear them and most precincts will have them available for voters. Both Watson and Gov. Tate Reeves say such a mandate would be unconstitutional infringement on voting rights, although the federal district court that covers Mississippi has ruled it would not be unconstitutional.

• You may be asked by poll managers to step six feet back and briefly pull down your mask so that your identity can be verified.

READ MORE: Frequently asked questions about voting from our readers.

• Poll workers will be wearing masks, and additional workers have been added at many precincts to ensure social distancing guidelines and to ensure the polls and the voting machines are continuously sanitized.

• Voters must have a government-issued photo identification. But those without an ID are allowed to vote, and they will have five days to go to their county circuit clerk’s office to provide proof of their identification. People needing to vote curbside because they believe they might have COVID-19 or because of other issues should call their local circuit clerk before voting. Telephone numbers for circuit clerks can be found on the secretary of state’s web page.

• People who for whatever reason are not on the poll books can request to vote by affidavit and they also will have five days to resolve issues surrounding why they were not on the poll books.

• A new rule issued by Watson says curbside voting must be available for anyone showing symptoms of COVID-19, including coughing, headaches, fever, sore throat and loss of taste or smell.

• Another new rule says election officials must notify a voter about problems with their signature on an absentee ballot, and must give the voter a chance to fix the problem. The voters must be offered an “absentee cure form” by email, mail or fax within one business day, and the voter has 10 days to correct the problem.

• People with questions about where they vote can visit the polling place locator or Y’all Vote on the secretary of state’s web page. The office also has a telephone line at 1-800-829-6786 to answer elections-related questions. County circuit clerks also can answer questions about the election.

• Rules prevent people from wearing campaign-related clothes or caps into the polling place. And people campaigning for a person or issue on the ballot must remain 150 feet from the polling place. Watson said this rule applies only to signage or clothing pertaining to “anything that’s on the ballot,” but would not prohibit other messaging not directly up for a vote. So any candidate-specific gear like MAGA or Biden hats are prohibited, but generic “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts are permitted.

ELECTION 2020: Mississippi Today Voter’s Guide

The post MAGA hats? BLM shirts? What Mississippians can and can’t wear to the polls and other helpful voting tips for Election Day appeared first on Mississippi Today.