Secretary of state ignored demands to reinstate voters inactivated by unverified Experian data days before midterms: ‘Harm is falling on eligible voters’

By Madeline Nguyen | Originally published by Mississippi Today

In the days before the midterms Tuesday, a coalition of the nation’s leading civil rights groups warned Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson he needed to reinstate any voters inactivated by his office’s deployment of unverified credit bureau data by Election Day. He never responded.

In the wake of that decision, an unknown number of eligible voters arrived at the polls Tuesday, only to find what has happened in nearly every federal election since Mississippi’s first experiments with Experian’s information two years ago: Properly registered voters had been mistakenly inactivated after the secretary of state provided local election officials with inaccurate address lists pulled from commercial data.

The letter the coalition sent Watson, obtained by Mississippi Today, warned the state’s top elections official that known errors in the data could threaten to disrupt voting in the midterms.

Elections experts say the errors now open up more room for uncertainty in ruby-red Mississippi’s razor-thin U.S. Senate race, as Democratic candidate Scott Colom’s narrow lead threatens to unseat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in what would be an historic upset. Local election officials are steeling themselves for more days of counting thousands of affidavit ballots, which include votes cast by inactive registrants, after a surge in inactivations left over 230,000 voters statewide inactive by Election Day.

County election officials said many wrongful inactivations trace to Watson’s $50,000 deal with Experian in 2024 to supply the company’s unverified address data to all 82 counties. From there, election commissioners would use the information to identify and inactivate voters who may have moved. It marked the first time that the state turned to anything other than government data, primarily records from the U.S. Postal Service, to accomplish the routine task of cleaning the voter rolls.

When the secretary of state’s office began sending out address lists from the data to every county last year, Watson’s office announced the deal would “strengthen the integrity of elections.” But Mississippi Today uncovered in March that errors in Experian’s data went unverified at every stage of the voter-roll maintenance process, resulting in properly registered voters discovering they had been mistakenly inactivated.

To prevent these issues from arising during the midterms, the coalition of national and state civil rights groups — including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU of Mississippi and the Southern Poverty Law Center — sent a list of demands to Watson and Laura Henderson-Courtney, senior attorney of the secretary of state’s elections division, four days before the midterms. Their top demand was that the secretary of state’s office “protect” voters by reinstating by Election Day anyone inactivated based on Experian’s data.

“Mississippi voters did everything the law asked of them,” the coalition wrote to Watson, who is currently running for lieutenant governor. “We urge your office to do the same, and to restore them to the rolls before they go to the polls Tuesday.”

The groups also urged the secretary of state’s office to preserve inactive voters’ access to the ballot box by giving the poll managers and local officials responsible for conducting the midterm elections written instructions to ensure inactive voters were provided with affidavit ballots, as state law requires. 

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

The secretary of state’s office did not respond to any of the groups’ demands, according to records obtained by Mississippi Today. Neither Watson nor his office agreed to an interview with the news organization, but Assistant Secretary of State Liz Jonson acknowledged that the office received the coalition’s letter.

“The ACLU, nor any other third party, have the authority to dictate applicable state and federal laws regarding elections in Mississippi,” Jonson wrote in an email. “Per state law, the Statewide Election Management System (SEMS) is currently in a blackout period thus no systemic voter roll maintenance is allowed.”

While Mississippi law bars officials from inactivating or purging voters 90 days before a federal election, it places no such restrictions on correcting voters to active status.

Voter records and local election officials have both confirmed that errors followed the secretary of state’s decision to introduce Experian’s data, but on Friday, Watson stopped short of acknowledging the known errors as anything more than a possibility in an interview with the Magnolia Tribune. 

“The state did move to commercial data for voter roll maintenance, and I’ve seen some folks saying it was bad data,” Watson said. “Was some of the data off? Perhaps.”

After months of warning signs, problems mount on Election Day

By the afternoon of Election Day, problems quickly emerged: Voters discovered their names were missing from poll books, election hotlines sounded off with questions from inactive voters, and the local officials running the polls said they were overwhelmed with the influx.

Amid the chaos, Watson took to Facebook to respond to concerns posted by a Lee County election commissioner.

Four hours after the polls had opened, Election Commissioner Jamie Gunnells, who oversees the Tupelo area, was seeing so many voters learn they were inactive that he posted a warning on Facebook alerting anyone else coming out to vote about the situation. 

He told constituents there was a “major disruption” at the polls due to what he called the “Experian fiasco:” A set of “old” address data that the secretary of state provided earlier this year for voter-roll maintenance had made “many” voters inactive.

Gunnells told Mississippi Today he felt he needed to get the information out before more inactive voters were blindsided at the polls. As he cycled among the three polling places in his district, his 13-hour Election Day shift was filled with confusion, anger and fear from voters who were surprised to find they were inactive. 

He said some voters were so frustrated about the issue that they left the polls without casting an affidavit ballot.

In response to Gunnells’ Facebook post, Watson stated that the responsibility for errors in the data fell on election commissioners like 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 replied. “That said, our goal is to send you the best information available, and we did so.”

Mississippi is a bottom-up state for elections, meaning the actual work of cleaning voter rolls and marking voters as inactive falls to county election commissioners. Under state law, however, the secretary of state is legally responsible for training these county officials to do that job.

Gunnells and other election commissioners said the secretary of state never cautioned them beforehand that they should check the list of addresses pulled from Experian’s data for errors, leaving them to discover the mistakes after voters had already been inactivated.

When Watson’s office announced its partnership with Experian, the office wrote that the deal would “bring a new level of reliable data” to the voter rolls. But records released by the secretary of state’s office show that in the contract for the deal, Watson’s office signed off on Experian’s disclaimers that the company couldn’t guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data.

“He started pointing figures at us: ‘We should have verified the data that they sent to us,’” Gunnells said. “I mean, how are we gonna verify it?”

Even more voters mistakenly inactivated

The issues that emerged during the midterms came as no surprise to voters like Thomas Minor and Heather Williams, who discovered in the primaries that they had been mistakenly inactivated. Address lists the secretary of state pulled from Experian’s data incorrectly flagged they had moved.

The list placed Williams at an address she hadn’t lived at in years. Minor had lived in Itawamba County his whole life, but the list said he resided 160 miles away, in a Delta town he had never stepped foot in.

In the voting-rights coalition’s letter to Watson last week, the groups outlined both voters’ cases as proof of the known errors tied to the secretary of state’s decision to introduce Experian’s data. 

“He could have rectified some of this stuff and made the process a lot easier,” Minor said. “They should have learned their lesson back then.

“It makes me think he doesn’t care about the voting process.”

Harya Tarekegn, the director of advocacy and policy for an organization in the coalition, the Mississippi Center for Justice, said in a press conference Friday that she believes many affidavit ballots in the midterms were cast by voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data.

One of them was Starkville resident Kailyn Lott. Eight months after what happened to Minor, Lott said she encountered a strikingly similar situation when she showed up to vote for the midterms Tuesday. She learned that she was marked inactive when she came to vote at the same fire station where she voted in her first election, the 2024 presidential contest.

When she got to the polling place, she discovered her name was missing from the poll book. She was inactive.

As she waited in line for an affidavit ballot, she said she saw more and more people encounter the same issue. At the front of the line, she discovered what caused the problem in her case: Her voter registration listed her address as her parents’ house in Pontotoc County, which she said is linked to an old credit card she opened as a kid.

Voter records from the secretary of state’s office show county election officials originally inactivated Lott last year due to address conflicts, a month after Watson’s office provided them with a list of addresses pulled from Experian’s data.

Despite the confusion, Lott was adamant about her right to vote. She showed poll workers her voter ID card and ultimately cast an affidavit ballot. But she’s worried others weren’t so lucky.

“When people hear stuff like this, it definitely deters them from voting because it just further instills in their mind that it doesn’t matter if they go and vote,” Lott said. 

Minor said in his case, his inactive status ultimately kept him from casting a ballot during the primaries — marking the first time he’s missed an election in 12 years. While poll workers provided him with a ballot envelope, he said they failed to give him the affidavit ballot itself for him to fill out his vote.

It was his first time going through the process, and in his confusion and rush to get to his job at north Mississippi’s Toyota car plant, he thought he had done everything he needed to vote.

It wasn’t until after he left the polls that he realized he never filled out a ballot.

Watson posted on social media Friday that the affidavit process exists as a “safety net” to correct “errors” made by election commissioners and preserve inactive voters’ right to the ballot box. 

“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,” Watson stated. “It may take voters a little longer for final results to come in, but it will result in more accurate voter rolls which will speed up the process in the future and decrease opportunities for voter fraud in MS.”

But to voting rights advocates, Minor’s experience is a testament to how inactivation can threaten eligible voters’ right to the ballot box, especially when they’re not aware of the affidavit process.

“The State cannot walk away from an unreliable data source while leaving in place every inactivation that source produced,” the voting rights groups stated in their letter last week.

Consequences beyond the midterms

Under state law, any voters inactivated by the data are now on the path to have their voter registrations purged if they don’t correct their status with their county’s circuit clerk or vote within two federal general elections — a period of about two to three years. Once a voter is purged, they need to reregister before their ballot will count again.

Now that the midterm elections have passed, the door has opened up for election commissioners to begin purging some of the first voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data. These voters were marked inactive in early 2024 in Lafayette County, where the secretary of state first experimented with using Experian’s data to clean the voter rolls.

Watson called the pilot a “success,” and it cleared the way for his office to expand the use of Experian’s data to all voters on the state’s rolls.

But Mississippi Today found errors emerged from the data during those early tests, resulting in the inactivation of properly registered voters. One was Jordan Jones Higginbotham, an Ole Miss student who discovered she was inactive before the 2024 primaries after an address list that the secretary of state drew from Experian’s data incorrectly placed her in Madison County.

Any Lafayette County voters in this experiment who were inactivated before the 2024 presidential election and who have not voted since then are now on the board to be purged. The voting-rights groups demanded Watson to agree by next Friday to halt any purges of voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data and to stop using any unverified address data from a commercial broker on the voter rolls.

Jonson wrote that the secretary of state’s office would respond to the coalition’s letter in “keeping with our standard operating procedure.” She did not answer questions from Mississippi Today about whether the office would act on the groups’ demands.

But as the country turns its eyes to Mississippi’s Senate race and the candidates’ campaigns gear up for a legal battle over the vote count, the coalition remains hopeful for change.

“One of the unintended benefits of all of this chaos is that it shines a light on how antiquated election administration is in Mississippi,” said Amir Badat, the Mississippi voting rights attorney with Fair Fight Action who represented the groups in the letter. “That’s going to be critical for us to be able to advocate for improvements to the system.”

Last week, the secretary of state’s office said it has stopped providing Experian’s data for voter roll maintenance, although the office did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about exactly when or why the partnership ended.

The secretary of state’s office wrote in a statement to WAPT that it had switched to IDI Data, a smaller company that brokers information drawn from a variety of sources — including the major credit bureaus and government records — to help customers track people down.

On Election Day, Watson posted on Facebook that his office had a “new vendor with more features and info than the last.” But voting rights groups remain unconvinced that errors will no longer emerge just because the secretary of state’s deal with Experian has ended.

“That decision speaks for itself,” the coalition wrote to Watson last week. “If Experian’s data is not reliable enough to use going forward, it was never reliable enough to strip Mississippians of active status and subject them to potential removal.”

You can check your voter registration status and track your affidavit ballot on the secretary of state’s website at yallvote.ms.

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article