The worst-kept secret about Mississippi’s elections is that any voter can vote by absentee each cycle if they are willing to lie.
Prosecutors, election officials and lawmakers know about it, and there’s very little they can do about it.
Exhibit A for this glaring flaw came when Rep. Becky Currie, a Republican from Brookhaven, admitted in a House Elections Committee meeting last week that she previously lied on absentee ballot applications but no longer does because she is over 65 — one of the legal reasons for voting absentee.
“I finally got old enough that I don’t have to lie,” Currie said, and members of the committee laughed in response.
To be fair to Currie, she’s by far not the only person in Mississippi who has done this, and her honesty is refreshing. Numerous people each election cycle do the same thing she’s done.
In fact, Secretary of State Michael Watson, the state’s top elections administrator, acknowledged in a November interview on Mississippi Today’s, “The Other Side” podcast, this practice happens and there’s virtually no way to verify if people are being honest on these forms.
This is why it was surprising that House Elections Committee Chairman Noah Sanford last week successfully pushed to expand this system further by scrapping a Senate bill to establish no-excuse early voting in the state and replace it with a proposal to add a new excuse to the absentee voting system.
Sanford’s proposal adds an excuse for people who care for children or disabled adults to vote by absentee. His measure also clarifies that people who anticipate having to work on Election Day can vote absentee.
The way a person votes by absentee is they go to their local circuit clerk’s office, request to vote absentee, and the circuit clerk’s employee gives them an absentee ballot application.
The voter then must check one of around 12 legal excuses for voting absentee. These excuses range from being temporarily disabled, being in college, or being older than 65. A Mississippi voter is not supposed to simply vote absentee out of convenience.
But what they can do is say on their application that they will be out of the county on Election Day, when, in reality, they’re binge watching the latest season of “Severance,” violating the law. Yet will anyone prosecute them? More than likely not.
The application clearly states at the end, “I realize that I can be fined up to $5,000 and sentenced up to five years in the penitentiary for making a false statement in this application and for selling my vote and violating the Mississippi Absentee Voter Law.”
But there’s no realistic way for anyone to police this, and local prosecutors dealing with more serious crimes likely wouldn’t want to prosecute anyone over this anyway.
To sum it up, nearly everyone who deals with elections knows voters routinely lie on these forms, legislators are laughing about it at the Capitol and are pushing to expand this program.
Given that the national and state Republican Party claims to care about election integrity and ballot security, why would Sanford and House leaders opt for this absurd system that in its strictest and technical interpretation, is ripe with voter fraud, instead of a much cleaner, more straightforward early voting bill?
Sanford told reporters this week that he is personally OK with some form of early voting, but he doesn’t have enough support from colleagues to pass the measure. Sanford said he didn’t know why other House members oppose early voting.
Instead, he’s offering an expanded absentee balloting proposal as an alternative way to keep the conversation alive at the Capitol. Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England told Mississippi Today if the proposal passes the House, he will negotiate with Sanford later in a conference committee.
Perhaps a reason House leaders are trying to push a convoluted absentee ballot system is because they’re scared of mean tweets from Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who has come out in opposition to early voting because he says Democrats want it.
Reeves previously blasted England for shepherding the early voting bill through the Senate and inaccurately claimed a Democratic senator labeled the measure as one of his priorities.
Instead, the governor and the House, at least for now, seem content with, again, being an outlier among the vast majority of states, including Republican states, on early voting.
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