The Voting Section at the Department of Justice has precleared a settlement in an election lawsuit arising out of LeFlore County, Mississipppi. The Mississippi Republican Party sued the LeFlore County Election Commission seeking that they simply follow state law regarding the conduct of elections. From the Jackson Clarion Ledger: Chaos in the Mississippi polls is not unlike the facts described in the ruling in United States v. Ike Brown arising out of Noxubee County, Mississippi. Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann has sought to clean up the mess in Mississippi, but because the Secretary of State does not have direct control over county or party run elections, the mess has continued in some parts of the state.
“The agreement settled a lawsuit Republicans filed over chaotic conditions at the polls during the 2008 presidential election. . . .The decree also prohibits cell phone usage after voters have signed the poll books.“
Pleadings filed in the Brown case show that elections in Noxubee, even after the voting lawsuit was filed, were infested with violations of law, hundreds of instances of forced assistance, and like in LaFlore, outright chaos inside the polling places. You can read sworn statements here and here about the chaos and violations of state law in Noxubee. Here is a picture of Ike Brown in Noxubee County handling an absentee ballot a few days after he told a federal judge he would have nothing to do with the election and would have no role in the processing of absentee ballots. All of these violations of law occurred after the federal court had already entered a liability finding against Brown for this same sort of lawless behavior.
Mississippi has serious problems with the integrity of elections. Elections there are some of the worst run in the nation. The Secretary of State desperately wants to fix the broken system, but state law vests too much authority in the county election commissions and parties. Thankfully the state Republican Party has stepped up and forced one out-of-control county to follow the state election law. In Mississippi, merely following state election law is a novel concept in some corners of the state.