Secretary of state’s push to use unverified addresses from credit agency for ‘election integrity’ left some legitimate voters inactive during primaries ...Middle East

NETTLETON — For the last 12 years, Thomas Minor has never missed a single election — local, state or federal.

It’s his way of making sure he has a say in the place he’s called home his whole life: Itawamba County. Over the years, he’s cast his ballot for candidates across the political spectrum.

But in Mississippi’s latest election — the March 10 congressional primaries — he didn’t end up voting at all. 

When Minor showed up to the polls, he found his name missing from the poll book. His voting status had changed to inactive. A couple days later, he learned it was all because of an error that was never supposed to happen.

The mistake originated from unverified consumer data the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office handed to county election officials statewide in July as an additional new tool to do the routine job of checking voters’ addresses and determining their status. Records show Minor’s voter registration was up to date, listing the address of a one-story home on the edge of the county, where he’s lived for the last eight years.

But according to the credit data from the consumer-reporting giant Experian — which guesses consumers’ possible addresses — Minor had an address about 160 miles away in Tchula, in a squat house with a shattered door, overgrown front lawn and “no trespassing” sign out front, based on Google Earth imagery from 2023.

Minor said he had never even heard of Tchula, much less been there. But to Itawamba’s election officials, the credit data showed Minor wasn’t living where he was registered to vote. They made him inactive last August, without his knowledge.

Minor is one of numerous Mississippi voters who were wrongly made inactive from errors in the credit data that went unchecked and unverified at every stage of the annual process of cleaning the voter rolls. The errors came as the secretary of state’s office broke from the official government data that Mississippi and most other states have relied on for years to track when voters move. 

It’s unknown exactly how many voters were wrongly made inactive due to the credit data, but Mississippi Today identified numerous voters who were affected from across the political spectrum and confirmed the mistakes with their county election officials. Their experiences resulted from a lack of proper safeguards to check the accuracy of the data before they could inactivate legitimate voters, even as the secretary of state’s office touted that the information would “bring a new level of reliable data to voter-roll maintenance.”

Mississippi Today found that Secretary of State Michael Watson’s rollout of the unverified credit data resulted in:

The secretary of state’s office has declined Mississippi Today’s repeated requests for an interview with Watson, saying that the news organization’s past reporting on concerns and gaps in the office’s rollout of the credit data caused “unnecessary confusion.” The office did not respond to a request for comment on how it checked the reliability of the credit data or fulfilled its legal responsibility to train election officials.

“Our office is not in the habit of using journalists as a pass-through for disseminating information, particularly when misconstrued,” Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jonson wrote in an email.

But in an interview with Mississippi Public Broadcasting the day after the primaries, Watson told host Russ Latino that from the beginning, the rollout of the credit data was “wildly successful.”

“It was a really successful partnership, as far as I’m concerned,” said Watson, a Republican who’s looking to move from his role as the state’s chief election officer to a new elected office next year, potentially lieutenant governor.

Minor sees it differently. To him, the secretary of state’s rollout of unverified data ultimately kept him from voting for the first time in 12 years, even though he had done everything on his part to ensure his registration made him eligible as an active voter.

“At that point, you lose voters,” Minor said. “The harder you make it to vote, the less people are going to vote.”

No ballot

Inactive voters aren’t barred from casting a ballot, but their status does limit how they can vote. They only can vote through signed paper ballots in their home precinct. Even after a paper ballot is cast, it must come under review to determine whether it’ll count.

Watson told MPB that the process means Mississippians can still cast a ballot if a mistake compromises their status. But those voters and voting-rights advocates say that in practice, those mistakes create more barriers for people who never should have been affected in the first place, which can hinder their access to the ballot box, limit the power of their vote or keep them from voting entirely.

In Minor’s case, that was all true. After his name didn’t show up in the poll book, poll workers told Minor he’d have to vote with a paper ballot for the first time. The process was completely new to Minor, but he did what he was told.

A poll worker handed him a form for a paper ballot. He filled out the papers the poll workers provided, signed to affirm his identity and quickly turned them in so he could get to his long shift producing Toyota car parts. The poll workers offered little explanation of the process. Minor believed he’d receive the actual ballot in the mail, where he’d fill out his vote.

“I didn’t ask any questions because I was in a hurry,” Minor said. “But I filled everything they handed me out and then handed it in. They filled out what they needed and said, ‘That was it.’”

It wasn’t until Minor was well down the road that he realized the poll workers never provided him with a ballot to mark his vote and none was coming in the mail. 

For the first time in 12 years, he didn’t vote.

‘We’ve corrected a lot of them’

Heather Williams said she would’ve also discovered she was made inactive at the polls if she hadn’t happened to get an email from a Democratic voters league warning her to check her voter-registration status, in case she was made inactive without her knowledge.

Two weeks before she planned to vote in the primaries, Williams went online to check her status. She wasn’t too concerned because she had always worked to make sure her voter registration was updated, especially after she moved to her current home in Starkville seven years ago. 

But her name didn’t show up in the system. She was inactive.

When she contacted her county’s circuit clerk’s office, which is responsible for registering voters, Oktibbeha County Elections Deputy Clerk Regina Sykes told her it didn’t seem like Williams lived where she was registered to vote.

Instead, Experian’s data incorrectly linked her to an old address in Columbus, where she hadn’t lived in years. Sykes said election officials, acting on the false information from the secretary of state, changed Williams’ voting status to inactive.

The fix was quick, and the circuit clerk’s office reactivated Williams’ voter status that same day so she could vote without a hitch in the primaries. But Williams knew she was able to resolve the issue only because she happened to check her status. She worried for other voters who weren’t as as informed about the voting process.

“There shouldn’t have been any questions about my address,” Williams said. “You’re just creating more stress and potentially, down the line, more obstacles for people.”

Sykes said Williams wasn’t the only voter mistakenly made inactive by errors in the credit data in Oktibbeha County, which has some of the highest rates of inactive voters in the state, according to voter records from the secretary of state’s office. According to Sykes, her office has corrected the statuses of “a lot” of voters who were mistakenly made inactive, especially people who discovered the errors after they turned out to the polls in the primaries.

Williams identifies as a Democrat. But to her, the scope of the errors is a concern that goes beyond party.

“I don’t think this is a Democrat or a Republican problem. This is just an overall issue for everybody,” Williams said. “Even my 68-year-old Republican mother has said this is all ridiculous and cause for concern.”

Watson told MPB that the data was meant to serve as another “tool” for counties to identify voters who had moved from where they were registered.

“The key for us is, ‘How do we give as many tools as possible to our elections commissioners to do their jobs?’” Watson told MPB this month. “I cannot force them to do it.”

But Williams said her experience showed the secretary of state’s office didn’t do its job to vet the reliability of the credit data and verify information that could negatively impact voters like her.

“It’s his way of taking the accountability off of him,” Williams said of Watson’s remarks. “It sounds to me like you’re giving people rusty tools when you’re using Experian.”

Unverified and unchecked

Experian has never billed its “most powerful locating product,” a massive consumer database called TrueTrace, as a verified source. Instead, the tool makes educated guesses on the possible addresses of over 245 million consumers based on a slate of exclusive data collected over years of their spending history: loans, rent payments, credit files and more.

Experian wrote that for most consumers in the database, its tool links a handful of possible addresses based on this trove of information. From this, it zeroes in on a single “Best Address,” which the company states is the place “where the consumer is most likely to be reached.” 

But still, according to the company, it’s a guess.

“Often, this will match their residence; however, we don’t verify residency,” Experian wrote to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that initially offered the data for Watson’s office to use in Mississippi.

But when the secretary of state’s office unveiled its statewide “partnership” with Experian last year, it announced that election commissioners in all 82 counties would get access to “reliable commercial data” from the company’s “long history as a credit reporting agency.” In a series of press releases announcing the partnership, the office made no mention that the addresses in the credit data were unverified or provided transparency on the checks it implemented to determine the data was reliable.

“While Experian’s data and insights can assist with voter list maintenance efforts, all decisions related to voter registration policies, procedures and record updates are made solely by election officials in accordance with local, state and federal laws,” the company wrote in an emailed statement.

The secretary of state’s office did not fulfill a public-records request on how many voters the credit data was used for in time for publication. A Mississippi Today analysis of voter records from Watson’s office found that since the credit data was rolled out statewide, election officials have made at least 50,000 voters inactive due to address conflicts, for which Experian’s information is a key source.

If they don’t vote in the next two federal general elections, they could be purged from the list altogether under state law.

The primaries: An early look into the data’s flaws

The consequences of the secretary of state’s rollout of unverified credit data came out as voter turnout surged in the Senate primaries, with Democrat Scott Colom drawing out voters in his quest to unseat Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in the November general election.

The jump in Democratic participation meant that Mikel Bolden, executive director of the Mississippi Democratic Party, had a lot more on her hands. Bolden directs the state party, whose county committees help conduct the Democratic primaries in their jurisdictions.

But on Election Day, she said she and her team were disrupted by an increase in reports from voters who discovered they were made inactive at the polls, even though they had just been able to vote as usual in recent elections.

Bolden said the party was used to hearing a “couple” of these reports every Election Day. But this time, she said a “substantial” amount of voters were affected.

Some told the party’s election-protection hotline that they were worried errors in the credit data had wrongly affected their status, Bolden said. Frustrated voters vented to her as workers couldn’t find their names in the poll books, leaving them to wait in line for a paper ballot and put their faith in an unfamiliar process.

Bolden tried to encourage the voters to stick it out. But for some, the frustration was too much. She said they decided to leave the polls without casting a vote.

“Regardless of if you don’t agree with how the person is voting, everybody still deserves the right to vote, still deserves the right to exercise their voice,” Bolden said. “But if you keep having the same issue of being inactive, you’re gonna have lesser voter turnout.”

The voters weren’t able to find out from poll workers on Election Day if they had been made inactive because credit data incorrectly identified their address. Only their county’s election officials would know. 

But Bolden said the secretary of state’s lack of transparency on gaps in the process compounded voters’ concerns and burdened the party as they worked to administer this year’s Democratic primaries. She said the secretary of state’s office never notified the party ahead of the primaries that they might encounter voters who were wrongly made inactive due to errors in the unverified credit data it provided election officials.

“It was a lot of frustration that happened on Election Day. This was totally left field,” Bolden said. “None of this was passed down to us by anyone.”

She said that if the secretary of state had notified the party, it would have been able to prepare its team to assist these voters. As Mississippi looks to the general election in November, Bolden is concerned that these issues could play out on a wider scale if errors in the credit data continue to go unchecked.

The Mississippi Republican Party, whose county committees conduct the Republican primaries, did not respond to an interview request. While Mississippi Today identified that Mississippians who had historically voted for Republican candidates were wrongly made inactive due to errors in the credit data, it is unclear whether party staff saw an impact in the Republican primaries.

Mistake inactivations date to 2024

Before handing the credit data to every county statewide, the secretary of state’s office handpicked Lafayette County to test out the new tool.

In Lafayette County, the University of Mississippi’s record-high enrollment creates special challenges for the commission’s responsibility to maintain accurate voter rolls, as students bounce around residences often or even return to their family’s homes outside of the county during long breaks or after graduation. 

District 4 Election Commissioner Laura Antonow said Lafayette’s commission wanted to be helpful and agreed to be the first to pilot the new tool starting in 2024, alongside Circuit Clerk Jeff Busby’s office. 

She said voter-roll maintenance should be a “partnership” between voters and election officials, but it’s long been bogged down as many voters fail to update their registration when they move. 

The sources that commissioners have traditionally depended on to identify these voters can give an incomplete, outdated view, according to Antonow. The main source that Mississippi and most states have relied on to track voters’ moves, U.S. Postal Service data on address changes, is an official governmental source. But it can flag moves only when people submit a paid notice to the Postal Service that they’ve relocated — something many voters never do.

Watson told MPB that from the beginning, the “big purpose” in rolling out the credit data was to “replace” the “outdated” Postal Service information.

“It’s not even good information,” Watson told MPB. “So, the commercial data that’s now starting to see, ‘Where are loans coming from? Where are house notes?’ — it’s better data to locate somebody where they actually do live.”

But still, the credit data sparked Antonow’s concern.

“It’s commercial data versus governmental data, and that made me a little skeptical,” Antonow said. “I told Jeff, ‘It was just a matter of time before people got concerned about this.’”

As the commissioners started using the credit data, Antonow said they discovered its errors in a way that hit home. Some of the commissioners found that Experian’s data flagged incorrect home addresses for their own family members, according to Antonow.

She said the commission informed the secretary of state’s office that the credit data had incorrect information years ago. The secretary of state’s office did not respond to repeated questions on whether it was aware that errors in the credit data wrongly inactivated legitimate voters.

Because the credit data didn’t prove to be entirely accurate, Antonow said the commission decided to avoid trusting its information alone and weighed other factors, such as the last time a person voted, before determining their status. The more recently someone voted in the precinct where they were registered, the more likely it was that they still lived there, no matter what the credit data indicated.

“We were very careful about who to make inactive,” Antonow said.

But errors still occurred. Jordan Jones Higginbotham, an Ole Miss student in Antonow’s district, discovered she was made inactive a week before she planned to vote in the 2024 primaries as she checked her voter status online — something she’s gotten in the habit of doing every time she intends to vote.

Higginbotham’s lived and voted in Mississippi her whole life. She originally registered to vote where she’s from, in Madison County, but she updated her voter registration when she moved to Oxford for college.

But that’s not what the credit data indicated to Antonow. According to Experian, Higginbotham actually lived in Madison County.

“So many people in our state already believe their vote doesn’t count,” Higginbotham said. “They don’t vote. So when they see that things like this are happening, it’s just another thing to put on their list why they shouldn’t vote to begin with.”

No notice

When Mississippi officials make a voter inactive, state law requires that officials send a single piece of mail to the voter, called a “confirmation notice,” to inform them they’ve been made inactive and need to verify their home address with the county. Higginbotham never received any word that she’d been marked inactive — just like all the voters Mississippi Today identified.

In the handful of other jurisdictions that have also turned to credit data, such as Montana, Maryland and West Virginia, officials do something different. They send out a notice asking voters to verify their address before making any changes to their status, which serves as a check on the unverified credit data. If the voter doesn’t respond within a certain period, then officials mark them inactive in those jurisdictions.

Under state law, Mississippi officials don’t wait at all.

Lafayette’s election officials thought they had mailed Higginbotham a notice. But she never got it because officials sent it to the incorrect address that the credit data linked to her in Madison County. 

The same thing happened to Minor. Two months after his county’s circuit clerk mailed out the notice to the house in Tchula, it returned as undeliverable — because he never even lived there. Under this system, legitimate voters are mistakenly made inactive without their knowledge and the notice they’re entitled to under state law.

“That does seem like a problem,” Busby said, after Mississippi Today flagged the issue to him.

Antonow and Busby told Mississippi Today that going forward, Lafayette County’s election officials would consider sending those notices to at least one verified address, the home address in a person’s voter registration. That way, they would be notified that they were made inactive, even if the credit data linked an incorrect address.

It speaks to the imperfections in this system, as errors persist and election commissioners correct them, largely without central guidance from the secretary of state. Antonow said errors and mistakes from Lafayette County’s first round using the credit data taught her lessons for when she used it this year.

“We’ve been much more conservative of who we’ve made inactive, just because we know there are some inaccuracies,” Antonow said. “Voters who are concerned should definitely question Experian and the secretary of state.”

You can check your voter-registration status at the secretary of state’s Y’All Vote website.

Hence then, the article about secretary of state s push to use unverified addresses from credit agency for election integrity left some legitimate voters inactive during primaries was published today ( Wednesday 25/03/2026 - 03:06 PM ) and is available on Mississippi Today ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

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