A group of civil rights organizations wrote a letter to Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office Tuesday asking for an explanation for why the agency declared that Wednesday would be the final day that elections workers could process mail-in absentee ballots. 

Representatives from Disability Rights Mississippi, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the state conference of the NAACP said that Watson’s office, which oversees state elections, unilaterally counted Friday, November 29, as a business day, even though the state government considered that day a holiday. 

The questions from the three organizations come at a time when incumbent Justice Jim Kitchens and Republican state Sen. Jenifer Branning remain locked in a tight race for a seat on the Mississippi Supreme Court as absentee ballots are being counted. 

The reason for the questions surrounding what the agency considers a business day is that current state law allows local election workers to process mail-in absentee ballots for five business days after Election Day, as long as the absentee ballots were postmarked by the date of the election. 

Though the United States Postal Service conducted business on Friday November 29, Gov. Tate Reeves declared November 28 and November 29 state holidays because of Thanksgiving. 

“The decision to count Friday, November 29, 2024, as a ‘business day’ disregards Mississippi law, which will lead to voter confusion and undermine the ability of Mississippi voters to participate in the electoral process,” the letter said. 

The decision to count November 29 as a business day, means that December 4 is the deadline for local officials to process the mail-in ballots — not December 5 as originally planned.

Watson’s office declined to comment. 

The secretary of state’s office also published a 2024 elections calendar this year that stated December 5 – not December 4 – would be the deadline for local election workers to process absentee ballots, though the calendar is for planning purposes only. 

Neither candidate in the Supreme Court runoff has conceded the race yet, and county officials have until Friday December 6 to certify the results and transmit them to Watson’s office. 

A federal appeals court ruled last month that Mississippi’s process of accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day violated federal law, though the ruling did not apply to this year’s election.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The U.S. Navy is transforming a costly flub into a potent weapon with the first shipborne hypersonic weapon, which is being retrofitted aboard the first of its three stealthy destroyers.

The USS Zumwalt is at a Mississippi shipyard where workers have installed missile tubes that replace twin turrets from a gun system that was never activated because it was too expensive. Once the system is complete, the Zumwalt will provide a platform for conducting fast, precision strikes from greater distances, adding to the usefulness of the warship.

“It was a costly blunder. But the Navy could take victory from the jaws of defeat here, and get some utility out of them by making them into a hypersonic platform,” said Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

The U.S. has had several types of hypersonic weapons in development for the past two decades, but recent tests by both Russia and China have added pressure to the U.S. military to hasten their production.

Hypersonic weapons travel beyond Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, with added maneuverability making them harder to shoot down.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that among the documents leaked by former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was a defense department briefing that confirmed China had recently tested an intermediate-range hypersonic weapon called the DF-27. While the Pentagon had previously acknowledged the weapon’s development, it had not recognized its testing.

One of the U.S. programs in development and planned for the Zumwalt is the “Conventional Prompt Strike.” It would launch like a ballistic missile and then release a hypersonic glide vehicle that would travel at speeds seven to eight times faster than the speed of sound before hitting the target. The weapon system is being developed jointly by the Navy and Army. Each of the Zumwalt-class destroyers would be equipped with four missile tubes, each with three of the missiles for a total of 12 hypersonic weapons per ship.

In choosing the Zumwalt, the Navy is attempting to add to the usefulness of a $7.5 billion warship that is considered by critics to be an expensive mistake despite serving as a test platform for multiple innovations.

The Zumwalt was envisioned as providing land-attack capability with an Advanced Gun System with rocket-assisted projectiles to open the way for Marines to charge ashore. But the system featuring 155 mm guns hidden in stealthy turrets was canceled because each of the rocket-assisted projectiles cost between $800,000 and $1 million.

Despite the stain on its reputation, the three Zumwalt-class destroyers remain the Navy’s most advanced surface warship in terms of new technologies. Those innovations include electric propulsion, an angular shape to minimize radar signature, an unconventional wave-piercing hull, automated fire and damage control and a composite deckhouse that hides radar and other sensors.

The Zumwalt arrived at the Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in August 2023 and was removed from the water for the complex work of integrating the new weapon system. It is due to be undocked this week in preparation for the next round of tests and its return to the fleet, shipyard spokeswoman Kimberly Aguillard said.

A U.S. hypersonic weapon was successfully tested over the summer and development of the missiles is continuing. The Navy wants to begin testing the system aboard the Zumwalt in 2027 or 2028, according to the Navy.

The U.S. weapon system will come at a steep price. It would cost nearly $18 billion to buy 300 of the weapons and maintain them over 20 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Critics say there is too little bang for the buck.

“This particular missile costs more than a dozen tanks. All it gets you is a precise non-nuclear explosion, some place far far away. Is it really worth the money? The answer is most of the time the missile costs much more than any target you can destroy with it,” said Loren Thompson, a longtime military analyst in Washington, D.C.

But they provide the capability for Navy vessels to strike an enemy from a distance of thousands of kilometers — outside the range of most enemy weapons — and there is no effective defense against them, said retired Navy Rear Adm. Ray Spicer, CEO of the U.S. Naval Institute, an independent forum focusing on national security issues, and former commander of an aircraft carrier strike force.

Conventional missiles that cost less aren’t much of a bargain if they are unable to reach their targets, Spicer said, adding the U.S. military really has no choice but to pursue them.

“The adversary has them. We never want to be outdone,” he said.

The U.S. is accelerating development because hypersonics have been identified as vital to U.S. national security with “survivable and lethal capabilities,” said James Weber, principal director for hypersonics in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies.

“Fielding new capabilities that are based on hypersonic technologies is a priority for the defense department to sustain and strengthen our integrated deterrence, and to build enduring advantages,” he said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Dec. 4, 1967

Martin Luther King, Jr. announced creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign, a movement to broadly address economic inequalities with nonviolent direct action. 

“It must not be just Black people,” argued King, “it must be all poor people. We must include American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and even poor whites.” 

The idea for the push came from Marian Wright Edelman, who had recently taken U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy to witness poverty firsthand in the Mississippi Delta. 

When she shared the idea that Washington officials should meet the nation’s most impoverished citizens, King embraced the vision, telling reporters, “We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until America responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. … In short, we will be petitioning our government for specific reforms and we intend to build militant, nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.” 

King talked of a debt that the nation owed Black Americans, who were set free in 1863, “yet they were not given any land to make that freedom meaningful.” 

He compared it to an imprisoned man whom authorities learn is innocent, “then going up to the man saying, now you are free. And you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any clothes to put on his back. You don’t give him any money to get on his feet in life again. The whole code of jurisprudence would rise up against this and yet, this is what America did to the Black man.” 

King didn’t live to see this dream through, assassinated five months later.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.