Hinds County Voting Problems
 Hinds County Voting Problems

By David Kenney   WLBT 3   07 August 2007
david@wlbt.net

Polling places are open and voters are casting their ballots in the 2007 Mississippi primaries. Voting started at seven across the state, but here in the metro, there were several problems.

In Hinds county, where there were reports from several precincts about voting problems, mostly on the Republican side.

The Hinds county Republican party is reporting numerous problems on all levels with voting this morning.   Party chair Pete Perry says that voting machines were not delivered to 12 precincts and he had seven Republican poll managers call in sick last night.

Precinct 79, the fire station at Adkins and Ridgewood was one of the places where no republican poll workers showed up until after eight o'clock this morning. Voters were forced to cast their ballots affidavit.

The Republican party did finally get some replacements in to set up the machines and man the polls, but it was after many voters had arrived and left. Some candidates, including secretary of state candidate Delbert Hosemann drove down to the precinct, after receiving calls from their own supporters who said they weren't able to vote.

Hosemann told WLBT News, "Found out they didn't open till 8:30 this morning and that they had 16 votes in this precinct, and the democrat had been open since 7 and they had 119 in theirs, I'm very concerned about the fact that our ballots weren't opened in the republican party. I think that's inexecusable

This precinct were at, victory A.M.E. Zion church, didn't have machines for Republican voters up and running until well after they had opened. There was apparently a problem tracking down where the machines were placed in the precinct by the poll workers.

As for democrats, no major issues so far. Hinds county democratic chair Claude McGinnis told me this morning that the party experienced normal election day problems, but they had at least one machine working and all polling places staffed, when the doors opened this morning.

There were some questions raised a the Callaway High school voting precincts A and B.  Some people found their ballots only had candidates from a neighboring district on some House of Representative races.

Voters called and said they were trying to get the issue corrected.