Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Mississippi stands firm against mail voting, but will allow for mail delays

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson

Mississippi secretary of state

Correction: The story was updated July 20 to correct several errors in the original version.

Despite new tweaks at the margins of election law, Mississippi looks to remain near the top of the list of places where it will be most difficult to vote this year.

Just ask the top election official, Secretary of State Michael Watson. A Republican like almost everyone in power in the state, he had asked lawmakers in Jackson to allow all Mississippians to vote early and in person because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Legislature rebuffed his modest proposal, which would have done nothing to ease the rules for voting by mail, instead passing a bill making the state's already strict excuse requirements even more exacting.


The measure, signed last week by Gov. Tate Reeves, adds being under "physician-imposed quarantine" for Covid-19 or "caring for a dependent" with the disease to the list of acceptable reasons for casting an absentee ballot in person before Nov. 3.

The altered law does not make those allowable excuses for voting by mail, which remains an option only for people who must be far from their polling place because of work or school, plus the disabled and those older than 65. Those restrictions meant only one of every 15 votes was cast that way in the 2018 midterm.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

"The Legislature narrowed it down further than the former law that we had," Watson lamented to the Clarion-Ledger.

The new law made one change that voting rights activists are praising, and which makes the state stand out from most others. Until now, Mississippi has only tabulated mail ballots that arrived by the day before Election Day, one of the nation's most restrictive deadlines. From now on, they'll be counted if they arrive five days after the polls close so long as they're postmarked before the polls close, joining a roster of just 10 states that allow votes to arrive that late or later.

In a recent Millsaps College poll, 54 percent of the state's voters backed an immediate switch to no-excuse absentee voting so the electorate could "safely vote by mail this November" — the system available everywhere this fall except Mississippi and 15 other states.

Watson opposed that. Instead, he hoped to persuade lawmakers to do what 39 states will do this November and allow in-person voting for several days ahead of Election Day by anyone who's registered — but only during emergencies such as the Covid-19 outbreak.

That did not happen, either. The secretary of state is now asking state Attorney General Lynn Fitch to decide just how permissive the pandemic exception for early voting should be — especially if the surge of coronavirus cases, which has not hit Mississippi as hard as most other states in the Deep South this month, causes a widespread need to stay at home this fall.

In a separate measure, the Legislature also granted the secretary of state's request to provide a $50 "hazard pay" bonus to poll workers as a way to encourage more people to take the state's 10,000 or more jobs, which have been tougher to fill than ever because people have no interest in that much exposure to strangers during the pandemic.

A "totally inadequate response," was the summary of the new laws from Democratic state Sen. David Blount, who pushed many of the more expansive changes and said he might try again before the Legislature's special session ends. "There's virtually no significant changes to conducting an election in a pandemic."

The state's six electoral votes are secure for President Trump, who carried the state last time by 18 points. The last Democrat to do so was Jimmy Carter in 1976. But Democrats think a turnout surge, especially in Black-majority counties, would give former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy a prayer in his rematch against GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Voters will also be asked to approve a design to replace the last state flag in the country to bear the emblem of the confederacy.

Read More

Houses with price tags
retrorocket/Getty Images

Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

This fact brief was originally published by EconoFact. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.

Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

Yes.

The rise in housing costs has been a major source of overall inflation, which was 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' shelter index, which includes housing costs for renters and homeowners, rose 5.1% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

Keep ReadingShow less
I Voted stickers
BackyardProduction/Getty Images

Voters cast ballots based on personal perceptions, not policy stances

The Fulcrum and the data analytics firm Fidelum Partners have just completed a nationally representative study assessing the voting intentions of U.S adults and their perceptions toward 18 well-known celebrities and politicians.

Fidelum conducted similar celebrity and politician election studies just prior to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Each of these found that perceptions of warmth, competence and admiration regarding the candidates are highly predictive of voting intentions and election outcomes. Given this, The Fulcrum and Fidelum decided to partner on a 2024 celebrity and politician election study to build upon the findings of prior research.

Keep ReadingShow less
Hand waving an American flag

"Freedom, a word that should inspire, has been distorted to justify the unchecked pursuit of individual interests at the expense of collective well-being," writes Johnson.

nicoletaionescu/Getty Images

Redefining America's political lingua franca

Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.

A seismic shift has occurred in America's race, identity and power discourse. Like tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface, long-held assumptions are adjusting and giving way to a reimagined lingua franca for civic engagement. This revived language of liberation redefines the terms of debate. It empowers us to reclaim and reinvigorate words once weaponized principally against marginalized communities.

Keep ReadingShow less
Latino attendees of the Democratic National Convention

People cheer for the Harris-Walz ticket at the Democratic National Convention.

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Harris’ nomination ‘hit a reset button’ for Latinas supporting Democrats

As the presidential race entered the summer months, President Joe Biden’s level of support among Latinx voters couldn’t match the winning coalition he had built in 2020. Among Latinas, a critical group of voters who tend to back Democrats at higher levels than Latinos, lagging support had begun to worry Stephanie Valencia, who studies voting patterns among Latinx voters across the country for Equis Research, a data analytics and research firm.

Then the big shake-up happened: Biden stepped down and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket fewer than 100 days before the election.

Valencia’s team quickly jumped to action. The goal was to figure out how the move was sitting with Latinx voters in battleground states that will play an outsized role in deciding the election. After surveying more than 2,000 Latinx voters in late July and early August, Equis found a significant jump in support for the Democratic ticket, a shift that the team is referring to as “the Latino Reset.”

Keep ReadingShow less