JACKSON, Miss.–The vote for the GOP run-off increased substantially in Hinds County, and that’s where people from state Sen. Chris McDaniel’s camp were looking through voting records Thursday, to try and determine if illegal votes were cast in Tuesday’s run-off election.
McDaniel lost by a very slim margin to incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran, who will go on to face Democrat Travis Childers in the November general election for U.S. Senate.
At least that’s the way it stands now. McDaniel said in his Tuesday speech and since then that he felt the election was hijacked by Republicans who encouraged Democrat crossover voting, which was legal as long as those Democrats did not vote in the June 3 primary.
“Now it’s our job to make sure that the sanctity of the vote is upheld,” said McDaniel. “Before this race ends, we have to be absolutely certain that the Republican primary was won by Republican voters.”
“We have evidence that we are concerned about,” said Laura Van Overshcelde, with the Miss. Tea Party, at a press conference Thursday afternoon. “We’re here to ensure the integrity of the electoral process. We have already found nearly 800 instances of June 3 voters in the Democrat primary, who illegally voted in the June 24 run-off election. We anticipate finding many more illegal votes.”
Pete Perry, GOP chairman for Hinds County, said the “illegal votes” were actually just mistakes made on paper by poll workers, who corrected those mistakes. He said they were not illegal votes.
“There’s errors that happened that day and the poll workers out there corrected it. They’re well aware of it, but they’re just making up numbers to make it look a lot better than it is.”
Perry scheduled a news conference for 10 a.m. Friday, to give more information on Tuesday’s vote.
