Depending on turnout, votes can be $30 or more

By Jeremy Weldon

No matter who wins or loses in the Panola County primary elections today, it’s going to cost taxpayers a lot of money.

Circuit Clerk Melissa Meek-Phelps, speaking to the Exchange Club of Batesville last Wednesday, said this year’s elections – the primary on Tuesday, a probable runoff on Aug. 27, the general election Nov. 5, and another runoff Nov. 19 – will easily cost in excess of $100,000.

That financial burden in necessary and unavoidable, Meek-Phelps said, but considering the number of election participants, the cost per vote is surprisingly high to many people.

She said the last elections held in Panola County – the special election last June for the open U.S. Senate seat created by the resignation of Sen. Thad Cochran and the runoff – saw a total of 2,804 votes cast.

Some 2,033 Panola voters cast ballots on June 5 and then 771 voted two weeks later. The cost of that election, divided by the number of participants, reveal that county taxpayers paid $30.99 for every vote cast June 5 and a whopping $81 for each vote cast on June 26.

Depending on the turnout – and early indications are that Panola County will have an average number of voters take part – ballots cast Tuesday and in the subsequent elections will be just as expensive to property owners who have ad valorem assessments.

A harbinger for election participation is the number of absentee votes cast, and Meek-Phelps confirmed this week that about 400 of those ballots have been cast so far. There were more than 800 a year ago.

Absentee voting at the courthouses at noon on Saturday.

As of Monday morning, 46,545 Mississippians had requested absentee ballots for today’s primaries, and 41,097 absentee ballots have been received back to the Circuit Clerks’ offices around the state, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Comparatively, in the 2015 Primary Election, 41,392 absentee ballots were requested, with 37,318 absentee ballots received.  The number of votes cast in the 2015 Republican Primary Election totaled 279,428 and the number of votes cast in the 2015 Democratic Primary Election totaled 299,278, for a grand total of 578,706 votes cast.

More than 1.8 million Mississippians are registered to vote in today’s.  Census data estimates the State’s eligible voting age population to be about 2.2 million.