Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. When Pastor Frank Hall was a little boy in Greenville during the Civil Rights Movement, organizers refused to stop meeting at his neighborhood church, even as white supremacists attacked Black churches throughout t he South. They showed him voting was a right you had to fight for. Now, decades later, when Hall discovered that the Washington County Election Commission had moved over 2,000 voters to inactive status ahead of this year’s congressional primaries Tuesday without advance notice, he knew what he had to do: fight.  “We are facing a critical moment with the Voter Roll,” a flyer from the election commission warned voters. “We are asking you to act now before Election Day.” Those voters in Washington County were among the 50,000 registered voters who were made inactive in Mississippi due to address conflicts after Secretary of State Michael Watson rolled out a controversial method statewide last July as another way to perform the routine job of checking voters’ residences: using unverified credit data, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of voter records from Watson’s office. Using the credit data, which comes from the consumer-reporting giant Experian, marks a departure from the verified government data that Mississippi and most other states have historically relied on to find out when voters move. But even among the few counties and states that have experimented with this new, commercial approach, Mississippi is an outlier:  Unverified data: Mississippi’s system lacks key safeguards to ensure voters aren’t mistakenly flagged as inactive because of inaccurate data. Under state law, county election commissioners make voters inactive without first asking them to verify their addresses. Because Experian also doesn’t verify the credit data handed down by the secretary of state, election commissioners may mark voters inactive based on information that was never verified at any point.  Reports of wrongful inactivations: Mistakes in the data may have led to mistakes in real life. Some Mississippi voters may have been put on the inactive list even though they still live at the same address, according to reports from affected voters who dialed in to the election-protection hotline run by the Jackson-based nonprofit One Voice. If they don’t vote in the next two general elections, they could be purged from the list altogether under state law. Little notice: Under state law, voters receive little notice that they’ve been made inactive beyond a single mailed card. Because of this, county election officials and voting-rights advocates worry that voters who were wrongly made inactive might not even know until they try to cast a ballot. Hall discovered that over 2,000 voters in Washington County were marked inactive from a flyer that the county election commission posted to inform voters. State law requires the commission to notify affected voters only with a single mailed notice, but District 1 Election Commissioner Jacqueline Thompson said that in addition to the flyer, they also emailed, called and knocked on voters’ doors to ensure they were made aware. Credit: Courtesy of Frank Hall Washington County already had some of the lowest rates of registered voters in the state. Now, the number of inactive voters has nearly doubled to one in six people on the list of registered voters, according to statewide data from the secretary of state. Across the state, the data shows that Wilkinson County has the highest rate of inactive voters, at 1 in 5 people on the lists. Hall wasn’t made inactive, but he said the prospect would be unthinkable. “I feel like my rights are being violated,” said Hall, who’s been spreading awareness of the surge, from his congregation to U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson. “If you take me off the (active) voting roll, you just took away what my foreparents fought for for years to try to get us this right.” An unverified system When Watson unveiled his office’s “partnership” with Experian, he wrote that it would preserve “election integrity” and “bring a new level of reliable data” for voter-roll maintenance. Watson, a Republican who serves as the state’s chief election officer, has touted both as key accomplishments of his time as secretary of state while he looks to run for a new elected office. “We have really gotten to the point where we feel like we’ve done our duty, we’ve done our work at the secretary of state’s office,” Watson said at a forum last week. “I can walk out of there and feel like I’ve left the place better than I found it.” But in a series of press releases announcing the partnership with Experian, the secretary of state’s office largely stayed quiet on how it ensured the information was reliable. “It makes me really nervous,” Washington County Election Commissioner Jacqueline Thompson said. “That person could be removed, that person could if you don’t do your due diligence.” The secretary of state’s office declined an on-the-record interview and did not respond to repeated requests for comment about how it checked the reliability of the credit data and fulfilled its legal responsibility to train election officials to use the new information in time for publication. “The Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office does not have direct oversight of county election commissioners,” the office wrote in an emailed statement. “However, in any aspect regarding voter roll maintenance, we encourage local election officials to review all relevant information before making a decision on a voter’s status.” But some election commissioners and voting-rights advocates worry that the new data has too many flaws, further limiting voting access in a state where voter turnout sank to its lowest level in 20 years in the last presidential election. “We’re already in a state where we don’t have that many provisions that help us access the ballot box,” said Nsombi Lambright, executive director of One Voice. “In the end, we continue to put these measures in place that make it harder rather than make it easier. It’s just embarrassing.” Mississippi election officials turn to data for debt collectors When the secretary of state rolled out Experian’s credit data statewide in July, Mississippi emerged as one of the first states to turn to a tool traditionally used by debt collectors to track down hard-to-find consumers. Voter-roll maintenance is a routine process done every year. A county’s list of registered voters can change constantly as people die or move away.  At least four times a year, election commissioners are supposed to meet and consult state and national data sources on addresses and deaths to track down those changes and ensure that their county’s list of registered voters is accurate. If the data indicates that a voter on the list has appeared to move from their registered home address, the election commissioners must flag the voter as inactive under state law. Like most states, Mississippi has for years relied on official data from the U.S. Postal Service to track when voters move. But that system can only flag moves when people formally submit a paid notice to the Postal Service that they’ve relocated — something many never do. To stay more up to date on voters’ moves, Mississippi and a handful of other jurisdictions, ranging from Orange County in California to states including Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia, have turned to what Experian calls its “most powerful locating product”: a massive credit database called TrueTrace. Experian’s data links possible addresses to over 245 million consumers based on their spending activity on items like loans, rent payments and credit files. For most people, the database pulls a handful of suggested addresses based on their consumer activity. From these, Experian zeroes in on a single “Best Address,” which the company states is the place “where the consumer is most likely to be reached” — but not necessarily the person’s actual home address. “Often, this will match their residence; however, we don’t verify residency,” the company wrote to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency responsible for assisting state and local election officials. Experian declined a request for a interview. “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. Jacqueline Thompson saw the new system in action when she attended a training session on voter-roll maintenance after the secretary of state rolled out Experian’s data. The system unexpectedly loaded a jumble of possible addresses linked to registered voters on the rolls. “It just pulled up all these random addresses, and so a lot of people were asking the question about that,” Jacqueline Thompson said. “Then that’s when we were told that Experian is one of the tools that the SOS (Secretary of State) is using in elections to verify whether a person is local or not. “But you have to be very careful with that.” Not so careful Even among the few jurisdictions that have rolled out credit data to maintain the voter lists, Mississippi’s approach goes further than many others — opening up the opportunity for election commissioners to mark voters inactive based on data that was never verified at any point. Under this approach, One Voice received reports that Mississippi voters who work or do business across state lines, especially in border areas like Tunica, Washington and Wilkinson counties, were at greater risk of being mistakenly marked inactive. Lambright explained that because much of these voters’ spending activity happens in a different state, Experian’s data could have incorrectly flagged them as living outside Mississippi. Pastor Frank Hall is photographed inside of his church in Greenville on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today “They’re having the address be more important than who you are,” Hall said. Unlike numerous other jurisdictions using Experian credit data, Mississippi does not give voters an opportunity to verify their address before they’re marked inactive. As a result, the accuracy of the voter-maintenance process solely relies on the reliability of the data and the judgement used by the election commission. In other jurisdictions that have rolled out Experian’s data, like Montana, Maryland and West Virginia, election officials used the information to identify voters who might have moved but then mailed them a notice asking them to verify their address. After, they had to wait to give the voter an opportunity to respond before changing their status. In West Virginia and Montana, for example, that waiting period is 30 days. Under Mississippi law, that notice, called a confirmation card, gets mailed out when election commissioners mark a voter as inactive. State Rep. Zakiya Summers, a Democrat from Jackson who previously served as a Hinds County election commissioner, said that the introduction of unverified data now casts doubt on what used to be a routine process. A copy of a confirmation notice sent out by Washington County asks inactive voters to verify their address under state law. In numerous other jurisdictions that use credit data, officials perform a verification check on Experian’s data by sending a similar notice to voters to confirm their address before making any changes to their status. Credit: Madeline Nguyen/Mississippi Today “This process ultimately raises a lot of questions around how accurate this data is,” Summers said. “Is the process as transparent as it needs to be? Are these voters receiving the due process that they lawfully deserve?” From her experience using Experian’s data to maintain her county’s voter rolls, Jacqueline Thompson said the voter-maintenance process outlined in state law could lack the necessary checks to account for flaws in consumer data.  “Us as election commissioner, we want to protect the vote of the people,” Jacqueline Thompson said. “You have to just make sure and check and do your research, for instance, if Experian came in play with your information.” While the actual task of voter-roll maintenance falls to election commissioners, Watson’s office is responsible for training election officials and maintaining the centralized, online system that commissioners use to maintain the voter rolls.  It is largely up to each county’s election commission to determine how to handle Experian’s data, according to Jacqueline Thompson. She said the unverified data puts the pressure on election commissioners to do their “due diligence” to ensure that voters aren’t wrongly made inactive and are aware when their status changes, especially because voters receive only one mailed notice under state law.  In Washington County, Jacqueline Thompson said the election commission went beyond the requirements of state law by emailing, calling and even knocking on doors to notify voters once they were made inactive. “We don’t want you purged, we don’t want you inactive,” Jacqueline Thompson said. “We want you to be fulfilling that civic duty, coming out to vote.” ‘They’re having the address be more important than who you are’ When Constance Slaughter-Harvey learned that her dad was forced to pay a poll tax to cast a ballot, just because he was Black in Mississippi, she committed herself toward protecting the right to vote. She became the first Black woman to graduate with a law degree from the University of Mississippi and oversaw voting for 12 years as assistant secretary of state for elections. She never would have thought that unverified credit data would one day be used to maintain the voter rolls. “I dedicated my life to making the right to vote accessible to all,” Slaughter-Harvey said. “This is making it more difficult and insulting to our efforts to eliminate voting barriers.” Inactive voters aren’t barred from casting a ballot, but voting-rights advocates say they can face more barriers. They must vote on signed paper ballots at the polling place tied to the precinct they live in, instead of on the machines. As long as they still live in the county they’re registered in, they’ll be put back on the active rolls once they vote. If they live in a different county, they must re-register there. However, paper ballots are subject to more scrutiny, and one that’s cast won’t necessarily be counted. Under state law, inactive voters’ ballots will count only if they affirm that they still live at their registered home address or an address in the same precinct. Voters can keep election commissioners up to date when they move by submitting an official change-of-address card. Credit: Madeline Nguyen/Mississippi Today Summers said that as election commissioner, she saw firsthand how voters could get discouraged when they found out they were inactive at the polls and had to take time to fill out a paper ballot. “Most people have jobs where they have a very short window to vote on Election Day,” Lambright said. “They just leave, and they’re just like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll vote next time.’” For advocates like Hall, the surge in inactive voters echoes a legacy of measures in Mississippi that have disproportionately limited Black voters’ access to the ballot — from intentional barriers, like poll taxes, to indirect obstacles, like felony disenfranchisement. “We’re going to end up getting back to fighting for rights again, like we were in 1965 when they marched on Selma, Alabama, and Montgomery,” Hall said. “We’re going to have to go back to fighting for our voting rights.” An August study by the EAC on Mississippi and other jurisdictions’ use of Experian’s data for voter-roll maintenance found that the data was more likely to suggest new addresses for counties with more voters of certain racial minority groups, including Black and Native American voters. The study found that credit data could be an “additional new tool” for voter-roll maintenance, although more research had to be done on the accuracy of the information. But Amir Badat, a voting-rights attorney with the nonprofit Fair Fight Action, said the EAC’s findings could be a cause for legal concern. Under federal law, states must maintain voter rolls in a “nondiscriminatory” way. “Whenever you’re introducing a dataset that’s not fully understood and that could have biases that we don’t fully understand, that is super concerning,” Badat said. “We have no information on how the use of this data was rolled out.” The secretary of state’s office did not respond to requests for comment on how it ensured that voter-roll maintenance was done in a “nondiscriminatory” way with the new credit data, in compliance with federal law. ‘Reliable’ information? The use of credit data for voter-roll maintenance in Mississippi is so new that Summers didn’t know it was even allowed under the law until Mississippi Today contacted her about it. She had never used anything other than verified government data to maintain voter rolls during her four years as an election commissioner. But the state Legislature quietly opened the door for the secretary of state to turn to information beyond the government as a part of the voter-roll maintenance House Bill 1310 in 2023, which became law in January 2024. Lawmakers hotly debated the bill for its provision to mark voters as inactive and eventually purge them if they didn’t vote within a series of elections. Supporters, including Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian, advocated that the bill would modernize voter-roll maintenance, especially as numerous counties grappled with inflated voter rolls.  “When we have people on the rolls by name only and they are not actually living there, that is a vessel for fraud,” said Tate, who then chaired the Senate Elections Committee. “And yes, there is voter fraud. What this does is give our local election officials another tool to clean up their rolls.” Currently, three of Mississippi’s 82 counties have more registered voters on the rolls than eligible voters in the Census.  But opponents, including Summers, argued that the wording of the bill was so vague that it could be overly permissive. Many states have laws in the books naming the exact sources that can be used for voter-roll maintenance, such as Postal Service data or death information from the Social Security Administration. But within HB 1310 was a little-debated clause that broadly allowed election officials to use “reliable information” indicating that a voter had moved from their registered residence as grounds to mark them inactive.  The bill did not specify any standards that the information had to meet to be considered reliable, but did name examples of what would fit. All were government sources. The bill made no mention of credit data. But in February 2025, a year after the bill the became law, Watson wrote that he was “excited to report” that HB 1310 allowed his office to sign a contract with Experian to roll out credit data for voter-roll maintenance statewide. “We had some concerns that this process could unintentionally result in a form of voter suppression,” Summers said of HB 1310. “And we were really, truly concerned about this, particularly in those communities that are already facing barriers to participating in our elections.” The voter-roll maintenance process outlined in HB 1310 — and its lack of verification checks — appears to conflict with the Department of Justice’s guidance on how states should comply with federal law. The department advises that states may wait to mark voters as inactive until they fail to return the notice verifying their address by the voter-registration deadline for the next election. Mississippi doesn’t wait. You can check your voter-registration status before heading to the polls at the secretary of state’s Y’All Vote website. ...read more read less