DeSoto County moved more voters to inactive in the leadup to Election Day than any other. Here’s what happened. ...Middle East

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HERNANDO – Dozens of people crowded into the old Trustmark Bank building in downtown on Wednesday afternoon to watch DeSoto County’s election officials pore over bins of ballots in a longtime Republican stronghold key to the political earthquake that has rattled Mississippi.

DeSoto, a Memphis suburb just below the Mississippi border, has been solid Trump country. Until now.

A jolt of Democratic enthusiasm and a slump in Republican voters appears to have delivered DeSoto County for Democrat Scott Colom, the Mississippi district attorney declared the winner Wednesday night over GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

DeSoto’s proximity to Memphis has established the county as a bright spot locally. It’s a center of economic development in America’s poorest state and the fastest-growing county amid statewide population decline, attracting Memphis suburbanites and Elon Musk-backed data centers alike.

But the county has drawn an uncomfortable spotlight since last week’s election as an epicenter of the election turmoil roiling Mississippi. This was the first federal general election in which officials across the state used unverified address data from the credit bureau Experian to render thousands of voters inactive, forcing them to cast affidavit ballots that are less certain to be counted. 

Voting rights advocates are concerned that errors in Experian’s data affected many voters who were already properly registered, forcing them to take additional steps in order to vote and blocking their access to the ballot box.

DeSoto moved more voters to inactive status than any of Mississippi’s 82 counties in the eight months between the primaries and the midterms. During that time, the county’s part-time election commissioners said, they moved to inactive nearly every voter flagged on the address lists that the secretary of state sourced from Experian’s data: more than 15,000 voters.

Over those months, DeSoto’s list of inactive voters more than doubled, leaving one in five of the county’s voters inactive by Election Day. Many didn’t find out until they came out to vote and found their names missing from the poll books in places where they had lived and voted for years.

Reports of hourslong voting lines, affidavit ballot shortages, and a now-dismissed Democratic lawsuit against DeSoto County followed soon after. 

Election protection hotlines sounded off with complaints of chaotic scenes at the polls. The state Democratic party’s lawsuit alleged that the line at one polling place got so long that someone waiting to vote passed out and had to be taken to the hospital. 

“The conditions were horrible,” said Ravonda Griffin, a local attorney hired by Colom after Election Day. “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.”

In the week since, the five commissioners responsible for running the county’s elections have taken time off from their day jobs to verify and count an unexpected surge in affidavit ballots. DeSoto County reported roughly 275 affidavit ballots in 2022, during the last midterm election, according to data tracked by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. 

This year, commissioners have reported more than seven times the number of affidavit ballots: about 2,100.

The commissioners’ long hours have been punctuated by charged exchanges with residents seeking answers and accountability for the dysfunction that they say plagued this year’s midterms. 

“There’s nothing normal about this,” Sheila Jackson, a resident wearing a “Drink Water. Love Hard. Fight Racism.” shirt, said on Monday to Tim Snyder, a Republican in his first term as a county election commissioner.

Standing in the old bank drive-through lane outside the commissioners’ office, Snyder defended the commission’s embrace of the Experian data to clean its voter rolls.

“You get false positives, but it’s just part of life,” Snyder said. “You know, it’s hard to find perfect.”

Use of the Experian data has triggered fingerpointing. Experian blamed Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office for misusing the data, which, the company wrote in a statement Tuesday, should not have been used to “validate voter records” — although the state’s $50,000 contract with the company specified the information would be used for voter roll maintenance.  

Watson’s office blamed county election commissioners for failing to verify the addresses before changing voters’ status, and some election commissioners are blaming the secretary of state’s office for directing them to use flawed information that caused more headaches than help.

A fateful decision to use credit bureau data to clean voter rolls

Before Watson, a Republican, handed down address lists sourced from Experian’s data to every county statewide last year, the state had solely relied on government information, including U.S. Postal Service data, to do the routine job of cleaning the rolls of voters suspected to have moved.

His office announced that Experian’s data would “strengthen the integrity of elections.” But in March, Mississippi Today first reported that errors in Experian’s information had gone unverified at every stage of the voter roll maintenance process, leading election officials to inactivate voters who were properly registered and hadn’t actually moved.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney who is now executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said Mississippi’s use of commercial data raised concerns that the state was improperly disenfranchising voters.

“You don’t have to be an expert on election law to be looking at Mississippi right now and thinking, ‘There must be a better way of doing this,’” Becker said. “I don’t know of any other state that uses commercial data as a single check and bases inactivation based, at best, on a flawed data set for voter maintenance purposes.”

In DeSoto, both Snyder and fellow Republican election commissioner Sissie Ferguson confirmed in separate interviews that the secretary of state’s office put pressure on county election officials to use the Experian data to clean the voter rolls. Ferguson said state officials specifically called out DeSoto County at an election commissioner conference in January. 

“We were told, ‘Y’all still have 15,000 that you haven’t worked,’” Ferguson said, referring to the number of voters flagged in the lists drawn from Experian’s data.

Watson’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Ferguson’s recollection of the conference.

Ferguson said she could tell the records were flawed, and in some cases didn’t change a voter’s status when she knew for sure they hadn’t moved. 

 “I recognized two or three of mine, and I thought, ‘That’s not true. He didn’t move, his dad did,’ so I didn’t make him inactive,” she said.

Watson has defended his deployment of the Experian data as a tool that empowered election commissioners to better clean the voter rolls and said county officials are responsible for the actual work of inactivating voters in Mississippi.

“Their job is to make sure they verify the information,” Watson said on a talk radio show Monday. “And I’ve heard people say, ‘Well, you pass the buck.’ What I am doing is explaining how the law works. I cannot make an election commissioner do his or her job.”

State law requires election commissioners to use “reliable information” to clean the voter rolls. In the announcement of the Experian deal, Watson’s office said Experian’s information would “bring a new level of reliable data” to the process.

Other jurisdictions that have checked voter rolls using Experian data took steps to verify the data in ways that Mississippi didn’t. For example, in West Virginia, election officials mail voters a notice asking them to verify their address before changing their registration status. 

But in Mississippi, state law requires election officials to move voters to inactive status at the same time as they mail the notices. Mississippi Today confirmed cases in which the notice was mailed to the unverified address sourced from Experian’s data. When the address was incorrect, properly registered voters who were moved to inactive status never got a notice to correct their status.

On Tuesday, Colom criticized Watson for relying on Experian, even though the company warned the secretary of state’s office in their contract that it couldn’t guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data.

 “Experian told him they were not reliable, and he did it anyway,” Colom said at a news conference about the election. “This chaos is a result of that decision.”

Watson’s office has stopped deploying Experian data and shifted to what he told Mississippi Today was a better source, from the data broker IDI. 

“It’s not that we moved on because we didn’t like Experian,” Watson said. “We moved on because we’ve gone with what we thought was a better product.”

Watson has conceded that the Experian files weren’t perfect and that some legitimate voters might get improperly flagged.

“Now there’s an aggressive approach to cleaning the voter rolls,” he said in the radio interview. “Is there going to be a little bit of pain? Perhaps. Did people have to wait an extra 5-10 minutes to vote affidavit? Perhaps.”

Experian wrote in a statement that election officials shouldn’t rely on its data as a basis to inactivate voters. 

“Our supplemental address information provided at that time was not designed or intended to validate voter records,” Experian spokesperson Scott Anderson said of the company’s deal with Mississippi. “Decisions regarding voter registration policies, procedures and record updates are made solely by election officials in accordance with applicable local, state and federal laws.”

A surge in affidavit ballots in DeSoto

Jennifer Morrell, a former Colorado elections official who now serves as CEO of The Elections Group, a consulting firm that advises elections leaders around the country, said that Mississippi’s election laws and processes had to be seen in the context of the state’s long history of using the voting process to disenfranchise Black residents.

“When you look at all the ways that Mississippi makes it harder for people to vote, it’s not hard to see a direct line from the Jim Crow era straight to the present day system,” Morrell said. 

Voters across DeSoto County reported lines as long as three hours to vote on Election Day, with folks arriving before dawn and people standing in chilly rain to cast their ballots. 

Poll workers, voters and the Democratic Party’s lawsuit alleged various polling places — including the high school serving the county’s most populous precinct — ran out of envelopes for affidavit ballots and that there weren’t enough voting machines in some places to handle the number of people who wanted to cast ballots. 

In her two decades of voting in Walls — a small town on the county outskirts bordering the Mississippi River — probation officer Heather Cavallo has become used to Election Day being an in-and-out affair. But during this month’s election, she said, it was a two-hour ordeal.

Throughout the day, a line snaked out of the town library that serves as the local polling place for more than 3,500 voters. By the time Cavallo’s son and husband came out to vote later that day, they were even more unlucky. The clouds that covered the skies when she came out to vote at lunchtime had morphed into showers and then thunderstorms by election night.

For three hours, the two men stood in the rain to cast their ballots, Cavallo said. Her husband, who had headed to the polls after a long shift at his construction job, didn’t get to vote until an hour-and-a-half after workers closed the polls to newcomers. By that point, the thunderstorms were raging so hard that they prompted flash flood warnings throughout the county. 

When her son got to the end of the line, he found out his name wasn’t even in the poll book.

He was among the one in five voters in the county who were inactive, so the 26-year-old cast an affidavit ballot. All there was left to do was wait and see if his vote would actually count.

“I’m at a loss,” Cavallo said. “I have seen nothing like this.”

But for Cavallo, it was all worth it to get to be one of the voters who flipped the Republican stronghold blue for Colom.

Ferguson downplayed complaints about voting. 

“They stand in line every day at Walmart and Kroger, and they don’t complain,” she said. 

Mississippi Today reporter Taylor Vance contributed to this story.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at [email protected].

Madeline Nguyen is an investigative reporting fellow at Mississippi Today and is based in Jackson. Contact Madeline at [email protected].

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