Election fraud is real but the integrity of Mississippi’s voting system is strong enough to foster confidence in the state’s election system, Secretary of State Michael Watson told fellow Republicans at a local party meeting Tuesday.
With Election Day three weeks away, Watson discussed elections — a key area of the Secretary of State’s oversight — as well as other roles his office undertakes, including business services and the management of public lands.
But elections — and more to the point, election security — were the highlight of his roughly half-hour speech.
“Let’s backtrack to 2020. I’ll tell you this: Did something happen in some states? Absolutely. Was there election fraud? Absolutely. Was there enough to change the election? I don’t know because I wasn’t in those states, but what I can tell you is that I was in Mississippi, and I appreciate the hard work of our commissioners and our clerks here in Mississippi,” he said.
Watson said he believes election fraud occurred in Mississippi, but he didn’t think it was enough to have changed the election results, and that’s because of the integrity of Mississippi’s “non-centralized” elections system, which has moving parts at state and local levels.
“People say all the time that election fraud is not real. Let me tell you it’s real,” he said, adding that his staff is working on a case involving fraudulent absentee ballots using the forged signatures of deceased former nursing home residents. “In Mississippi, we have limited it to the extent to where I have faith in our elections here.”
Watson said a majority of counties have replaced aging voting machines with newer models, which he said are more secure and accurate because they rely on paper ballots and cannot be hooked up to the internet, which would make them more vulnerable to hacking.
And counties will start receiving a greater share of the state’s election support fund, 70% instead of 50%, to pay for voting machines and other election equipment, he said.
If anything, cybersecurity is the biggest threat to the elections process, Watson said. He stressing that election officials have to stand vigilant against hackers from “other countries that continue to try to get into our systems.”
“It’s basically foreigners trying to influence the elections process,” he said.
Watson said he’d like to see a more unified effort to resist those threats.
“We have some counties that have strong countywide cyber programs and we have some that don’t know what cyber means,” he said.
He said voters can fall victim to manipulation by bad actors trying to influence elections.
He recalled a circuit clerk telling him that she asked a regular voter why she hadn’t been to the polls yet on Election Day and the voter telling them that she had already cast her ballot online, which is impossible.
Turning to other voting issues, Watson said absentee voting in Mississippi essentially is the same as what other states call early voting.
He noted that red states Florida and Texas have early voting, and Florida had 60% of its votes in the 2020 election cast before Election Day.
“Do we trust their results?” I’ll leave that to y’all,” he said.
While Republicans are generally suspicious of early voting and online voter registration, Watson said it should be considered, if not embraced.
He said Ohio’s secretary of state told him online voter registration is efficient and leads to cleaner voter rolls because a clerk doesn’t have to transcribe forms, and it carried no apparent benefit to either political party.
“Here’s where I challenge us as conservatives. We hear early voting, we lose our minds. We hear anything starting with online, we lose our minds,” Watson said. “We’ve got to be smart. We’ve got to figure out what makes sense.
“Let’s be intellectual about it. Let’s be smart. We’ve got a country to save.”
