With less than a week before Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 3, states across the U.S. are seeing record voter turnout in early and absentee voting, and ballots cast as of Oct. 27 were already approaching half of the total voter turnout in 2016.
In Mississippi, early votes as of Oct. 27 had come to only 4.9% of the total votes cast in 2016, well-behind the national average of 48.2%, according to statistics from the U.S. Elections Project. Early voting in the state is dependent on absentee ballots, of which 91,474 were requested this year by residents, and 58,796 had been returned a week before the Nov. 3 deadline.
Andrew Hood, of Madison, told South Central Mississippi News that he always votes in every race on the ballot, “even the ones that are uncontested.”
Yet, the presidential election is particularly important to Hood.
“The first time I was able to vote, I voted for Ronald Reagan,” Hood told South Central Mississippi News.
A lifelong conservative, Hood said he was raised in a family with a farm-based business, where the value of hard work was emphasized. He also was heavily influenced by the trips he took with the Boy Scouts to Civil War battlefields, where he considered the past violence and divides the country has overcome, he said.
“It was brother-against-brother, cousin-against-cousin, but we got over it, we’re trying to do better, and we built the greatest nation, in my opinion, after that,” Hood said.
As someone deeply interested in history, Hood also recalled the first time he was studying what happened in Germany prior to WWII. Ultimately, the failings that led to the Holocaust are human failings, and with the right circumstances people in the U.S. are just as capable of committing those kinds of atrocities as anyone else, he said.
“We’re no different than they are. We’re all human, and we all fall from grace,” Hood said. “I knew then, in high school, if we didn’t protect our liberties here, it could happen here.”
With all that in mind, and with values he considers socialist being advocated in the media and general society, Hood said he thinks this election is a pivotal point in U.S. history.
“And that’s why I think it’s important to vote,” he said.
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