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The Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office spent $50,000 to run nearly 2 million checks of Experian’s unverified commercial data on registered voters, saying it did so to verify their addresses and help determine their status in a push starting last July to “strengthen the integrity of elections” statewide.
For years before the deal, Mississippi’s county election commissioners solely relied on government information to do the routine job of identifying and inactivating voters who had moved. When Secretary of State Michael Watson announced a partnership with the credit-reporting giant last year, his office issued a press release saying the deal would “bring a new level of reliable data” to enhance this process from the commercial realm, after a “successful” experiment using the company’s data in Lafayette County in early 2024.
But internal records show Watson’s office proceeded to expand the use of Experian’s information statewide, despite receiving disclaimers from the company that it couldn’t guarantee the data’s reliability. The decision allowed Experian’s commercial data to be used to maintain the voter rolls in every county for the first time in Mississippi, a state that had previously taken the company to court over errors in its credit reports.
The information the secretary of state purchased from Experian could indicate voters have moved or died, based on sources ranging from government records to the company’s credit database on over 245 million consumers. The tool that the office bought from Experian, a massive information hub called TrueTrace, did not include voters’ credit account information from the consumer reports underlying the data and does not impact voters’ credit in any way, according to the Election Assistance Commission.
Mississippi Today uncovered last month that since the secretary of state’s office handed down unverified addresses sourced from the credit bureau data to election commissioners, incorrect information led to the inactivations of numerous legitimate voters without their knowledge over the last two years. The mistakes stemmed from a process that lacked adequate safeguards to catch incorrect addresses before they could affect properly registered voters.
A Mississippi Today review of public records from the secretary of state’s office detailing the beginnings of its partnership with Experian, as well as court documents chronicling the state’s legal battles with the company over the accuracy of its information, show the office rolled out Experian’s data despite:
Mississippi’s legal challenges against Experian: Experian has faced years of legal challenges at the state and federal levels, including a now-settled 2014 lawsuit by Mississippi, over errors in the company’s credit reports — including incorrect addresses. The address information that the secretary of state purchased from Experian draws from the company’s “core consumer credit database” as a source, according to the credit bureau.
Disclaimers from the company: In the December 2024 contract launching the deal with the secretary of state, Experian said it could not guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data. Watson’s office signed off on the company’s disclaimers.
Legal requirements surrounding the data’s reliability: In February 2025, however, Watson wrote in an opinion column that state law authorized his office to roll out the credit bureau data for voter-roll maintenance as “reliable information.” Since 2024, state law broadly allows election commissioners to inactivate voters based on any information indicating people have moved so long as it is “reliable.”
The secretary of state’s office has declined Mississippi Today’s repeated requests for an interview with Watson, with Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jonson stating that the news organization showed “gross misrepresentation and mischaracterization of multiple election officials” in an article that found legitimate voters were inactivated following the secretary of state’s rollout of the credit-bureau data, according to voter records and county election officials. The office also has not responded to multiple emailed requests for comment on how it concluded Experian’s data was reliable.
“Whether it’s mischaracterization of people or the multiple instances of misinformation in which you continue to spread in your stories, our office will not take part in your sensationalized journalism,” Jonson wrote to Mississippi Today in an email.
At Jonson’s request, Mississippi Today is publishing her full statement on behalf of the secretary of state’s office in an editor’s note at the end of the article.
None of the sources interviewed and quoted by Mississippi Today in its reporting about the secretary of state’s partnership with Experian have told the news organization that they felt mischaracterized. Mississippi Today also has audio and video recordings documenting all conversations and quotes from the sources featured in this reporting.
Michael Watson gives a speech as he announces his campaign for Mississippi lieutenant governor at a Hilton Garden Inn in Pascagoula on Tuesday, April 7, 2026. Credit:The Sun Herald
In an interview with Mississippi Public Broadcasting last month, Watson told talk show host Russ Latino that, from the beginning, his office’s rollout of the credit bureau data was “wildly successful.”
“It was a really successful partnership, as far as I’m concerned,” said Watson, who on April 7 announced his bid for lieutenant governor in next year’s Republican primary after serving as Mississippi’s chief election officer for the last six years.
Jim Hood, the Democratic former attorney general who led Mississippi in its yearslong federal suit against Experian, said his office’s investigation into errors in Experian’s credit reports convinced him the company’s data should not be used to determine voter status.
“To base the possibility of taking away someone’s right to vote based upon a company that’s got a proven track record of having inaccurate information in their data, it ought to give pause for concern,” Hood, who served from 2004 to 2020, told Mississippi Today. “It was not needed in the first place.”
Mississippi takes Experian’s errors to court
In 2014, Mississippi launched a federal lawsuit against Experian alleging the company had violated federal and state law by knowingly including error-filled data in millions of Americans’ credit reports. Hood said he was moved to initiate the suit after his office investigated how errors in the company’s reports had upended the financial prospects of Mississippi consumers.
Mississippi’s suit alleged that “significant inaccuracies” in the company’s credit files, which ranged from incorrect addresses to false reports that consumers were on a federal terrorism watch list, kept Mississippians from opening bank accounts, renting apartments, securing job opportunities, financing their homes, buying cars and paying lower interest rates.
Hood said he was shocked to see Mississippi had become one of the first states to check voters’ addresses and determine their status using information partly pulled from Experian’s credit database.
“It’s bad enough when the information is affecting you financially,” Hood said. “We shouldn’t be trusting it for people’s precious right to vote.”
Jim Hood speaks at Lucy Webb Elementary School in Greenville, Tuesday, September 17, 2019. Credit: Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today, Report For America
A Mississippi Today analysis of records from the secretary of state’s office found at least 50,000 voters on Mississippi’s rolls were made inactive due to address conflicts from last July, when the office began providing election commissioners statewide with addresses from Experian’s data, until last month’s congressional primaries.
In the suit, Mississippi argued that errors entered the company’s credit reports through Experian’s “overly aggressive” matching system — the same procedure used in TrueTrace to link information collected by the company to individuals — which could mix up the information of people with different names and addresses. The state also accused Experian of allowing errors in its reports by failing to screen “inaccurate” information collected from “unreliable sources.”
Experian denied Mississippi’s allegations in court and argued that it complied with federal and state law by following “reasonable procedures to assure the maximum possible accuracy” of information in its credit reports. In response to the suit, a company spokesperson wrote on Experian’s website that the credit bureau was “proud” to say the “data in our systems” was roughly 98% accurate.
“Specifically, to say we purposefully put errors on credit reports is false and unsupported by evidence, and clearly calculated to be sensational,” Experian’s spokesperson wrote.
The suit was settled in 2016, when Experian agreed to pay Mississippi over $7 million with the other two major credit bureaus, Equifax and TransUnion. Hood’s office also announced that the settlement required Experian to “overhaul” its business practices by 2020 to help prevent the company from inaccurately including information from public records in consumers’ credit reports.
Alongside Mississippi’s suit, most of the country’s states launched an investigation into errors in Experian’s credit reports that led the company to agree to reforms and a $6 million settlement. Hood said he realized two years after Mississippi’s settlement, in 2018, that the credit bureaus “hadn’t complied” with the reforms after discovering that his own credit report listed his address wrong and mixed up other information with that of his dead father.
The realization caused Hood’s office to issue a consumer alert to Mississippians.
Experian did not respond to questions about how it changed its business practices as required by its settlement with Mississippi.
In the suit, which is set to go to trial in November, the federal watchdog argued that Experian had violated federal law on similar accusations as Mississippi’s 2014 legal challenge, including allegations that gaps in the company’s matching system caused errors to resurface on corrected credit reports.
Experian has denied the bureau’s allegations in court and wrote on its website that the suit was “another example of irresponsible overreach” by the government agency.
Experian deal was over triple the cost of traditional government data
In the last days of 2024, Watson signed off on spending $50,000 for one year of access to what Experian calls its “most powerful locating product.” The deal made Mississippi one of the first states to apply a commercial tool traditionally used by debt collectors to track down hard-to-find consumers to the voter rolls in every county.
The bill came out to be more than three times the annual price of the government information that Mississippi and most other states have historically relied on to identify when voters move: U.S. Postal Service data on address changes. As of last July, the Postal Service charges users a fee of roughly $15,000 a year to access its data at one site.
That data flags when people submit a paid notice to the Postal Service that they’ve relocated. While this means its data is backed by federal government records, election officials said it fails to capture the many voters who move without filing a notice or updating their voter registration with their new address.
“It’s not even good information,” Watson told MPB. “So, the commercial data that’s now starting to see, ‘Where are loans coming from? Where are house notes?’ — it’s better data to locate somebody where they actually do live.”
As a result, Watson said his office rolled out Experian’s tool, which makes an educated guess on a voter’s possible address based on years of their consumer activity. To do so, the tool draws on a broad mix of sources. The Postal Service’s information is just one of them, alongside consumer marketers, financial institutions, third-party data providers and Experian’s own data on credit, rent payments, loans and more.
Thomas Minor, photographed March 18, 2026, at his local polling place in Fulton, discovered during the March 10 primaries that his name was missing from the poll book. County election officials had mistakenly inactivated him after the secretary of state provided them with incorrect address information sourced from Experian’s data. Credit: Madeline Nguyen/Mississippi Today
Using this information, the tool zeroes in on a single “Best Address,” for each person, which the company states is the place “where the consumer is most likely to be reached.” But because Experian’s tool pulls from so many different sources, the company states it doesn’t check whether the person actually lives there.
“Often, this will match their residence; however, we don’t verify residency,” Experian wrote to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that initially paid for Mississippi to experiment with the company’s data.
Thomas Minor, a lifelong resident of Itawamba County, discovered that local election officials mistakenly made him inactive after his name wasn’t in the poll book during last month’s congressional primaries. Ceburn Gray, the circuit clerk responsible for registering voters in his county, said the error stemmed from address information provided by the secretary of state’s office using Experian’s data, which incorrectly indicated that Minor had an address about 160 miles away in Tchula.
Incorrect information that the secretary of state sourced from Experian’s data and provided to Itawamba County election officials listed Minor’s address at a house in Tchula with a shattered door, overgrown front lawn and “no trespassing” sign out front, Google Earth imagery from 2023 shows. Credit: Courtesy of Google
The experience has left Minor wondering why the secretary of state’s office purchased Experian’s data in the first place.
“It was a waste of money,” he said.
Reliable information?
From the outset of the secretary of state’s statewide partnership with Experian, the contract underpinning the deal issued disclaimers making clear that the company could not guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data.
“Because the services involve conveying information provided to Experian by other sources, Experian cannot and will not, for the fee charged for the services, be an insurer or guarantor of the accuracy or reliability of the services, Experian data or the data contained in its various databases,” the company stated in the terms of the contract.
The agreement further stated that Experian made no warranties regarding the “accuracy, completeness or currentness” of its data or the “correctness, accuracy, completeness, timeliness” and “reliability” of the office’s use of the data.
The secretary of state’s office signed off on all the disclaimers.
Amir Badat, a Mississippi voting-rights attorney who has represented cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said while warranties are a standard topic covered by such contracts, Experian’s own disclaimers about the limits of its data raise legal concerns about how the secretary of state’s office concluded the information was “reliable,” such as by conducting an independent study or investigation.
“When a provider of information, like Experian, is specifically disclaiming any guarantee of the reliability or accuracy of a particular dataset, that definitely raises concerns,” Badat said. “I haven’t seen any evidence that the secretary of state’s office has taken a hard look at the reliability of the data.”
Mississippi took part in a study by the Election Assistance Commission that tested the use of Experian’s data for voter-roll maintenance in a handful of jurisdictions across the country.
The study, published last August, ultimately determined from Mississippi’s and the other participants’ experiences that its first “concern” of using credit bureau data such as Experian’s was the “timeliness and quality” of the information.
As a result, the commission advised that jurisdictions take care to identify “potential sources of errors” when using the data.
“It is crucial to assess whether this data can reliably identify new or updated addresses for voters,” the commission’s study stated.
Mississippi Today found errors following the secretary of state’s rollout of Experian’s data that date back two years to the office’s first experiments in Lafayette County through this study.
In announcements touting the reliability of Experian’s data last year, the secretary of state’s office stayed quiet on how it specifically determined the information was reliable. The office did not respond to Mississippi Today’s questions on what standards Experian’s data met for the office to consider the information reliable enough to roll out under state law.
Mississippi largely leaves it up to election commissioners to determine whether information is reliable enough to be used to inactivate voters. While state law provides examples of what would count as “reliable information” — all of which are government sources — it does not set any standards that the data must meet to be considered reliable.
Experian’s in-contract disclaimers about the accuracy of the data in its TrueTrace tool were at odds with its client-facing website, where the company repeatedly states that the data is “accurate.” Experian denied a request for an interview with Mississippi Today and did not respond to emailed questions about TrueTrace’s accuracy rate.
“While Experian’s data and insights can assist with voter list maintenance efforts, all decisions related to voter registration policies, procedures, and record updates are made solely by election officials in accordance with local, state, and federal laws,” the company wrote in an emailed statement.
Secretary of state conducted nearly 2 million searches on Experian’s data
Through its deal with Experian, the secretary of state’s office bought access to the company’s “Best Address,” the Postal Service information and the Social Security Administration’s death data for registered voters across the state. The office’s December 2024 contract with Experian shows the SOS ran 1.9 million checks on voters’ data through the company — the equivalent of nearly every active voter on the rolls at the time. It’s unclear exactly how many voters who exactly the secretary of state’s office selected to analyze using Experian’s data platform and the criteria the office used to select these voters.
To access Experian’s data, the secretary of state’s office had to supply the bureau with voters’ personal information, but it’s unclear exactly what level of information was shared. Records show the office did share voters’ names and home addresses with Experian to access its data.
The company writes that users can also share individuals’ full Social Security numbers and birthdays for “most accurate matching,” but it’s unclear whether the secretary of state’s office provided Experian with this information on voters.
Mississippi opts for Experian’s information over largest partnership to receive state government data
During his two terms as secretary of state, Watson has made voter-roll maintenance a priority in his wider push for “election integrity.” Numerous counties across Mississippi have historically had more registered voters than voting-age residents.
Data published by the secretary of state’s office shows the number of counties with inflated rolls has decreased over Watson’s tenure, down from seven at the beginning of 2021 to three as of this February.
Watson told MPB that, in an effort to give election commissioners more “tools” to better maintain the voting rolls, his office rolled out Experian’s consumer data, in addition to forging partnerships to source government data from at least six neighboring states. Watson wrote last February that the government data Mississippi received from one, Alabama, showed that over 8,000 people were on the rolls in both states.
“In short, there was the potential for 8,000 illegal votes to be cast,” Watson stated.
But Mississippi does not belong to the nation’s largest partnership of states sharing government data to help each other better maintain voter rolls, a “nonpartisan,” nonprofit network called the Election Registration Information Center that’s widely known as ERIC.
Jurisdictions belonging to the program have access to information from the voter rolls and driver’s license data in most states, which can help them identify voters on their own rolls who are also registered in other places.
But nine Republican-led states, including many of Mississippi’s current partners, abandoned ERIC in 2023 after the Gateway Pundit, a conservative site that frequently spreads misinformation, falsely claimed the program was funded by George Soros, a liberal billionaire featured in numerous conspiracy theories.
The secretary of state’s office did not respond to emailed questions on why Mississippi is not a member of the program.
“It’s a little confusing why a particular state would resort to the use of commercial data that has been disclaimed by the provider of that information in terms of its reliability and accuracy over a system like ERIC,” Badat said. “It makes you question, ‘Are they actually concerned about clean voter rolls?’”
Editor’s note: Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jonson wanted Mississippi Today to publish her entire response as she turned down a request for an interview. Her verbatim statement is below. Decisions about which Mississippi Today journalists work on articles are made by our editors, not by sources.
Our position of not providing an on-the-record interview has not changed. In fact, the sentiment has only strengthened since we have on the record your gross misrepresentation and mischaracterization of multiple election officials in your March 25th article. Whether it’s mischaracterization of people or the multiple instances of misinformation in which you continue to spread in your stories, our office will not take part in your sensationalized journalism. While this type of journalism may be widely accepted in Arizona, in Mississippi, we expect honest reporting. Our team would be happy to speak to another MS Today reporter with whom we know we can except honest reporting, but you, however, have proved you are not one.
