The Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court has assigned a special judge to the case of the Madison County School Board District 2 Election following candidate Rylon Thompson’s filing of an election contest.
Judge Lamar Pickard has been assigned to hear the case and has yet to set a date for the first day in court.
Thompson lost the election to current school board member Bill Grissett. Incorrect ballots were handed out to residents across District 2 giving Thompson reason to believe he could have won. He contested the election on November 22 and then spent two days auditing the election on November 29 and 30. At the completion of the audit, Thompson said he “absolutely” believes he has a case. Grissett also assisted in the audit, although he did not respond for comment.
“We verified that entire areas – mainly the subdivision of Summertree – were zoned to not receive ballots when it is actually included in the District 2 zone, but they didn’t have that information at the polls and we verified that,” Thompson said. “That was probably one of the main discrepancies that we saw.”
Thompson said they saw major inconsistencies and not all of the information they should have had access to was included in the audit, so he has filed three public records requests to get the details of training logs, improper issuance of ballots, lists of streets not properly assigned to the district and information from Cropper, the company who completed the redistricting for Madison County.
The new board members that were elected are set to be sworn in on January 9. This will happen even if a decision has not been made yet in the case.
Judges who are chosen for these hearings are outside of the county, usually retired and have previous election contest experience, which is the case for Judge Pickard as he has handled these cases before in Madison County. The initial court hearing will not be a trial but to go through the preliminary items.
He will notify Circuit Clerk Anita Wray when he is coming to Canton for the preliminary court date. From there, a hearing will be set between the two parties – the one contesting the election and the winner of the election.
At this time, it is expected for this to take place in 2023 and likely after the new school board members are sworn in. With no deadline, no one knows for sure when the trial will be or when the judge will make a decision.
Judge Pickard will have the final decision on what the outcome of the election contest will be. There are several rulings the judge could make. First, the judge could say he has heard the challenge and the certified election winner is the actual election winner. Second, he could say he has seen all the evidence and the person who challenged the election results actually won the election. The third option would be to have a special election. Special elections are awarded when the judge is unable to tell the will of the people through the evidence.
There is one more thing that Judge Pickard could rule and he has in the past – that even if everything the contestor is saying is true and all of the votes he is saying would have been his truly would have counted for him, would it have been enough to win the election? If it would not have, the contestor would have not proven the case.
Although Madison County has had election contests in the past that were over two votes, Thompson lost by 1,618 votes and will have to prove that he could have had enough votes to win.
For now, the county will wait for Judge Pickard to set his court date.
