Run off elections take place Tuesday

Tuesday is Election Day! News 25 spoke with Secretary of State Michael Watson about what we’re learning from the last election day.

Only a fourth of the Mississippi population got out to vote in the primary election.

According to Watson, it is just as important to vote in local elections as it is national. Your local officials are going to have a much bigger and quicker impact on your day-to-day life.

The secretary of state is working to build back up the public’s trust in the voting system. One way they’re doing this is cracking down on voter fraud and using new systems that require a paper ballot. “Folks just don’t trust the process. So, I think that’s a really important part for us to remember. ‘Hey, what have we been doing these last four years to prepare for our elections upcoming?’ We’ve done a lot of great work at the state level here in Mississippi. Thankfully, our legislators have joined us in that work. And doing things like, now we have paper-verifiable trails with our election equipment. To make sure if folks say ‘Hey, we’ve got something wrong with the machine’, you’ve always got that paper to go back to.”

You can see more important about your polling location, ballots, and more at sos.ms.gov/yall-vote.

Watson says he is also grateful for all of the poll workers.