During their Tuesday morning assembly the roughly 250 members of the senior class at Columbus High School turned their attention to an important date on the calendar — graduation day — as they were informed about how to order everything from caps and gowns to class rings.
But the students’ attention was also directed to another day, Nov. 6, the date of the general election in Mississippi.
Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann and Rep. Kabir Karriem spoke briefly to the students as part of National Voter Registration Day. Hosemann had earlier met with students at Mississippi State during a voter registration event on the Drill Field. In the afternoon, he visited seniors at New Hope High School and election officials at the Lowndes County Courthouse.
Both Karriem and Hosemann emphasized the importance of voting, tying the vote to the sacrifices of Americans to ensure that right.
“How many of you would be willing to die for something you love?” Karriem asked the students, which elicited a murmur through the auditorium. “It’s a poignant question, because when we talk about the vote, there were some people who died for us to have that right. Literally, the vote has blood on it, so we shouldn’t take voting lightly.”
Hosemann noted that in June, 3,200 Mississippi National Guard members left for a one-year deployment in the Middle East. He said the sacrifices made by those Mississippians ensured the students’ rights, including the right to vote.
“Those 3,200 Mississippians are in harm’s way,” Hosemann said. “That’s a nice way of saying you’re living in a sand dune and somebody doesn’t want you there and may try to kill you. That means we have an obligation.
“Go vote and when they come home next June and you see one of the walking down the street you can go up to them and say ‘I voted,'” he added. “Your vote matters, and the fact that we have men and women fighting to protect your right to vote should make you want to vote even more.”
Tables were set up outside the school auditorium to provide voter registration applications. Students who turn 18 by Nov. 6, the date of the election, are eligible to vote.
Breshod West, 18, said he had not given much thought to registering to vote before Tuesday’s assembly.
“I don’t really know much about it, like who’s running or anything,” he said. “But I do plan to register. I’m glad we had this today because I probably wouldn’t have even thought about it.”
Turnout, cybersecurity
During a brief meeting at the courthouse, Hosemann told a handful of local officials, including Lowndes County Circuit Clerk Teresa Barksdale and four of the county’s five election commissioners, there are two issues his office is most concerned with: low voter turn-out and cyber-attacks on the state’s election system.
“We only had 13-1/2 percent to vote in the primaries in June, which is terrible,” Hosemann said. “And it was even worse in Lowndes County with just 10 percent of the voters going to the polls. That’s unacceptable. That’s why we’ve been going all over the state, encouraging people to register to vote and, of course, following through and voting on election day.”
Hosemann said there are currently 1.8 million registered votes in Mississippi, but that another 400,000 eligible to vote are unregistered.
The second issue, Hosemann said, revolves around attempts to infiltrate the state’s voting system through circuit clerks’ offices.
“Mostly, it’s through phishing,” Hosemann said. “Every day, we’re getting reports from circuit clerks’ offices about emails. They are official-looking emails and the names on the emails are recognizable, in a lot of cases they are former employees of the Secretary of State’s office. We’ve been alerted and we’re telling our circuit clerks: Please, please do not open those emails. That’s all they need to get into the system.”
Barksdale said her office had been alerted to the problem several months ago.
“It’s scary,” she said. “All it takes is to open an email and then there’s a problem. We tell our people not to open emails if they aren’t 100-percent sure that it is really a legitimate email.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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