Turnout was low in Lowndes County and other north Mississippi counties for Tuesday”s 1st Congressional District race, voters and election officials said.
Still, some said the tea party movement helped bring voters to the polls and will help focus attention on the November general election.
Including absentee and affidavit ballots, 9.3 percent of voters showed up at the polls Tuesday.
While some local precincts were at a crawl, at the Lee Middle School polling location Raymond Gross, an election official, said people were coming steady all day, and it made him happy nearly 475 people had voted by mid afternoon.
“I think people are excited,” Gross said. “People are coming with canes, with walkers — folks you”d never expect to see. People are getting out to vote.”
He attributes the healthy turnout to recent activity in the tea party.
“We can say thanks to the tea baggers,” he said. “There”s lots of coverage of them on cable. It”s a movement that I hope continues for a while.”
Gross, who has been helping out with elections for the past 10 years, said that election officials at Lee Middle School might process as many as 600 people during this cycle. But he was sure that the general election will yield even more voters.
“We might get 1,500 to 2,000 people in this precinct in November.”
As of 1:30 p.m., 59 people had voted at Carrier Lodge, the University Precinct polling place. 1,141 people are registered in the precinct. However, that number includes both Republican and Democratic voters, and there were only Republican candidates running in this primary. Still, the turnout was low.
“It”s voter apathy,” said Reese James, one of several election officials. “We”re the kind of people who vote, and we”re the kind of people who know what”s going on in the country. Most people don”t have a clue.”
Ernest Brackett, another election official, added that citizens have become hypocritically complacent about the right to vote.
“They don”t go out and vote, but they complain,” he said. “How can you make things better if you don”t try to change anything? I don”t know why people don”t vote when they have the chance.”
Of course, the 59 ballots that were cast had an opposite story to tell.
“I vote every single time, every chance I get,” said James Lipscomb, 22. “And the tea party meetings — I go to every single one of them. It”s good for our country.”
Eulalie Davis and her 19-year-old daughter, Fairfax, were doing their “duty.”
“Frankly, I”m not excited about this election, but we”re supposed to vote for our representatives,” Eulalie Davis said.
Her daughter had similar reasons.
“I think it”s important for young people to vote,” Fairfax Davis said. “One of these days, it”s going to be our generation running next, and we need to know the process.”
There was some unrest, however. Reese James and the two other election officials he sat with were bothered by the fact that Mississippi doesn”t any require identification to vote.
“The state is cow-towing to special interests and refusing to enact voter identification,” he said.
“I could walk up and say my name is John Smith,” George Courington said.
Courington and James said that voter identification will be on the ballot in the general election and 70 percent of Mississippi wants it passed.
Statewide, election officials reported sparse turnout in several counties, including DeSoto and Lee, which were pivotal to the most competitive race of the day, the three-way Republican primary in the northern 1st District.
“Some of the ones that usually are our big precincts, people are just not voting,” said Marla Treadway, a deputy circuit clerk in DeSoto County.
Only one race was held in each of the four U.S. House districts, and only opposite-party challengers were being chosen.
Republican primaries were being held in the 1st, 2nd and 4th districts, and a Democratic primary was in the 3rd.
In central Mississippi”s Hinds County – where 104 precincts are in the 2nd District and 15 are in the 3rd – election commissioner Lelia Rhodes said turnout was “slow, slow, slow.”
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