Mississippi Secretary of State Watson rolled out unverified Experian data, marking 50,000 voters inactive and blocking some from March primaries

On March 10, 2026, Mississippi voters casting ballots in the state's congressional primaries discovered that some eligible voters had been removed from active rolls and were unable to cast a counted ballot — the documented result of a statewide rollout of unverified consumer credit data that Secretary of State Michael Watson's office had distributed to all county election officials the previous July. The office had contracted with the consumer-reporting giant Experian to use its TrueTrace product, which estimates consumers' addresses based on spending activity and credit patterns rather than verified residential records — a departure from the government-sourced data that Mississippi and most other states had historically used for voter-roll maintenance.

Experian disclosed to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission that TrueTrace identifies where a consumer is "most likely to be reached" but does not verify residency. Despite this limitation, Watson's office touted the data as a tool that would "bring a new level of reliable data to voter-roll maintenance." Lafayette County officials, who had piloted the tool two years earlier when the enabling state law took effect, told Mississippi Today they had warned the secretary of state's office that the credit data contained inaccurate addresses. The office expanded the program statewide anyway in July 2025. Watson's office declined Mississippi Today's repeated requests for an interview, saying the news organization's past reporting on the rollout had caused "unnecessary confusion."

Mississippi Today's investigation, published March 25, 2026, identified numerous voters wrongly made inactive from across the political spectrum whose inactivations were confirmed by their county election officials. One Itawamba County voter, Thomas Minor, who had voted in every election for twelve years and whose registration listed his current address, was marked inactive in August 2025 because Experian's data listed an address 160 miles away in a county where he had never lived. Minor showed up to the March 10 primaries, was told he was inactive, attempted an affidavit ballot process he had never encountered, and ultimately left without casting a vote. Counties had been mailing inactivation notices to the Experian addresses — not voters' actual addresses — meaning affected voters often received no warning that their status had changed.

Mississippi Today's analysis found the unverified credit data had been used to mark approximately 50,000 registered voters inactive before the March 2026 primaries. Watson told Mississippi Public Broadcasting the day after the primaries that the credit-data rollout was "wildly successful." The state's law broadly permits the secretary of state to use any "reliable information" to verify voter addresses, but provides no mechanism requiring verification of the data's accuracy before it can be used to change voter status.