Jasper election commissioner's future in doubt 
 
 Published Sun, Jul 4, 2004
By DAVID HENDRICKS
Gazette city editor
After a wild month of election miscues culminating in last week's reshuffling of the Jasper County voter registration office, Election Commissioner Jake Rawls received a rude awakening in his mailbox Saturday.

Rawls said he was surprised to receive a terse letter signed by state Sen. Clementa Pinckney thanking him for "the distinction with which you served" Jasper County on its Election Commission.

"It doesn't explain anything," he said. "I just don't know what's going on."

Rawls said the fact that Pinckney wrote in the past tense, combined with the letter's timing, leads him to believe he's being removed from the commission. He said there were rumors last week that Pinckney would seek wholesale changes to the commission if its members fired voter registration office Director Cathy Morgan, which they did Thursday in a 6-1 vote.

Commission member Barbara Pinckney said Saturday that she hadn't received a letter from the senator, but Commissioner Jack Lee told her he had.

Lee and the other members of the commission could not be reached for comment Saturday. Sen. Pinckney, D-Ridgeland, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

As a member of the county's legislative delegation, Sen. Pinckney is entrusted with recommending Election Commission candidates to the governor, who makes the final appointments. Every commission member's term had technically expired in March, according to Rawls and Barbara Pinckney, but Sen. Pinckney had not moved on new appointments.

"You serve until you're reappointed or a replacement is appointed for you," Rawls said, noting he had never spoken with Sen. Pinckney about a reappointment.

"If (Sen. Pinckney) is changing the board I'm sad to see it," Rawls added. "We just came together as a board and finally got some changes made."

Barbara Pinckney, who has served on the commission for more than 20 years, said reappointments were "not something that was ever done on a timely basis."

Thursday night, commission members Rawls, Pinckney, Lee, Sharon Terry-Davis, Leroy Sneed and Chairman Lawrence Bowers voted to fire Morgan. It was a move they all agreed had been a long time coming.

Commissioner Donald Sheftall voted to keep Morgan on, despite a rash of election irregularities since she took the job in 1998, including vast inconsistencies in vote counts and voter rolls in the June 8 primary.

Rawls and Commissioner Pinckney said they had no choice but to fire Morgan.

"We've been getting demands from the public (to fire her) for two years," Commissioner Pinckney said.

Morgan could not be reached for comment Saturday.

Democracy stumbling

The rural county has had plenty of election snafus over the past few years.

Most recently, three local candidates' filed complaints after the June 8 primary, which saw more than 300 absentee ballots ruled invalid and hundreds of votes inexplicably miscounted in several precincts.

Samuel Gregory was denied his protest Thursday by the county's Democratic Party, which certified Gladys Jones' victory for a seat on the County Council. A State Law Enforcement Division investigation into the primary is still pending, along with other protests with the state party.

In the 1998 general election, Jasper County's absentee ballots were confiscated by SLED until results could be affirmed by a circuit court judge.

And after the 2000 presidential election, a Harvard University study said the county's results were the worst in the nation. One precinct's 2000 results showed that all but two votes went to third-party candidates.

The county Election Commission was scrambling Friday to staff the voter registration office after the first part-time assistant they hired abruptly quit, saying she didn't feel safe in the office alone. Commissioner Pinckney said the state and neighboring counties have stepped in to help Jasper officials search for a new voter registration director.

Rawls said he doesn't know whether Sen. Pinckney is shaking up the entire commission or just appointing someone else to his seat. Either way, he said Morgan's firing showed that the county was "headed in the right direction."

"I am so sick and tired of Jasper County being the laughing stock of the world every time we have an election," Rawls said. "The community's lost all confidence in us. We had to make some changes, so that's what we did."

Commissioner Pinckney said she hopes rumors that the senator would try to get rid of commission members who voted to fire Morgan aren't true.

"I want to see Jasper County stop this foolishness," she said.