An Electoral Mess in Mississippi

Last summer, Mississippi began an effort to “continue to build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” as Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson put it. Using data from the credit-reporting agency Experian, the state scrutinized its list of registered voters, searching for anyone who may have moved, left the state, or died. Tens of thousands of Mississippians had their active registrations shifted to inactive—a crucial step toward purging them from the rolls.

On Tuesday, many of those inactive voters showed up at the polls, only to be told that they were not properly registered. Their best option was to fill out an affidavit ballot, a more involved process that increases the likelihood that a vote will not count. Now a Senate seat is on the line, and the Democratic challenger, Scott Colom, leads the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, by just about 2,500 ballots. And voting-rights advocates say that Mississippi, a state with a long history of voter suppression and discrimination, has once again undermined one of its citizens’ most sacred rights.

Experian now says that its data were never supposed to be used to scrub Mississippi’s voter rolls in this way. Watson said in a social-media post that the inconvenience of having to fill out an affidavit ballot was “well worth the election integrity added by having cleaner voter rolls!” A postelection legal battle over the affidavit ballots is intensifying, as lawyers from the campaigns and voting-rights groups argue over how those ballots should be treated. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has called for affidavit ballots to be separated from regular ballots, suggesting that it may attempt to challenge their validity in the days ahead. Colom’s campaign has said there is no legal basis for treating affidavit ballots any differently once they are processed. The back-and-forth could be a precursor to a legal battle in which the courts could ultimately decide whether Colom or Hyde-Smith prevails.

The situation is already drawing comparisons to Mississippi’s past efforts to systematically disenfranchise Black voters. In DeSoto County, inactivations surged in recent months, and the number of active voters declined by nearly 10,000 from September to October, according to state data. The county, just south of Memphis, is home to one of Mississippi’s largest concentrations of Black voters. A 2025 review of Experian’s voter-roll-maintenance data by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan federal agency that supports election administration, found that zip codes with higher proportions of Black residents were more likely to be flagged for “new addresses,” potentially leading to voter inactivations.

Because Experian has a national database that can be used to surface evidence that a person may have moved to a new address, officials in a handful of states have turned to it, and other similar commercial sources, to try to keep their voter rolls up-to-date. Some election officials used the data to contact voters and encourage them to update their voter registrations, or to send postcards to a subset of voters they’d had trouble reaching. But Mississippi used the data far more aggressively. Scott Anderson, Experian’s vice president for corporate communications, told us that the company has not provided services to Mississippi since early 2025. “The solution provided at that time consisted of supplemental address information and was not designed or intended to validate voter records.”

Mississippi plowed ahead, despite warnings that the data were error-prone and could introduce far more problems than they solved, multiple officials and voting-rights advocates told us. One of those officials, Jim Hood, a Democrat who served as Mississippi’s attorney general from 2004 to 2020, sued Experian in 2014 over errors in its credit reports, eventually settling with the company and two other credit-reporting bureaus for $7.2 million. “I’d be leery of doing any business with them, especially on something as sensitive as somebody’s constitutional right to vote,” he told us. Hood said that his daughter was among those told on Tuesday that she was not an active voter, despite showing up at the same precinct she has always gone to. She ended up having to fill out an affidavit ballot.

Just how many other Mississippians showed up to vote only to learn that they had been inactivated is unclear. Some advocates on both sides of the contest estimated last week that 10,000 to 25,000 affidavit ballots remained uncounted, a number that could easily swing the race. Half a dozen voters who’d had to fill out affidavit ballots told us that they are unsure their votes will count; the state says that nearly a quarter of these ballots are being rejected. Watson said in a statement last week that his office had received “multiple calls” about inactive voters on Election Day, but he seemed to downplay the impact. “Voter roll maintenance is the cornerstone of election integrity,” he wrote on X. He has since assured Mississippians that every legal vote will be counted, calling the affidavit-ballot process a “safety net for errors.” Our emails and calls to his office and cellphone went unanswered.

If there was one thing Virginia Gordon-Lang’s mother had taught her, it was how to vote. The 38-year-old recounted to us the times her mom took her hand as they walked into a church or school to cast a ballot. On Election Day this year, however, she showed up to three different locations, attempting to vote for Colom. She didn’t appear on the rosters of eligible voters at any of the locations, she said. When she finally made it to the front of the line at the last precinct, Gordon-Lang said, a poll worker told her that she was not on the active-voter list. Gordon-Lang, a Marine Corps veteran who had moved in April, said that she told the worker that she had filled out required paperwork weeks ago confirming her home address, and that she had never missed an election. She filled out an affidavit ballot.

Gordon-Lang said that a Hinds County election official had called a few days after the election to tell her that she was no longer a registered voter and that her ballot was going to be thrown out. (Hinds County officials did not respond to our phone calls.) After spending 15 years on active duty—including time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Germany—Gordon-Lang was devastated. “It’s like a slap in the face,” she said. “That’s what makes me so angry.” She contacted the Meridian Lauderdale County NAACP branch, which is trying to make sure that all eligible votes are tallied. “I want my vote to count,” she told us. “I want my vote back—that’s what I want.”

[Read: The arc of the Voting Rights Act]

Whether Gordon-Lang represents a singular case or a broader trend could determine the ultimate outcome of one of the most watched races in the country. Voting-rights groups, attorneys, and campaign staff are fanning out across the state, gathering stories of people who may have been wrongly turned away or made to cast a ballot provisionally through the affidavit process. They are also holed up watching the county-by-county process determine which votes will be counted. As of this afternoon, Mississippi reported that 14,239 affidavit ballots had been processed, and 23 percent of them had been rejected. Civil-rights groups that sent Watson a letter a few days before the election, warning about the unreliability of Experian data, say that rightful voters have now been limited in their ability to cast a ballot. “It shows how antiquated and broken our system is,” Amir Badat, the southern-states director and senior director of Fair Fight Action, a national voting-rights organization based in Georgia, told us. “This is what modern-day voter suppression looks like.”

Representatives from several groups told us stories about ballots being rejected because poll workers—not voters—failed to adhere to strict procedures that required them to sign affidavits, and stories about voters whose registration should not have been affected but were somehow categorized as inactive. Tonya Rivers, a Rankin County election commissioner, told us that commissioners were urgently trying to verify “questionable” data from Experian as it processes affidavit ballots. “I want clean voter rolls just as much as anybody,” she said. “But cleaning up voter rolls shouldn’t mean creating problems for legitimate voters in the process.”

Although most states and counties rely primarily on government data to maintain and update their voter lists, some states have begun to use private credit-reporting data as well. But not everyone is using it as Mississippi has. The West Virginia secretary of state’s office participated in a federal pilot program with Experian but opted to use the company’s data in a far more limited way than Mississippi did, officials there told us. They analyzed data from the company’s True Trace program specifically to identify about 15,860 voters who may have moved without updating their voter registration.

“Postcards were mailed to the folks identified only through Experian data, but we did not inactivate any nonresponding voters or place them in a queue for future cancellation,” West Virginia’s deputy secretary of state, Donald Kersey III, told us in an email. “It was used only as outreach.” West Virginia decided not to continue using Experian after the pilot, officials there told us, citing costs and other factors. El Paso County, Colorado, also used the data to reach out to voters rather than automatically inactivating them, County Clerk Steve Schleiker told us.

Mississippi, by contrast, used Experian’s data to run 1.9 million checks of voters’ data, roughly equivalent to the state’s total number of active registered voters, allowing county officials to begin a process that culminated in thousands of people being shifted to “inactive” status. An April report in Mississippi Today found that at least 50,000 voters had been inactivated over address issues from July 2025 to March 2026. Those changes were made even though Experian told Mississippi, in disclaimers in an initial contract, that it could not guarantee that its data were accurate, and local officials warned the state that the credit agency was prone to reporting inaccurate addresses, the report said. The outlet reported last Monday that by the time of Tuesday’s election, the list of inactive voters had surged to 230,000, accounting for about one in nine of the state’s registered voters.

Some of them supported Hyde-Smith. Michelle Pratt, a Republican, was told that her name wasn’t on the voting list when she tried to cast a ballot at a church near her home in Meridian. She said a poll worker asked whether she had moved recently; she has lived in the same home for eight years. Pratt voted by affidavit ballot for Hyde-Smith and said the experience left her suspicious about the process: “It makes you wonder: How do I know if my vote was counted—you know, mine or anybody’s?”

De’Angelo Houston, the president of the Meridian Lauderdale County NAACP branch, told us that he and other observers are gathering information from people who had not moved over the past decade, yet were told on Election Day that their registration was not active. He said last week that observers were watching as Lauderdale County election commissioners sifted through piles of affidavit ballots to either reject or accept them. “We are documenting the reasons why they are refusing,” he said. Houston said he watched as one election official rejected 21 affidavit ballots for missing signatures, either from the voter or a poll worker.

In DeSoto County on Friday, observers from the Democratic Party were watching through a window as election officials determined, precinct by precinct, which affidavit ballots would be accepted and which would be rejected. Every now and then, officials gave updates to observers about how many affidavit ballots were rejected, and why, Deborah Williams, the chair of the DeSoto County Democratic Executive Committee, told us. She said that a lot of voters “are going to end up being disenfranchised.”

The Mississippi secretary of state’s office told the local-news outlet 16 WAPT last month that it no longer uses Experian’s data and is now contracting with a different commercial company, IDI Data, to help maintain its voter rolls. The state has been experimenting with options for maintaining its voter list in recent years but has not joined a bipartisan, multistate compact that shares information about voters. Spurred by conspiracy theories suggesting that the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center was part of a left-wing plot, a number of Republican-led states ditched the group in 2023.

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

Former Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling told us that commercial data can be useful for voter-roll maintenance “if it’s part of a broader ecosystem of data you’re working with.” But he cautioned against efforts to deactivate voters based on potentially flawed data that are not corroborated, and he criticized Mississippi’s rule requiring voters who show up with valid identification to fill out an affidavit ballot if they are not on the active-voters list. In Georgia and other states, inactive voters can fill out a normal ballot—and be automatically reactivated—if they show up at a voting precinct with appropriate identification.

There is good reason for states such as Mississippi to keep a close eye on their voter rolls. Federal and state data indicate that people regularly move or change their name without updating their voter registration. Watson, the Mississippi secretary of state, has pointed out that in at least three counties, the population of registered voters is larger than the estimated number of citizens older than 18.

But there is little evidence of the kind of voter fraud that would justify the mass purges of voter rolls that Republicans aligned with President Trump support. Hood told us that during his 16 years as attorney general, and eight years as a district attorney prior to that, he hunted for true evidence of widespread voter fraud—and always came up short. The idea that fraudsters would go through the trouble of trying to vote using registrations of people who have died or left Mississippi—a state without early in-person voting and with limited voting by mail—is detached from reality, he said.

“We have a system that works, and they’re just looking for a problem to fix that’s not there,” Hood said. “It’s not a lot of people going in there voting that are not legit. The problem is getting people to go vote that are legit.”

As the country awaits the results of what may be the most narrowly decided Senate contest in decades in Mississippi, Americans are also seeing the fallout of experimenting with unreliable tools to satisfy the ever-evolving demands of election activists.