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My brother Andrew was 20 years old when the Ku Klux Klan murdered him in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. They were there to work alongside Black Mississippians registering to vote.
Sixty-two years later, students at Jackson State, Alcorn State, Tougaloo College and the University of Mississippi, campuses where the Andrew Goodman Foundation’s Vote Everywhere program is active, are likely among the thousands of Mississippi voters whose affidavit ballots remain unresolved.
An affidavit ballot is what Mississippi calls a provisional ballot or ballots that for various reasons must undergo additional scrutiny. Some may have used an affidavit ballot because they did not have a photo identification on them. Others because a poll worker could not find their name on the rolls. Estimates of what is still unresolved statewide run from 12,000 to 18,000 ballots, in a U.S. Senate race that has not been called.
Before the election, Mississippi marked 230,107 registered voters inactive. Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office flagged them by using address data from Experian, the credit bureau, under a $50,000 contract last year to clean the rolls statewide. Mississippi Today has reported that the data is unverified and wrongly inactivated legitimate voters.
This is problematic for a college student. Dorms often lack an individual mailing address the voting system recognizes. A verification letter sent to a residence hall may have nowhere to land. The student never sees it, never responds and gets flagged. The Mississippi Free Press reported this problem a week before the election, and Election Day is when it came due.
No law was passed to do this. No legislator voted for it. A for-profit vendor’s address file decided which young voters would spend Election Day exercising their right to vote and which would spend it arguing with a poll worker. That is the newest barrier, and it sits on top of the old ones.
Mississippi is one of only three states with no in-person early voting. It is one of 13 states requiring an excuse to vote by mail. It has no online voter registration. Polls are open from 7 in the morning until 7 at night on a Tuesday, which is a workday. A Jim Crow era provision still imposes a lifetime voting ban for certain felony convictions, affecting nearly 70,000 Mississippi residents. When researchers rank the states on ballot access, Mississippi finishes last or next to last.
The remedy itself is problematic. Students who voted by affidavit because they had no photo ID have until close of business on Tuesday to appear in person at their county circuit clerk’s office with acceptable identification. Not online. Not by mail. In person, during business hours, in a short time frame.
For a student at Alcorn State in Lorman, it means getting to Port Gibson, 11 miles away, with no public transportation. A 19-year-old without a car has no way to make her or his own vote count.
Here is what Mississippi students did anyway. Turnout rose about 35 percent over the last midterm in 2022, from roughly 710,000 votes to more than 950,000. Thirty Mississippi students trained as poll monitors with the Andrew Goodman Foundation, ACLU of Mississippi and Mississippi Votes, from Jackson State, Alcorn State and Tougaloo. Eleven of them drove up from Alcorn State for the training.
Through our partnership with the ACLU, students worked 44 precincts, serving as nonpartisan poll observers in Florida, Georgia and Mississippi, and in Arkansas supporting ballot curing and watching the count.
That is the hard work the Andrew Goodman Foundation exists to do. We support nonpartisan student organizers with a modest stipend, and the campuses they organize are their own. They are not volunteers brought in from out of state. Some of them are the 19-year-olds waiting to find out whether their own ballots will count.
Andrew did not go to Mississippi because it was easy. He went as a student himself because it was the right thing to do even though it was hard work. People there had been asking for help from allies for a long time. What has changed in 62 years is not the difficulty. It is that the students doing the asking now live there.
So this is not a request for sympathy for Mississippi students. They do not need it. It is a request for three specific things.
Cease using unverified commercial credit data to decide who stays on the voter rolls. If a state buys a database and acts on it, the burden of proving an address wrong belongs to the state, not to a college sophomore.
Treat a dormitory as a residence. A student who lives in one has an address for every purpose except, apparently, this one.
And give Mississippians what voters in most other states already have: early voting, and the ability to register online.
Sixty-two years is a long time to still be arguing about whether young people in Mississippi have equal access to the ballot box. Those students have already made their case. They registered their classmates, they trained as poll monitors, they showed up on a Tuesday between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Many of them and other Mississippians are now waiting to learn whether the ballots they cast will be counted at all.
David Goodman is the brother of Andrew Goodman and a board member of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that trains and supports student voting advocates in 25 states and the District of Columbia.
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