Jackson Free Press

Bill Chandler, the director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, is reporting that the Scott County Circuit Clerk's office may have mishandled the voter registration forms of approximately 200 people, mostly Latinos and African Americans.

Chandler said MIRA, a which advocates from immigrants in Mississippi, registered 320 new voters in Scott County, where 9.7 percent of the population is Hispanic. More than 38 percent of Scott County's citizens are African American.

Roughly half the individuals MIRA signed up did not have working telephone numbers, Chandler said. Of the people who did have working phones, Chandler said not one received voter information cards from Circuit Clerk Joe Rigby's office. Chandler believes the voters without phones also likely did not receive the information cards.

"The effect of that is preventing people from knowing where their polling place is. To me, that is very, very serious," Chandler told the Jackson Free Press this evening.

Back-to-back calls placed to Rigby's office resulted in a busy signal.

CORRECTION: The above blog post has been edited to reflect that the circuit clerk's name is Joe Rigby. We apologize for originally misstating his name.