Four days before Tuesday's election, a group of civil rights organizations sent Mississippi's Republican secretary of state, Michael Watson, a warning. Voters who had done nothing wrong had been marked inactive because of bad data his office handed out. The groups asked him to put those voters back on the active rolls before they went to the polls.

He never answered. According to Mississippi Today, which obtained the records, his office did not respond to any of their demands. On Election Day, properly registered voters showed up and learned they were inactive.

Where the bad data came from

In 2024, Watson's office signed a $50,000 deal with Experian, the credit bureau, to supply its address data to all 82 counties. County election commissioners then used those lists to find voters who might have moved and mark them inactive. Mississippi Today reports it was the first time the state used anything but government records, mainly from the Postal Service, for that job.

Watson's office said the deal would "strengthen the integrity of elections." But in March, Mississippi Today found that errors in Experian's data went unchecked at every step of the process. Voters were marked inactive for moves they never made.

One of them, Thomas Minor, had lived in Itawamba County his whole life. The list said he lived 160 miles away, in a Delta town he had never set foot in.

By Election Day, more than 230,000 Mississippi voters were listed as inactive after a surge in inactivations.

What the groups asked for, and what Watson did

The coalition included the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU of Mississippi and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Its top demand was simple: before Election Day, restore anyone made inactive because of Experian's data.

"The voters on this list did nothing wrong," the letter said. "Restoring them to active status does not weaken list integrity."

Watson's office acknowledged to Mississippi Today that it received the letter. Assistant Secretary of State Liz Jonson wrote that no outside group can "dictate" election law in Mississippi, and that the state's voter-roll system was in a "blackout period" when "no systemic voter roll maintenance is allowed."

That blackout only goes one way. Mississippi law bars officials from removing voters or making them inactive in the 90 days before a federal election. As Mississippi Today points out, it places no such limit on putting voters back on the active list. Watson could have fixed the mistake before Tuesday. He didn't.

What happened on Tuesday

By the afternoon of Election Day, voters were finding their names missing from poll books, hotlines were filling with calls from inactive voters, and local officials said they were swamped.

Jamie Gunnells, an election commissioner in Lee County, saw so many voters learn they were inactive that four hours into the day he posted a warning on Facebook about a "major disruption" at the polls from what he called the "Experian fiasco." He told Mississippi Today that some voters were so frustrated they left without casting a ballot at all.

Watson answered Gunnells on Facebook by blaming him. "Ultimately, no matter what data is sent to the election commissioners, you should understand your job is to verify the information before acting upon it," Watson wrote.

Gunnells and other commissioners said the secretary of state never told them to check the Experian lists for errors. "How are we gonna verify it?" Gunnells said.

By Friday, Watson would only go as far as this: "Was some of the data off? Perhaps." He also defended the system: "We have implemented every available resource to ensure our elections are secure, and to ensure we do not have dead people, illegal aliens, people with false addresses, or nonresidents voting in our elections."

Why it matters for the Senate race

A voter who is wrongly listed as inactive can still vote, but only with an affidavit ballot. That's a ballot sealed in an envelope with a signed statement, and county officials decide later whether it counts. Watson himself called the affidavit process a "safety net" to correct "errors" made by election commissioners.

Mississippi's U.S. Senate race is still too close to call, with Democrat Scott Colom ahead of Cindy Hyde-Smith. Mississippi Today reports that local officials are counting thousands of affidavit ballots, including votes cast by inactive voters. Harya Tarekegn of the Mississippi Center for Justice, one of the groups in the coalition, said she believes many of this year's affidavit ballots were cast by voters made inactive by Experian's data.

Those are the ballots Hyde-Smith's campaign went after. On Thursday, her lawyers demanded that all 82 counties keep every affidavit ballot "separate and apart" from the rest, including ones already accepted, as "potential evidence" in a later fight. Colom's lawyer answered that Mississippi law doesn't allow it and that doing so could tie a ballot to the voter who cast it.

So the voters who got pushed onto affidavit ballots because the state used bad data are now the voters the Republican senator wants held apart for a possible challenge.

The facts, in short

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson sent counties Experian address data that wrongly marked eligible voters inactive. Four days before the election, civil rights groups asked him to restore those voters, which state law allowed, and his office didn't respond to any of their demands. More than 230,000 voters were inactive by Election Day. Wrongly inactivated voters had to cast affidavit ballots, and some left without voting at all. Cindy Hyde-Smith, trailing in the Senate count, has asked every county to set those affidavit ballots apart.

Source

Secretary of state ignored demands to reinstate voters inactivated by unverified Experian data days before midterms — Mississippi Today, November 6, 2026