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Welfare recipient won’t stop fighting for ‘decency and common sense’

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Welfare recipient won’t stop fighting for ‘decency and common sense’

The state of Mississippi isn’t getting anything past Danielle Thomas.

Thomas is a bright, young single mother raising her six kids in south Jackson. Because she lives in poverty, Thomas is also an expert in the convoluted policies and bureaucratic red tape surrounding one of the biggest scandals in state history: the TANF program.

Despite recent attention on the graft and corruption within the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant, Mississippi is still pumping less than 5% of the money directly to mothers like Thomas.

“I really think it’s still them stealing from people, to be honest,” Thomas, 34, said. “I really feel like they feel like a lot of us aren’t smart enough, or they feel like we probably don’t know the system in and out well enough.”

Thomas works part time as a home health aide earning $9.50 an hour, the same wage she started at 10 years ago. When she’s not on the job, she’s feeding and changing her 5-month-old, ferrying her other kids to and from school, cooking meals, fetching medication, tending to boo-boos, monitoring screen time, and trying to keep the shrieking to a tolerable decibel.

Danielle Thomas sits on the couch with her son Kannan, then 2, at their south Jackson home in 2021. Thomas, a 34-year-old mother of six, has faced countless barriers in Mississippi’s social safety net.

On top of all that, Thomas basically moonlights as the unpaid lawyer, auditor and investigator on her own cases at the Mississippi Department of Human Services and other state service agencies. As most public assistance recipients know, it takes fierce self advocacy to ensure fair treatment within Mississippi’s social safety net.

Only about 1,600 very poor families in Mississippi are successfully jumping through the hoops required to receive the small TANF cash assistance payments each month.

Thomas knows a great deal more about how the TANF program works than the politicians who write the laws that govern the program.

But what happened to Thomas in recent weeks has stumped even the nation’s top policy experts.

In October, Thomas learned that she would be receiving a lump sum of more than $5,000 in back due child support from her ex-husband Larry Young, the father of her four youngest children. The state’s child support office, run by a private contractor, intercepted the money from Young’s child tax credit.

This tax offset process is part of the state’s child support enforcement program that Thomas is required to participate in to keep receiving public benefits. The rationale is, if the state is going to provide taxpayer support to single-parent families, then the noncustodial parents, usually fathers, should be forced to pay up as well.

This is where things get tricky: When the office collects support on behalf of a child receiving TANF, the state then seizes the funds to pay itself back for the welfare payments it issued. Most of that money goes straight back to the federal government.

Thomas said she sees the rationale in this, but at the same time, “I think that’s messed up a lot of co-parenting relationships … it doesn’t help how they think it helps. It kinda actually divides the family a little more.”

Thomas receives assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, for all of her children – several hundred dollars a month that comes on a debit card Thomas can only use on qualified items at qualified stores.

But Thomas only receives TANF cash assistance, $118 a month, for each of the two eldest children, not Young’s kids.

This is because of a harsh and little-known rule in Mississippi that if a parent is already on welfare when she gets pregnant and gives birth, that new child is not eligible for TANF benefits. These are sometimes called “capped” children. Just 12 states still have this policy in place, according to a 2020 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report.

For Thomas, this makes the child support payments for the younger kids all the more crucial.

The $5,000 cash infusion from the tax credit was coming just in time for Christmas. Thomas also planned to use some of the money to replace the radiator fan and valve cover gasket on her 2012 Dodge Durango – long overdue repairs on her only mode of transportation to work and the kids’ schools. Right now, she gets under the hood and manually sets spark to the fan before driving anywhere.

Thomas and her kids survive on the combination of her work income, no more than $13,000 a year, about $900 in monthly Supplemental Security Income, or disability benefits, that Thomas gets for her severe depression and anxiety attacks, and the public assistance. Because Thomas receives disability, she doesn’t receive a TANF payment for herself.

The prospect of a financial cushion provided Thomas some hope, but it was short lived.

In late October, Thomas received the child support payment on her debit card. It was $100.

She called a representative at the child support office, who told her that, according to the computer screen she was looking at, the TANF program had seized the rest.

That’s not how that works, Thomas thought.

“TANF took $5,000 from my kids, but the kids that they took the money from, they don’t receive TANF. They have never received TANF,” Thomas said.

Without the incoming funds, Thomas told her ex she still needed him to help pay for clothes and shoes for the kids. At first, the dad was skeptical that the state had taken the money. The situation caused tension between the parents.

“It makes me feel bad,” Young said. “It’s sad how Mississippi does things, man. Mississippi don’t care about no one, but what they do? Help Brett Favre. Help Phil (Bryant). They don’t help the ones that actually need help.”

Mississippi, which offers some of the lowest wages, strictest public assistance requirements, fewest labor protections and most meager health care of any state is also the most poverty stricken.

But Mississippi politicians have long blamed “fatherlessness” and nonmarital pregnancy for the state’s high poverty rate, ignoring the research that reflects the inverse: that those family outcomes are most often a symptom of poverty – and the feeling that upward mobility is unachievable – rather than the cause of it.

Instead of focusing on evidence-based practices for interrupting systemic poverty, the state has spent hundreds of millions of welfare funds attempting to address fatherhood and teen pregnancy. Along the way, MDHS admits it has gathered no evidence of how these “family stabilization” programs reduced poverty.

Millions through these programs ended up going to the pet projects of former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, other famous athletes and the cronies of state politicians.

Danielle Thomas and her son, 4-year-old Kannan Young, pose for a portrait near here home in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, December 15, 2022.

Escaping poverty was always going to be a challenge for Thomas, whose parents split before she could remember. Child Protection Services took Thomas from her mother, who is legally blind and ran an unstable household, when she was 6. She moved with her father to South Carolina until her mom regained custody, and, at 16, Thomas returned to Jackson. She bounced around high schools before dropping out, meeting her first child’s father and becoming a mother.

Thomas secured her GED and has started several higher education programs in the hopes of securing a better paying job, but it seemed like something always got in the way of her finishing. “I start strong, I start motivated, and then I might take a blow from different things and I kind of back out,” she said.

She has prioritized the paying gig that she has versus striving for another because, she said, “I know from experience that if I don’t work, we don’t eat.”

Several years ago, Thomas entered a work program offered through SNAP, the federal food assistance program administered by Mississippi Department of Human Services. It was a 24-week course, she recalled, to learn medical billing and coding – a job in which she could potentially earn $50,000. The program promised to provide her with a certificate at the end.

“During the seventh week, we went in and they told us it was no funds left to be able to continue the program,” Thomas said. “I really felt like it might have been something where they just found a way to reroute the money.”

Like that, the program was over.

During the pandemic, Thomas had to leave her home health job to take care of her kids, who were conducting virtual school at home. She applied for unemployment, which would have provided her an additional $600-a-week, more than she’d ever made and finally a chance to get ahead. But unemployment insurance only covers people who make over a certain amount, and because of her low earnings, the Mississippi Department of Employment Security denied Thomas the benefits.

It appeared a technicality: Thomas didn’t qualify under traditional unemployment insurance rules, but she should have qualified under the special pandemic unemployment program, the purpose of which was to extend benefits to people not typically covered, including part-time workers like herself.

Thomas did her research, appealed the decision, and secured a hearing with the labor office. She even got her employer to corroborate the information on her claim. But after representing herself in the proceeding, she was still denied because she had filed under the traditional unemployment insurance.

Through setback after setback, Thomas doesn’t blame the government for her current situation.

“I’m not a victim because I know the decisions and the choices I have made when it comes to these children and certain things, I’ll take the accountability for. But when it comes to my children … I’d shovel horse manure to make sure my kids eat every night. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make sure me and my children have a roof over our head and we have food on the table.”

Then there’s the added stress of raising her children in a neighborhood where gun violence is prevalent. “We’re in an area that’s really crime-ridden. It’s real, real crime-ridden and poverty-ridden,” Thomas said.

Danielle Thomas poses for a portrait near here home in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, December 15, 2022.

Not too long ago, Thomas’ 9-year-old son found a bag of marijuana on the ground on his way to school. A curious mind, he picked it up and carried it with him to class. When the administration discovered it, Thomas said they almost opened a DHS case, but because she’d been such an attentive parent – attending all parent-teacher conferences and volunteering to bring food for parties – a school administrator vouched for her.

“I’ve been raised in this type of environment … but I don’t wanna repeat cycles. I wanna break generational curses. I don’t want us to be here, but for some reason I feel like I’m stuck, because nothing will come in to allow me to get away from here,” Thomas said.

“Yes, I had all these kids. I made this bed. I have to lay in it,” she said. “But I also know I’m the type of person to where I’m not looking for the government to take care of me and my kids. I can do without, but they also gotta realize the trauma that they have forced upon some of us to where we can’t even live properly. Like, I don’t even like going outside of my home unless I have to.”

In August, State Auditor Shad White, who initially launched the ongoing TANF fraud investigation, released a report demonstrating the cost of “absent fathers” to Mississippi taxpayers. The report focused on how children who grow up in single-parent households are less likely to finish high school, more likely to go to prison and more likely to become teen mothers.

“I’m hoping folks will be informed as taxpayers, but will also realize collectively as a society we need to be sending the message that if you’re man enough to father a child, you ought to be man enough to step up and help raise that child,” White said when the report was released, WXXV reported.

Danielle Thomas and her then 2-year-old son Kannan, at their south Jackson home in September of 2021.

In Young’s case, Mississippi has done nothing to inspire his participation. The state took from him to indirectly support the kids of someone else, while his own kids got nothing.

National policy experts have long advocated against states confiscating the child support payments of poor children to pay back the TANF support they received. They say the practice, which barely makes a difference for states since the money is returned to the feds, keeps families in poverty and harms the relationship between children and their noncustodial parents.

“In this case, it’s even worse: the state is taking money paid by a father for children who the state didn’t even provide assistance to,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, deputy director for policy for the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). “While the state may have found a loophole that makes this legal, keeping these funds from Mrs. Thomas and her children is a violation of both decency and common sense.”

Little to no research on this scenario exists. Mississippi’s TANF policy manual doesn’t explicitly address it, according to the reviews of Mississippi Today and two national experts who reviewed the manual at Mississippi Today’s request for this story. It does not come up in exhaustive Q&As published by the federal agency that administers the programs, the Administration for Children & Families under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. When asked about what happened, the federal office told Mississippi Today that the agency was following Mississippi state law.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services similarly confirmed in an email to Mississippi Today that this is the agency’s policy.It said it could not comment on Thomas’ case specifically.

“While they (capped children) are not considered in the calculation of benefits, these children are still part of the head of household’s TANF case,” the statement reads. “When there are multiple children in the TANF-recipient household with different non-custodial parents, and one of those non-custodial parents makes a child support payment, that payment is applied to the overall household’s TANF recovery balance.”

It’s a miniscule policy distinction but with substantial implications – as is true with much of the state’s social safety net. The Legislature could change it.

But this area of government is often too complicated, too niche to capture the attention of the public or even policy makers. It’s part of the reason so much corruption was able to occur within the program in recent years.

Without a closer analysis, it’s easy to miss the catch-22.

When it behooves the state to exclude the children, in the case of determining who gets monthly benefits, it excludes the children. But when it benefits the state to count the children, such as to seize their child support payments, it counts them.

MDHS said it did not have any data on how many mixed-family households this policy affects.

Thomas questions it plainly: “I don’t see how one parent can be responsible for what another parent owes.”

Danielle Thomas poses for a portrait near here home in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, December 15, 2022.

Since the $100 child support payment, Thomas has had countless calls with MDHS, the child support office, and advocates, many of whom told Thomas they’ve never encountered this scenario and that they believed it was a mistake.

When Thomas visited MDHS in person, a supervisor in the office said her TANF case carried an unreimbursed balance of about $17,000 – a mathematical mystery since she’s only received a total of $146-a-month for both children, recently raised to $236-a-month, on and off over the last several years. TANF has a lifetime limit of 60 months. At one point, an MDHS caseworker told Thomas she had been receiving TANF for two children since 2008, before her second child was even born.

“I’ve calculated and added some things up myself and I’m like, you know, ain’t no way,” Thomas said. “… It’s a lot of things I’m not understanding, but I’m really thinking like it is really just (determined by) who reviews your case and files at the time. Like, if you have someone who is reviewing your case who might let some stuff slip through the system.”

Shortly after she began pressing the agency, Thomas found a letter in her mail. It was from the child support office, notifying her that her entire MDHS public assistance case had been closed. This wasn’t true, but it added to her list of issues to resolve. She wondered if her speaking out had triggered this notice.

A tender moment between then 2-year-old Kannan Thomas and his mom Danielle Thomas at their south Jackson home in 2021. During the pandemic, Thomas, a single mother of six, has had to juggle a job and overseeing virtual learning for her children. One of the biggest barriers to upward mobility for Thomas is access to child care.

Several days later, Thomas received another letter. This one targeted her 5-month-old, who had barely begun receiving assistance, and ordered Thomas to add the baby to her child support case. The notice said she had 21 days to visit the office and hand over paperwork proving the child’s father or her entire family would be cut off from assistance altogether.

Following Mississippi’s ban on abortion, which led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch and others have advocated for more strictly enforcing child support. The policy is advertised as a protection for mothers.

But for Thomas, the state’s meddling has only hurt her.

“They usually don’t contact you this early,” Thomas said after receiving the last letter. “I really feel like once again, this has something to do with me going and talking to people about them.”

With about $12,000 in supposed unreimbursed TANF still hanging over her head, it’s questionable if she’ll ever see a dime of child support from any of the three fathers of her children.

By this point, Thomas was dejected.

“I don’t understand how this system works,” she said in a slow, flat voice. “I’m no longer trying to figure out how it works.”

In fact, Thomas understands better than anyone how the system works. It is working the way it was designed, by wearing down the people it purports to serve.

But then, after talking to a free legal aid office, Thomas learned she could request a formal hearing from the TANF office to challenge the paradoxical policy. It’s scheduled for later this month. She’s already downloaded and started reading the agency’s program manuals from its website.

“I’m actually not going to stop fighting,” Thomas said.

In one of her educational stints, Thomas was studying to become a paralegal. When she thinks about going back to school, that’s the career path she envisions.

If her TANF case is any indicator, she’s a natural.

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

Mississippi Today

Pharmacy benefit manager reform likely dead

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mississippitoday.org – Gwen Dilworth – 2025-04-01 17:26:00

Hotly contested legislation that aimed to increase the transparency and regulation of pharmacy benefit managers appeared dead in the water Tuesday after a lawmaker challenged the bill for a rule violation.

The bill was sent back to conference after Rep. John Hines, D-Greenville, raised a point of order challenging the addition of code sections to the bill, which will likely kill it. 

House members in the past have chosen to turn a blind eye to the rule, which would require the added code sections to be removed when the bill is returned to conference. This fatal flaw will make it difficult to revive the legislation. 

“It will almost certainly die,” said House Speaker Jason White, who authored the legislation. “And you can celebrate that with your pharmacist when you see them.”

“…This wasn’t ‘gotcha.’ Everybody in this chamber knew that code sections were added, because the attempt was to make 1123 more suitable to all the parties.”

The bill sought to protect patients and independent pharmacists, who have warned that if legislators do not pass a law this year to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, which serve as middlemen in the pharmaceutical industry, some pharmacies may be forced to close. They say that the companies’ low payments and unfair business practices have left them struggling to break even.

The bill underwent several revisions in the House and Senate before reaching its most recent form, which independent pharmacists say has watered the bill down and will not offer them adequate protection. 

House Bill 1123, authored by White, originally focused on the transparency of pharmacy benefit managers. The Senate then beefed up the bill by adding provisions barring the companies from steering patients to affiliate pharmacies and prohibiting spread pricing – the practice of paying insurers more for drugs than pharmacists in order to inflate pharmacy benefit managers’ profits. 

House Speaker Jason White brings the House of Representatives to order at the beginning of the new legislative session at the State Capitol, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025 in Jackson.

Independent pharmacists, who have flocked to the Capitol to advocate for reform this session, widely supported the Senate’s version of the bill. 

The Senate incorporated several recommendations from the House into its bill, saying that they believed that the legislation would have the House’s support. 

Instead, the House sent the bill to conference and requested additional changes, including new language that would eliminate self-funded insurance plans, or health plans in which employers assume the financial risk of covering employees’ health care costs themselves, from a section of the bill that prohibits pharmacy benefit managers from steering patients to specific pharmacies.

This language seeks to satisfy employers, who argue that regulating pharmacy benefit managers’ business practices will lead to higher health insurance costs. 

Sen. Rita Parks, R-Corinth, who has spearheaded pharmacy benefit manager reform efforts in the Senate, previously said that adding the language to the bill would “remove any protection out of the law.” But she signed the conference report that included the language Monday after a heated conference meeting between lawmakers. 

Rep. Hank Zuber, R-Ocean Springs and co-author of the bill, said the bill has something for everybody, gesturing to its concessions for employers and independent pharmacists. He said the bill gives independent pharmacists 85% of what they wanted. 

Mississippi Independent Pharmacies Association director Robert Dozier was not available for comment by the time the story published. 

Zuber told House members Tuesday to “blame the Senate” for the slow progress of pharmacy benefit manager reform in Mississippi, citing the body’s failure to take up a drug pricing transparency bill half a decade ago, for three years in a row.

“If the Senate had followed the leadership and the legislation that we drafted those many years ago, we would not be here,” Zuber said. “We would have the information on drug pricing, we would have the information and transparency on (pharmacy benefit managers) and we would have the ultimate reason as to why drug costs continue to rise.”

Members of the House expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation Tuesday, arguing it did not do enough to ensure lower prescription drug costs for consumers. 

“I’m going to try to do something next year that goes even further,” Zuber responded.

For the past several years, lawmakers have proposed bills to regulate pharmacy benefit managers, but none have made it as far as this session. 

“We’ll go another year,” said White. 

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

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Mississippi Today

Feuding GOP lawmakers prepare to leave Jackson without a budget, let governor force them back

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-01 19:23:00

After months of bitter Republican political infighting, the Legislature appears likely to end its session Wednesday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown if they don’t come back and adopt one by June 30. 

After the House adjourned Tuesday night, Speaker Jason White said he had presented the Senate with a final offer to extend the session, which would give the two chambers more time to negotiate a budget. As for now, the 100 or so bills that make up the state budget are dead.

The Senate leadership was expected to meet and consider the offer Tuesday evening, White said. But numerous senators both Republican and Democrat said they would oppose such a parliamentary resolution, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has also said it’s unlikely and that the governor will have to force lawmakers back into special session.

White said he believes, if the Senate would agree to extend the session and restart negotiations, lawmakers could pass a budget and end the 2025 session by Sunday, only a few days later than planned.

But if the Senate chooses not to pass a resolution extending the session, White said the House would end the session on Wednesday.

It would take a two-thirds vote of support in both chambers to suspend the rules and extend the session. The Senate opposition appears to be enough to prevent that. 

Still, the speaker said he believes Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Senate leaders are considering the proposal. But he said if he doesn’t hear a positive response by Wednesday, the House will adjourn and wait for Gov. Tate Reeves to call a special session at a later date. 

“We are open to (extending the session), but we will not stay here until Sunday waiting around to see if they might do it,” White said.  

White said leaving the Capitol without a budget and punting the issue to a special session might not cool tensions between the chambers, as some lawmakers hope. 

“I think when you leave here and you end up in a special session, some folks say, ‘Well everybody that’s upset will cool down by then.’ They may, or it may get worse. It may shine a different and specific light on some of the things in this budget and the differences in the House and Senate,” White said. “Whereas, I think everybody now is in the legislative mode, and we might get there.”

The Mississippi Constitution does not grant the governor much power, but if Gov. Tate Reeves calls lawmakers into a special session, he gets to set the specific legislative agenda — not lawmakers. 

White said the governor could potentially use his executive authority to direct lawmakers to take up other bills, such as those related to education, before getting to the budget. 

“When we leave here without a budget, it is entirely the governor’s prerogative to when he (sets a special session) and how he does that.”

While the future of the state’s budget hangs in the balance, lawmakers have spent the remaining days of their regular session trying to pass the few remaining bills that remained alive on their calendars. 

House approves DEI ban, Senate could follow suit on Wednesday 

The House on Tuesday passed a proposal to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs from public schools, and both chambers approved a measure to establish a form of early voting. 

The House approved a conference report compromise to ban DEI programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from K-12 schools, community colleges and universities. If the Senate follows suit, Mississippi would join a number of other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump, who has made rooting DEI out of the federal government one of his top priorities. 

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers follows hours of heated debate in which Democrats, all almost of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. Legislative Republicans argued the legislation will elevate merit in education and remove from school settings “divisive concepts” that exacerbate divisions among different identity groups. 

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the act, but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law, but only after they go through an internal campus review process that would give schools time to make changes. The legislation could also withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. 

Legislature sends ‘early voting lite’ bill to governor 

The Legislature also overwhelmingly passed a proposal to establish a watered down version of early voting, though the legislation is titled “in-person excused voting,” and not early voting.

The proposal establishes 22 days of in-person voting before Election Day that requires voters to go to the circuit clerk’s office or another location county officials have designated as a secure early voting facility, such as a courtroom or a board of supervisors meeting room. 

To cast an early vote, someone must present a valid form of photo ID and list one of about 15 legal excuses to vote before Election Day. The excuses, however, are broad and would, in theory, allow many people to cast early ballots. 

Examples of valid excuses are voters expecting to work on Election Day, being at least 65 years old, being currently enrolled in college or potentially travelling outside of their county on Election Day. 

Since most eligible voters either work, go to college or are older than 65 years of age, these excuses would apply to almost everyone. 

“Even though this isn’t early voting as we saw originally, it makes this more convenient for hard working Mississippians to go by their clerks’ office and vote in person after showing an ID 22 days prior to an election,” Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England said. 

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves opposes early voting, so it’s unclear if he would sign the measure into law or veto it. 

Both chambers are expected to gavel at 10 a.m. on Wednesday to debate the final items on their agenda. 

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

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Mississippi Today

‘A lot of us are confused’: Lacking info, some Jacksonians go to wrong polling place

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mississippitoday.org – @mintamolly – 2025-04-01 18:43:00

Johnny Byrd knew that when his south Jackson neighborhood Carriage Hills changed wards during redistricting last year, his neighbors would have trouble finding their correct polling place on Election Day.

So he bought a poster board and inscribed it with their new voting location – Christ Tabernacle Church.

“I made a sign and placed it in front of the entrance to our neighborhood that told them exactly where to go so there would be no confusion,” said Byrd, vice president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods.

Still, on April 1, a car full of voters from a senior living facility who should have gone to Christ Tabernacle were driven to their old polling place. 

“I thought it was unfortunate they had to get there and find out rather than knowing in advance that their polling location was different,” said Sen. Sollie Norwood, a Democrat from Jackson who was on the ground Tuesday helping constituents with voting.

One of those elderly women became frustrated and said she no longer wanted to vote, Norwood said, though her companions tried to convince her otherwise. By midday Tuesday, 300 people had voted at Christ Tabernacle, one of the city’s largest precincts currently in terms of registered voters, but among the lowest in turnout historically.

Voting rights advocates and candidates vying for municipal office in Jackson are keeping an eye on issues facing voters at the polls, though without official results, it remains to be seen if that will dampen turnout this election with the hotly contested Democratic primary.

“I still believed it was gonna be low,” Monica McInnis, a program manager for the nonprofit OneVoice, said of turnout. “I was expecting it would be a little higher because of what is on the ballot and how many people are running in all of the wards as well as the mayor’s race.”

A daughter helps her mother casts her votes as mayoral candidate John Horhn chats with voter at Christ Tabernacle Church in south Jackson, Tuesday, April 1, 2025.

The situation is evolving as the day goes on, but the main issues are twofold. One, thousands of Jackson voters have new precinct locations after redistricting last year put them into a new city council ward. 

Two, some voters didn’t realize their polling place for the municipal elections may differ from where they voted in last year’s national elections, which are run by the counties. 

In Mississippi, voters are assigned two precincts that are often but not always the same: A municipal location for city elections and a county location for senate, gubernatorial and presidential elections 

“People in Mississippi, we go to the same polling location for three years, and that fourth year, it changes,” said Jada Barnes, an organizer with the Jackson-based nonprofit MS Votes. “A lot of us are confused. When people are going to the polling place today, they’re seeing it is closed, so they’re just going back home which is making turnout go even lower.” 

Barnes said she’s hearing this primarily from a few Jackson voters who called a hotline that MS Votes is manning. Lack of awareness around polling locations is a big deterrent, she said, because most people are trying to squeeze their vote in between work, school or family responsibilities. 

“Maybe you’re on your lunch break, you only got 30 minutes to go vote, you learn that your polling location has changed and now you have to go back to work,” she said. 

Norwood said he heard from a group of students assigned to vote at Christ Tabernacle who had attempted to vote at the wrong precinct and were told their names weren’t on the rolls. They didn’t know they had been moved from Ward 4 to Ward 6, Norwood said, meaning they expected to vote in a different council race until reaching the polls Tuesday.

Though voters have a duty to be informed of their polling location, Barnes said city and circuit clerks and local election commissioners are ultimately responsible for making sure voters know where to go on Election Day. 

Angela Harris, the Jackson municipal clerk, said her office worked to inform voters by mailing out thousands of letters to Jacksonians whose precincts changed, including the roughly 6,000 whose wards changed during the 2024 redistricting. 

“I am over-swamped,” she said yesterday. 

Despite her efforts, at least one voter said he never got a letter. Stephen Brown learned through Facebook, not an official notice, that he was moved from Ward 1 to Ward 2. 

Stephen Brown, a resident of Briarwood Heights in northeast Jackson, ran into difficulty voting April 1.

A resident of the Briarwood Heights neighborhood in northeast Jackson, Brown’s efforts to vote Tuesday have been complicated by mixed messages and a lack of communication. He has yet to vote, even though he showed up at the polls at 7:10 this morning. 

His odyssey took him to two wrong locations, where the poll managers instructed Brown to call his ward’s election commissioner, who did not answer multiple calls, Brown said. Brown finally learned through a Facebook comment that he could look up his new precinct on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website — if he scrolled down the page past his county precinct information.

This afternoon, Brown has a series of meetings planned, so now he’s hoping for a 30-minute window to try voting one more time, even though he’s skeptical it will make a difference. 

“I’m a very disenchanted voter, because I’ve been let down so much,” he said. “I vote because it’s the thing that I’m supposed to do and because of the sacrifices of my ancestors, but not because I truly believe in it, you know?” 

Brown’s not alone in facing turbulence. Back at Christ Tabernacle, one Jackson voter, who declined to give her name, said she’s frustrated from having to drive to three polling locations in one day.

“I’m dissatisfied with the fact that I had to drive from one end of this street and all of the back to come over here when I usually vote over here on Highway 18,” she said. “This was a great inconvenience, gas wise and time wise.”

The same thing happened to Rodney Miller. He called the confusion some voters are facing in this election “unnecessary.” 

“That ain’t the way we should be handling business,” he said. “We should be looking out for one another better than that, you know? It’s already enough getting people out to vote, and when you confuse them when they try? Come on now. That’s discouraging.”

Christ Tabernacle is the second largest precinct in the city in terms of registered voters, with 3,330 assigned to vote there as of 2024, according to documents retrieved from the municipal election committee. But it had one of the lowest voter turnout rates – 10% in the 2021 primary election before redistricting and before it became so large.

Byrd mentioned the much higher turnout in places like Ward 1 in northeast Jackson, compared to where he lives in south Jackson. Why does Byrd think this is?

“Civics,” Byrd said. “They took civics out of school. If you ask the average person what is the role and responsibility of any elected official, they can’t tell you.”

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

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