Experian Data Used to Move Many DeSoto County Voters to Inactive Status

DeSoto County moved more voters to inactive status than any of Mississippi’s 82 counties in the eight months between the primaries and the midterms, handling more than 15,000 voter files through unverified commercial data.

That surge left one in five voters in the fastest-growing county of America’s poorest state listed as inactive by Election Day. The voter roll cleanup relied on address lists sourced from the credit bureau Experian, a first for a federal general election in Mississippi.

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The resulting administrative strain collided with a political shift in a longtime Republican stronghold just south of Memphis. A jolt of Democratic enthusiasm and a slump in Republican turnout delivered DeSoto County to Democrat Scott Colom, who defeated GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Yet the election drew an uncomfortable spotlight to the county over long lines, affidavit ballot shortages, and a now-dismissed Democratic lawsuit. Commissioners reported processing about 2,100 affidavit ballots this year, more than seven times the roughly 275 affidavit ballots recorded in 2022, during the last midterm election, according to data tracked by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Scott Colom slams Mississippi’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson for using credit agency data to remove Mississippians from the active voter rolls: “Experian told him they were not reliable. And he did it anyway. This chaos is a result of that decision.” pic.twitter.com/e6ECsKcgcK

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Voters described waiting up to three hours in the rain at polling places that ran out of envelopes and machine capacity. “The conditions were horrible,” Ravonda Griffin, a local attorney hired by Colom after Election Day, said. “Having to stand in line for three and four hours in the rain, that is a form of voter suppression. It is, and that’s just not fair.”

The state $50,000 contract with Experian specified the information would be used for voter roll maintenance. However, the company said that its supplemental address information was not designed or intended to validate voter records.

Experian Data Used to Move Many DeSoto County Voters to Inactive Status

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson defended the deployment of the data as a tool empowering election commissioners to clean rolls, noting that county officials bear responsibility for verifying records. Meanwhile, county election commissioners pointed to pressure from the secretary of state’s office to work through the flagged lists.

“We were told, ‘Y’all still have 15,000 that you haven’t worked,'” Sissie Ferguson, a DeSoto County election commissioner, said regarding a state election commissioner conference in January. Ferguson added that she recognized several records as flawed and chose not to change those voters’ statuses.

Mississippi Senate: Why 230,000 Voters Are Marked Inactive, Colom +2,536 (Nov. 10) — Ballot Brief

Watson’s office has since stopped using Experian data and shifted to a product from data broker IDI. In the wake of the midterms, election commissioners have continued working through the surge of affidavit ballots while residents pressed local officials for accountability.

Sheila Jackson, a resident, told Tim Snyder, a Republican in his first term as a county election commissioner, that there was “nothing normal about this” while questioning the reliance on commercial data outside the commissioners’ office.