Mississippi Voters Wrongly Inactivated on Experian Data Hit the Polls After Secretary of State Watson Ignored a Civil Rights Coalition's Demand to Reinstate Them

Eligible Mississippi voters arrived at the polls Tuesday to find they had been mistakenly inactivated, Mississippi Today reported, after Secretary of State Michael Watson provided local election officials with address lists pulled from commercial data. In the days before the election, a coalition of civil rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU of Mississippi and the Southern Poverty Law Center, warned Watson he needed to reinstate by Election Day any voters inactivated by his office’s deployment of unverified credit bureau data. He never responded. 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, the first time the state turned to anything other than government data to clean the rolls. In the contract, Watson’s office signed off on Experian’s disclaimers that the company couldn’t guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data. Assistant Secretary of State Liz Jonson wrote: “The ACLU, nor any other third party, have the authority to dictate applicable state and federal laws regarding elections in Mississippi.” State law bars inactivations in the 90 days before a federal election but places no such restrictions on correcting voters to active status.

On Election Day, Watson told a county election commissioner that “you should understand your job is to verify the information before acting upon it.” On Friday he said: “Was some of the data off? Perhaps.”