Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann isn’t very optimistic about voter turnout for this year’s municipal elections — and he’s reaching out to voters across Mississippi to do what he can to remedy that.

“This is literally where the rubber meets the road,” Hosemann said at a press conference Thursday at the Trent Lott National Center. “Your municipal elections are the individuals who give you police protection and fire protection, they manage your streets, they pick up your garbage.

“Everything that goes on in day-to-day life comes out of your municipalities and their governance, and the selection of that governance is just as important.”

As of Thursday, officials from Hattiesburg City Hall had received 87 absentee ballots for the upcoming May 2 primary election. Hosemann said 4-5 percent of registered voters typically vote absentee, so he’s hopeful the small number of absentee ballots is not reflective of the actual turnout in Hattiesburg for the primary.

He has so far been disappointed in the expected voter turnout in other areas around the state, including Jackson.

“They have a very heavily contested Democratic primary — there are about 12 or 13 people in it,” he said. “But they only had 211 (Wednesday) that had actually cast an absentee ballot, and that’s not a good sign.

“Now, either people don’t care, or the candidates aren’t ringing them and asking them if they’re going to be in town. I was just disappointed.”

Hosemann also took the opportunity to present the 2016-2020 Mississippi Official and Statistical Register, informally known as the Blue Book.

The book, which has been published since the early 1900s, features information on state and county officials, government agencies, boards and commissions and election returns. A digital version of the book can be found at the Secretary of State’s website at www.sos.ms.gov.

This year’s version of the Blue Book is the Bicentennial edition and offers 59 pages of Mississippi history, beginning with the Magnolia State’s 1817 beginnings and leading up to the present date. That section features several businesses, business leaders and other members of communities across the state, including  sports legends and renowned artists and authors.

“It shows you who got elected here, who didn’t get elected, what the vote totals were in various primaries — those kinds of things are in here,” Hosemann said. “All of the economic developers are in here, all the information about each county is in here.

“We’re real proud of it. I think the Legislature was right to authorize the publishing of it, and we’re glad to have it distributed today.”

 

Source: Hattiesburg American

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann is onto something with the relaunch of the Y’all Business site, a free digital resource of information.

The website was initially launched in 2015 but this latest version, with interactive maps showing locations of hospitals, restaurants and other types of businesses, and population data and information about household income and broadband access, is frankly fantastic.

Users can easily find demographic information by geographic location in Mississippi, or useful competitive business information. For instance, a user considering opening a restaurant can populate a map with information about restaurant competitors from within a certain area, and they can find out other helpful information including traffic count.

Other demographic information is valuable simply because it is so accessible and from a verified source. For instance, Lafayette County has a median age of 28.5 versus 36.5 for the state at large, and that information is right at your fingertips at yallbusiness.com.

Hosemann says he created the site to help determine things like whether there’s a market for a certain type of business in any particular part of the state. He said the goal is to help development of small- and medium-sized businesses by giving people free access to information.

We think he’s right on target with this useful site.

Source: The Oxford Eagle

April is autism awareness month and inside the state capitol rotunda Wednesday, children, doctors and state dignitaries gathered to bring greater awareness to those living with the disorder.

Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann led off the event.

“Today’s an important day, not only to shine the bright light of public awareness on autism, but it is also important for us to acknowledged that we are at a stepping stone for the future [in Mississippi],” Said Hosemann.

Secretary Hosemann said that the state has made unbelievable strides, but that Mississippi has a ways to go.

Dr. James Moore is Chairman of the Mississippi Autism Board and professor at the University of Southern Mississippi and said that more experts in the field of autism are needed to address the thousands of kids and adults in Mississippi who have the disorder.

“We need diagnostic support, we need more professionals in Mississippi. It’s hard to convince those qualified folks to move, so we need more programs, like the program at the University Southern Mississippi, who are trying to produce home grown behavior analyst,” said Moore.

Moore says that the state is only averaging about 12 students a year who will graduate in the discipline of behavior analyst. And according to him, that’s nowhere near enough to work with the more than 5-to-10 thousand kids who have already been diagnosed with the disorder.

Mother Chelsea McKinley of Petal, Mississippi was last to speak at the event. She has three boys who have been diagnosed with autism and said that she struggles to find ways to help her kids navigate a society that doesn’t quite have them in mind.

“We tried everything. I know you’ve seen it, someone shares on your Facebook, the new diet, the new supplement, we tried them all. They do work in some cases but my thing was, I wasn’t looking for a cure for my children. They didn’t have something that they needed to be cured from. They needed to find a way to cope in a world that wasn’t necessarily made to cater to them,” said McKinley.

The event was sponsored by Autism Speaks.

Source: NewsMS