The bureaucratic trainwreck that sabotaged Mississippi’s election

Republican U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith speaks to guests at her election night watch party at the Sheraton Flowood The Refuge Hotel in Flowood, Mississippi, US November 3, 2026.

Elections always provide loads of interesting tidbits about people’s lives or how we choose to live.

In Mississippi, where we are seeing living proof that every vote counts, it turns out that this needed reliance on tens of thousands of provisional “affidavit” votes by individuals who showed up at the local voting precinct only to find they were not listed as authorized voters. That happened because the state had contracted with a credit bureau, of all things, to verify current addresses.

As Democracy Docket tells the tale, Mississippi made thousands of valid voters inactive ahead of the election that has Democratic challenger Scott Collum now about 2,400 votes ahead of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Since Mississippi has no recount law, the outcome will depend on the counting of thousands of provisional ballots filed in local county offices, delaying the vote outcome,

It turns out that the Republican secretary of state’s contract with Experian, a global credit reporting agency whose data Mississippi Today has been described as riddled with errors threw thousands of voters into “inactive” status in the months leading up to the general election. The contract was intended to keep voter registration lists up to date, since people move all the time without updating their registration.

There is nothing illegal about any of this, just inane thinking.

Voters Didn’t Know

Most affected voters heard nothing about their status change and turned up at voting booths only to learn that they were no longer listed as registered voters. Rather than a normal ballot, they were handed an “affidavit” document recording their choices as well as a declaration of identification.

As evidence of errors in the credit bureau work, Experian sent communication to update or fix the registration to wrong addresses. Apparently, it’s up to individuals to check on their status.

In short, all the fuss about a virtual tie vote in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race was avoidable without the fervor to hire an outside firm that never checked on the listings to “clean up” the voter registrations.

Instead, we’re sitting around waiting for 82 local counties to count these provisional ballots from people who have been on the same voter registration rolls for 20 or 30 years by hand – under the watchful eye of lawyers for both major parties and probably federal monitors – to decide just how big a Democratic majority will be in the U.S. Senate.

Just why a state would pay a credit bureau to verify voter listings without doing any actual verification, notification or updating is a bit of a mystery.

It’s not an inconsequential number of ballots. In DeSoto County, 15,000 were removed as active voters between the primary and general election, says Mississippi Today. Jackson County lost 14,063 and Harrison County 28,291. For many voters showing up at the polls to find themselves, well, missing, it was a shock. In all, there were upwards of 230,000 provisional ballots with 10,000 to 15,000 outstanding.

Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson defended the inactivations as a “cornerstone of election integrity,” adding in a social media post” “We’re getting multiple calls about people not showing up as active voters, so we wanted to share a few details.” Watson said the state sends the credit info to counties, which are supposed to verify it before updating the lists. “Thankfully, affidavit voting is used to catch any errors or those who live in the same county but forgot to update their info.” He said the “extra few minutes” it takes a voter to vote provisionally are “well worth the election integrity added by having cleaner voter rolls.”

The Checking

So, election canvassing boards in each will review all affidavit votes to check them against existing voter files for those deemed “inactive” as well as their preference in the Senate race. If officials are relying on the already faulty Experian data to cross-check voter files, aren’t more errors almost certain?

“Credit bureau data was never intended to be used to maintain voter rolls, and using the wrong data for the wrong purpose can lead to serious harm. In this case, Mississippi undermined access to voting, a fundamental right, by inexplicably using the data broker Experian’s data to ostensibly maintain voter rolls,” Center for Democracy & Technology’s Sydney Saubestre said.

Apart from all else, election officials must verify that the provisional ballots were properly signed by the precinct poll manager and that the voter provided voter identification within five business days.

Of course, none of this would have emerged if the contest had been a blowout.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

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