Hinds County Circuit Clerk Zack Wallace texted registered voters at 5:03 p.m. on the eve of the midterm elections with polling information, but the link he sent them led to a dead end. The county’s voter information page was non-functional, opening to a blue screen that read, “U.S. NeXt: Website Coming Soon.”
Wallace’s text told voters the polls would be open Tuesday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and directed them to the county’s voter information page for polling locations. Instead, voters trying to use the official link were met with a site that had been down since at least Oct. 20, 2026, leaving one of Mississippi’s most populous counties without a working public gateway to election information just as people were being told to check where they had to vote.
That mattered because local election officials in Mississippi had changed 138 polling places since the 2024 election, including moving 111 precincts, closing 22 precincts and opening five new precincts. In Jackson, where the county’s linked voter information page could not be reached on the eve of Election Day, residents were being sent to confirm details that could shift from one election to the next.
The breakdown was not limited to the website. The Hinds County Election Commission phone number had been disconnected since at least Oct. 21, and attempts to reach county offices later that evening also came up empty. The Mississippi Free Press tried to call the Hinds County Board of Supervisors office at 5:34 p.m. and the Hinds County Circuit Clerk’s office at 6:10 p.m. and could not reach either one.
There is still no explanation in the record for why the county’s official site first redirected to a local mental health clinic page and then shifted to a 404 error before landing on the “Website Coming Soon” screen. What is clear is simpler and more troubling: on the night before voters had to cast ballots, the county was still pointing them to an official election resource that did not work, and there was no working phone line to pick up the slack.
For voters trying to sort out a polling location on election eve, that left Wallace’s message looking less like a helpful reminder than a sign of how fragile the county’s election information system had become. The website and the phone line were the very tools people needed most, and neither was available when they were needed.
