An Electoral Mess in Mississippi
L ast summer, Mississippi began an effort to “continue to build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” as Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson put it.
Key points
- “The solution provided at that time consisted of supplemental address information and was not designed or intended to validate voter records.” Mississippi plowed ahead, despite warnings that the data were error-prone and could introduce far more problems than they solved, multiple officials and voting-rights advocates told us.
- Scott Anderson, Experian’s vice president for corporate communications, told us that the company has not provided services to Mississippi since early 2025.
- The situation is already drawing comparisons to Mississippi’s past efforts to systematically disenfranchise Black voters.
One of those officials, Jim Hood, a Democrat who served as Mississippi’s attorney general from 2004 to 2020, sued Experian in 2014 over errors in its credit reports, eventually settling with the company and two other credit-reporting bureaus for $7.2 million.
Additional details
- Experian now says that its data were never supposed to be used to scrub Mississippi’s voter rolls in this way.
- The county, just south of Memphis, is home to one of Mississippi’s largest concentrations of Black voters.
- Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan federal agency that supports election administration, found that zip codes with higher proportions of Black residents were more likely to be flagged for “new addresses,” potentially leading to voter inactivations.
- Because Experian has a national database that can be used to surface evidence that a person may have moved to a new address, officials in a handful of states have turned to it, and other similar commercial sources, to try to keep their voter rolls up-to-date.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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