Technology and vigilance help improve Mississippi elections, Clark says

EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS

Associated Press   18 October 2004

Secretary of State Eric Clark laughs when he recalls stories of Mississippi election shenanigans. But it's not a ha-ha belly laugh. It's more like a grin with a grimace.

There was the time in 1943 when Clark's own father was seeking re-election to the state House of Representatives.

"My dad just got a handful of votes in this community and he asked the guy - I won't call his name because he's a notorious character in Smith County - but he said, 'Sam ... how many votes did I actually get in Such-and-Such?' He said, 'Well, John, you got 119 but we gave you 36,'" Clark said. "So it's like, you should be happy."

As Mississippi's top elections official, it's Clark's job to try to prevent such loosey-goosey handling of ballots.

He says technology has helped curb vote-stealing.

"I know for a fact that there was rampant fraud in elections when we used to have paper ballots," Clark said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "Every system that we've gotten since then has improved the accuracy of elections."

Punch cards are better than paper ballots. Optical scanner systems are better than punch cards. Electronic touch-screen systems are quicker and more efficient than optical scanners.

Only Hinds and Rankin counties currently use electronic touch-screen voting systems in Mississippi. The other 80 counties use a mishmash of technology.

Some Mississippians - particularly Republicans - say requiring all voters to show identification at the polls could be another step in reducing election fraud. Opponents say ID could be used to intimidate voters, especially older ones who once had to pay poll taxes. They also say ID supporters offer little solid proof of widespread cheating.

Clark, a Democrat, says he supports voter ID but his bigger concern about potential voting fraud is with absentee ballots.

"If you have people who are determined to corrupt the process and do it in an organized fashion, what they do usually is they get absentee ballots in the names of people who died or moved away or are in jail for disenfranchising crimes," Clark said. "I mean just anecdotally and having lived here 53 years, I know that's what happens."

Clark acknowledges that election fraud prosecutions are rare in Mississippi, but he says district attorneys or the attorney general could bring charges if evidence is strong.

Another problem Mississippi faces is inflated voter rolls. The most recent records available show 34 counties had more registered voters than people of voting age.

The federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 - written to try to head off the kind of voting snafus that plagued Florida four years ago - requires each state to compile a computerized central voter registration list by January 2006. Clark says the registry will help local officials purge the rolls of ineligible voters.

He says poll workers have undergone hours of training to prepare for the Nov. 2 general election, when ballots will have everything from the presidential race to a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages.

This state traditionally has its largest voter turnout during presidential election years, and records show 994,145 Mississippi ballots were counted in the 2000 presidential contest. Clark predicts that this year, Mississippi voter turnout could top the 1 million mark.