Cynthia Walker said she was 15 years old when she participated in her first ballot box review — reconciling the number of ballots with poll book entries and taking a count of everything, down to the number of rubber bands in each box.

She claimed her findings, recorded in handwritten notes on a yellow legal pad, led to a landmark election challenge for a Black supervisor 50 miles north of Jackson. The 67-year-old Yazoo City resident said she’s taken part in dozens of these examinations since then.

So when Walker saw former Hinds County Supervisor David Archie in the news in the summer of 2023, incredulous that he’d lost reelection in a smackdown by a political newcomer, she thought to herself, “I know what happened to him,” Walker told Mississippi Today. “I’m going to reach out to him.”

Two days later, Walker appeared beside Archie at a press conference outside the sheriff’s office to decry an alleged “high-tech” conspiracy involving a former election commissioner and voting machine company. She stood 5-foot, wearing a short tapered haircut, jewel dotted shades and a pastel yellow pantsuit.

“She’s a little bitty person, but she has the power of a giant coming out of her,” said Marilyn Hetrick, a 75-year-old Clinton resident, retired assistant personnel director for the city of Jackson, and one of Archie’s staunchest supporters.

Three years ago, Walker and Hetrick didn’t know each other — or the ousted supervisor, for that matter — from Adam. 

It was a curious time to become an ally of Archie, who’d become widely defined by his antics, such as a profanity-filled fit during a 2021 supervisor’s meeting. As officers removed him, he tore down the plexiglass partitions on the dias. This behavior, according to his supporters, has all been in the name of drawing attention to corruption in the county.

But the two retired women have teamed up in the last two years to fight what they call a calculated election heist. The alleged proof?

Missing voter signature books. Improperly sealed ballot boxes. Commingled election machine hard drives. A post-election Facebook message from the chair of the Democratic Executive Committee reading, “I’m f—ing David Archie on site !!!” 

This spawned a lawsuit, crafted from Hetrick’s suburban kitchen, exhibits strewn across her banquette, with Walker on speed dial from up north near the edge of the Mississippi Delta. 

“It was a radical departure from election laws. It was gross misconduct. It was illegal and immoral and disrespectful. It was voter disenfranchisement,” Walker said on the steps of the courthouse last week, Hetrick behind her.

“You just cannot ‘have it your way,’ like you’re at Burger King, when you’re processing election materials,” Walker added.

Even the harshest critics of Hinds County elections, such as former longtime Hinds County Republican Party chairman Pete Perry, say the challenge is baloney. Procedural irregularities alone do not demonstrate fraud, and they’re not likely to nullify a wide-margin outcome, experts said.

“I don’t think they ran a good election. I don’t believe they ran it legally,” Perry said. “I also don’t believe they did a damn thing that affected 1,800 votes. It’s not possible.”

On the day of the deadline for Archie’s petition for judicial review of the election in September of 2023, Hetrick said her fingers were practically bleeding from all the typing. Then at about 10 a.m., Archie received a call from Supervisor Robert Graham: The county had just experienced a cyber attack. The circuit clerk’s office cleared out for the day.

“My heart just dropped,” Hetrick said. 

Archie went down to the courthouse anyway, manilla folder in hand, and recorded videos in front of the locked glass doors to the unlit, empty office, according to his recent Facebook post. 

Still, Hinds County Circuit Clerk Zack Wallace — who was initially named as a defendant in the lawsuit — testified that his office was open that day, and Archie took no additional steps to file, meaning he’d missed his deadline. The judge agreed.

Thus ensued a two-year battle over whether the office was open or closed, culminating in over a dozen subpoenas and a packed courtroom hearing on Aug. 27, featuring a who’s who of county powerbrokers.

The special judge appointed to hear the case, retired Circuit Court Judge Barry Ford, reversed his original ruling that dismissed the case, allowing Archie’s lawsuit to proceed. 

“Today’s ruling was a win for our case to restore election integrity,” Hetrick wrote on Facebook later that day. “Those who intentionally disregarded election law and protocol must be held accountable as a deterrent to others who might try this in the future.”

One morning in the fall of 2022, a recently widowed Hetrick struck up a conversation with a tall, broad fellow with a slick head while walking on the track at the Baptist Healthplex near her home in Clinton. 

He was friendly, calm and knowledgeable, she said. Hetrick asked the man what he did for a living. “I work for government,” he said. What branch? “County.” What position? “I’m a supervisor.”

Which supervisor? “I’m David Archie,” he said.

Hetrick was floored. This wasn’t the loud-mouthed politician she was used to reading about in the news, whose opponent she actively supported years earlier.

Hetrick asked him about his boardroom blow-ups, which he described as a statement, a method of getting people to care about their local government’s dysfunction. After Hetrick vetted her new friend with her former coworkers from City Hall, Archie took her on rides-along to show her the progress he’s made in the county — the things he says the media never broadcasts.

“I started to understand where he was coming from,” Hetrick said.

Hetrick lives just outside of Archie’s district, in an area that was represented by Archie’s main foe on the board, former Supervisor Credell Calhoun. The two men hadn’t always been at odds.

Calhoun, a businessman and former auditor in the governor’s office, told Mississippi Today he supported Archie’s campaign for supervisor in 2019. When Archie won narrowly and it looked like there may be a challenge to that election, Calhoun said the board of supervisors directed all of its state road funding to Archie’s district, District 2, to ingratiate voters to Archie in the event there was a rematch. 

When that didn’t happen, Calhoun said the board took half of the money back to divvy up across the county, angering Archie. “We were trying to help him so much and then he turned,” Calhoun said.

Archie refutes this, saying the board directed the funding to his district because it had been neglected for several years. Archie has repeatedly accused Calhoun of misspending public money and impeding county progress, which Calhoun denies. He calls Calhoun a “40-year con man,” and Hetrick parrots.

So when the county’s Democratic Party primary rolled around the next year, Hetrick spent most of her energy supporting the candidate Archie’s camp preferred against Calhoun, former state representative Deborah Dixon. Dixon and Calhoun had similar contention, and she ran against the incumbent after she said he backed the candidate who knocked her out of the Legislature in 2019.

Hetrick served as a poll watcher — her first time in the role — for Dixon. At the election watch party that evening, Hetrick celebrated her candidate’s victory but was stunned by her friend Archie’s loss.

Archie had lost convincingly to Anthony Smith, the owner of a computer maintenance company and a real estate firm, by nearly 2-to-1. Smith, regarded by some as “somebody nobody knew,” took home more votes in 25 out of 26 precincts in the district. The total count was 2,810 for Archie and 4,687 for Smith. 

Plenty of residents were unsurprised by Archie’s ouster after all of the bickering. After all, voters shook up more than half of the board – including voting out Calhoun and a third incumbent. But Archie and his team were taken aback.

“Something just doesn’t feel right and we’re trying to figure it out,” Archie told Hetrick when she called him later that night.

Cue Walker. 

The retired paralegal, who’s since opened her home to shelter homeless families, had run as an independent for mayor of Yazoo City in 2022 and lost, receiving just 5% of the vote. 

Walker publicly alleges her election, and others in Yazoo, were rigged, the work of a Jackson-based election consultant named Toni Johnson. 

This is where Walker claims to have found a pattern: She alleges Johnson “came into Yazoo City blazing” starting during the 2018 municipal elections. Walker paints a vague picture of Johnson being in cahoots with the election machine techs and having special access to the computers. And that the candidates Johnson works for always win.

“She went to the highest bidder,” Archie said.

This connection is a handy detail for the Archie camp because Johnson previously served as a Hinds County Election Commissioner, where she found herself in Archie’s crosshairs. She’d also run against him for the supervisor seat in 2019.

Archie accused Johnson of pocketing county money in 2021, WJTV reported, and in early 2022, the auditor’s office arrested her for allegedly defrauding the government by using pandemic relief funds to purchase a television for her home and issuing no-show contracts for services including voting machine audits.

In the 2022 Yazoo City election, Walker alleged Johnson attended the ballot examination wearing her ankle monitor. Johnson pleaded guilty to embezzlement related to the flat screens in 2023 and stepped down from the commission. 

Later that year, after forming a nonprofit called We Must Vote, Johnson consulted Smith’s campaign against Archie. 

“She was very effective in helping me and, you know, I don’t judge anybody,” Smith told Mississippi Today. “I think she’s still a beautiful person.”

Archie’s team hasn’t provided evidence, or a description of evidence, to support allegations of election machine tampering. But Walker did proclaim during the post-election press conference that Johnson’s “blueprint, her DNA, her blood is all over the stealing, the roguishness and the thieving of elections in Mississippi.”

Johnson’s attorney Lisa Ross spoke at the event: “Show us one machine Toni Johnson has touched. She has touched none,” Ross said.

Archie vowed to bring his information to the county district attorney, the attorney general, the secretary of state and the FBI. 

“It is unbelievable that she (Johnson) runs around throwing her weight around because it’s our understanding there’s a real big fish,” Archie said at the 2023 press conference, holding his hands at the distance of a walleye, “that is behind her and protecting her.”

Archie repeated the “big fish” line to Mississippi Today during the reporting of this story, but would not elaborate, saying “you’ll soon find out.”

About a week after the press conference, the resolution board was still working to canvas the absentee ballots to determine which were legally cast and should be accepted. Democratic primary elections, which often determine the winner in Hinds County, are overseen by the Hinds County Democratic Executive Committee.

Jacquie Amos, then-chair of the committee, explained to Mississippi Today that some voters fill out absentee votes on ballots printed on regular paper, which cannot be fed through the machine. Resolution board members, trained by the committee, must transfer the votes to scannable ballots.

So if someone walked into the courthouse basement that day, one week after the election, this is what they’d see: Tables of people bubbling in hundreds of fresh ballots. 

Archie, joined by supporters, did just that, and things got heated. 

“You don’t really know what they’re doing, marking one ballot to another,” said Dixon, who was there to follow her own race.

Amos said she went down to the basement to try to explain the procedure to onlookers, since “no one knows the process, they always think something is wrong,” she said.

Perry was there, too, and said workers should have been looking over the board’s shoulder but weren’t — an account Amos rejects. Local activist Addie Lee Green, who was attempting to observe workers behind the counter in the clerk’s office, said the election officials attempted to call the sheriff to escort her out.

In addition to Dixon, Archie had backed Malcolm Johnson, former county special projects manager and talk show host, in another supervisors race. 

“He said, ‘Jacquie, we’re not going to let you steal this election from Deb or Malcolm,’” Amos said. “I turned around and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Someone had to hold Amos back from a physical altercation. She said she was fuming when she left the courthouse to cool off and received a Facebook message, “Hey, don’t let them cheat Debroha (sic) Dixon out of her election. She won fair and square.”

“She won,” Amos responded. “But I’m f—ing David Archie on site !!!”

Amos said she’d already been on the outs with the supervisor. She said she’d incensed Archie when she refused — in response to many pleas — to run against Calhoun. Archie said that’s not true.

Soon, her profane Facebook message — which became exhibit E in Archie’s lawsuit — would appear in news outlets across the metro, though she said Mississippi Today was the first to call her for her side. 

Amos said she was disappointed Archie would use the message, composed in a heated moment, to paint her as corrupt, especially because she grew up with him as a kid. 

Amos’ father, a basketball and baseball coach at the now-defunct Hinds County Agricultural High School in Utica, had been Archie’s mentor before he passed. Her father campaigned door-to-door for Archie and was “crazy about him,” Amos said.

“‘If Daddy were here, David would not be acting that way.’ Mama says that all the time,” Amos said.

All of the drama is hurtful in more ways than one.

“What it does, in my opinion, is make voters stay away from the process,” Amos said. “People won’t vote. They say, ‘There’s corruption.’”

After the dust up in the basement, and the committee officially certified the election, Archie asked Cynthia and Hetrick to help with his ballot box review — the process a candidate must undergo in order to challenge the results.

Hetrick accepted the offer, thinking it probably wouldn’t bear fruit, but at least she could help her friend accept his loss. Until she saw inside the boxes.

In the election commission’s fluorescently lit office in late August of 2023, two white top folding tables sat end to end. Wallace, the circuit clerk, brought the election contents, the soft blue boxes carrying ballots and precinct materials, into the room so Archie’s camp could conduct its examination.

Walker was the leader, joined by Hetrick, advertising specialist Taylor Turcotte, Turcotte’s friend and Green, a former Bolton alderwoman and a frequent unsuccessful statewide candidate.

What happened in that room is a matter of perspective. Smith, who brought a campaign supporter known only to him by his alias “Eyes”, sat across the table from the women, filming videos of them on his phone. 

Walker described a tense scene, a gaggle of “grown rusty men that were on the attack, that ran interference, that cussed and screamed and threatened to fight.”

Turcotte’s friend was so uncomfortable that she didn’t come back after the first day. “They didn’t grow up in the hood like me,” Walker said. 

Smith rejected this telling, insisting all he did was “watch them very closely.” But Turcotte said Smith’s unblinking, “cold, dead stare” actually made her fear for Archie’s safety. At one point, a scrap nearly broke out, three of the women said.

“That’s how they pick fights with David is they get up in his face and they insult him, and then he gets loud to overwhelm them. And then David looks like the ass,” Turcotte said.

Hetrick, a devout Catholic, began arriving at the commission with her rosary wrapped around her wrist. Walker, who carried pepper spray, made a joke that Hetrick should bring holy water.

The next day, Hetrick said she brought her tiny white plastic bottle, embellished with a gold cross, and sprinkled the chairs around the table before Smith arrived that morning. The tiffs subsided after that, Hetrick said.

What disturbed the women more than the intimidating environment was what they said they found — or didn’t find — inside the boxes.

Each of the precinct boxes contained paper ballots, the petition states.

But the team alleges they found no machine tapes, the print-outs containing the number of votes scanned. They allegedly determined that all of the precinct media sticks, the hard drives that contain the digital record of the vote, were commingled in a bag with no seal, stashed in a commissioner’s desk in an open cubicle.

They alleged that out of 26 precincts, the boxes contained only eight receipt books, where voters record their signature when they sign in to vote, five ballot accounting forms, which show the number of ballots used and left over, and one machine key. 

This was after seven days of review.

“Everything was stored in all kinds of different places illegally but nobody cared,” said Turcotte, who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican against U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson in 2024 and for an open seat on the Jackson City Council in 2025.

The team alleges there’s no way to determine how many people actually voted in the election due to the illegal maintenance of the records. 

“If Mr. Smith won, why will they not allow us to validate his win?” Walker said.

Amos said she didn’t know of any documents that were missing, and if the materials weren’t in their designated precinct boxes, it would have been because the commissioners had already started cleaning the boxes out to prepare for a runoff. The records should be stored together in the commission’s office, Amos said.

“I am not Olivia Pope and this is not Defiance,” Amos said.

The committee voted Amos out in 2024, replacing her with Clinton alderman James Lott, a director at Hinds Community College. She left the committee altogether and now serves as the chair of the committee for the 2nd Congressional District. Lott told Mississippi Today his goal is to advance integrity in Hinds County elections through proper pollworker training and giving equal treatment to any complaints.

“Everything deserves to be heard and investigated,” Lott said.

Through an attorney, the Hinds County Election Commission did not respond to Archie’s allegations or answer questions about the current status or whereabouts of the materials. 

Because the commissioners will make up the tribunal that offers recommendations to the judge deciding Archie’s case, commission attorney Ray Chambers said they have a responsibility not to respond to press inquiries prior to trial. The only filings from defendants in the lawsuit so far argue Archie submitted past the deadline and avoid any explanation or alternative to the claims Archie laid out.

Perry said his experience is that the laws around election procedure — such as chain of custody, storage of materials and ensuring they are sealed — are frequently disregarded in Hinds County. But it’s inconceivable to him that 18 signature books have vanished.

“I’ll bet my ranch on the fact that the sign-in books exist,” he said.

Mississippi Today requested to inspect the books, but Chambers said state law requires that when a challenge arises, the materials are kept under seal until the court hearing.

Perry, who has conducted dozens of ballot box examinations and testified as an expert in election challenges, was present at the commission’s office for some of Archie’s review. He said he observed the team talking back and forth; it didn’t look to him like they knew what they were doing.

“There wasn’t anything to be gained by where they were spending their time,” he said. “All they did was make a scene to say, ‘We spent a week down there.’”

Archie’s lawsuit itself does not allege that the paper ballots he reviewed were forged. It doesn’t utter ballot stuffing or vote buying.

“As a kid in the 60s, I saw it done,” Perry said. “That’s where everybody was marking paper ballots and putting it in a box. And at the end of the day, they’re sitting there, late at night underneath a light hanging from a single cord above a table in an old closed grocery store.”

But that’s not how it works anymore. Today, votes are counted by a scanner instead of by hand. When ballots are printed, there’s a record attached to verify how many are used and left over. The receipt books record how many people entered the polls through their signature. In the poll books, election workers mark on a roster of registered voters, recording who voted. Both of these may be matched to the number on the machine or the number of paper ballots. 

Mistakes do happen, particularly with affidavit and absentee votes, and can make a difference in a slim margin race when challenged.

But fabricating ballots in the hundreds, let alone thousands, in theory would require a multi-person conspiracy and a kind of sophistication that all evidence shows Hinds County officials do not possess, Perry said.

“You can’t manufacture that kind of vote. The system has too many checks and balances in it to do it,” Perry said.

That doesn’t mean Hinds County elections don’t have problems. 

Bridgette Morgan, a candidate in the 2024 election for Hinds County Court Judge, brought a challenge after losing in a runoff last November. In the first race of three candidates, she received nearly enough votes, shy just 9, to win outright.

Morgan alleged that irregularities were to blame for her not being declared the winner. She was unsuccessful in getting a jury to agree with her in July, and she told Mississippi Today she plans to appeal. (Morgan’s challenge was for a general election, so a regular panel of jurors was responsible for deciding the case).

Perry said he’s repeatedly told Hinds County officials that if they don’t start following the laws around securing and storing ballots and maintaining proper accounting, a close election will soon enough result in a new election, costing the county an extra $100,000.

“Because in a close election, the way that they’re ignoring the law, refusing to even pretend to follow the law, it’s going to get overturned,” Perry said. “Now, David Archie’s is not a close election.”

Both Hetrick and Walker refute Perry’s analysis. Hetrick said he lacks imagination; Walker said if he knows of repeating violations, he should have done something about it by now.

In the case of suspected outright election or voter fraud, a local district attorney, the attorney general’s office or the U.S. Attorney’s Office may step in.

But most of the election laws Archie’s lawsuit alleged were broken — those related to controlling the contents of precinct boxes, sealings, receipt book storing, the process for examining affidavits — do not come with criminal penalties for violations, leaving few avenues for prosecutors.

Reached about Archie’s claims, a secretary of state’s office spokesperson said simply that the state office has no involvement in the matter. The attorney general’s office confirmed to Mississippi Today it had an active investigation into Morgan’s case, but not Archie’s.

So what’s the recourse? In Mississippi, virtually the only way to address a complaint over the handling of an election is for a failed candidate to file a challenge with the qualifying body in the race — in Archie’s case, the Democratic Executive Committee. If that doesn’t work, a candidate can petition the court for judicial review. 

The losing candidate must have the money to hire a lawyer. In these cases, the proper defendant is the winning candidate, not the officials who were responsible for running a fair election. 

In the course of one of these lawsuits, a judge could order an election official be jailed for breaking the law, but Perry said he’s only seen that happen once.

Candidates have a difficult time prevailing in election challenges. They must show how irregularities could have made a difference in the outcome of the race. The courts are reluctant to order a new election without clear evidence that the will of the people could not be determined.

Take the challenge of Eugene Fouche, a Black candidate for supervisor in Yazoo County, in 1979. This is the election challenge and ballot review Walker referenced – she was actually 21 at the time.

Walker called it a precedent-setting case that resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Fouche’s favor, finding that he should have been declared the winner over the white incumbent. 

That never happened, according to the lawyer who brought the case in circuit court, Ed Blackmon. The local judge dismissed the case and Fouche lost on appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court, records show. 

“I’ve never cited it,” said Blackmon, who has brought several election challenges since.

Still, anyone interested in politics in Yazoo County in the 1970s and 80s would have been enthralled by the case, which came as Black Mississippians were increasingly engaging in politics following historic enfranchisement progress made during the Civil Rights Movement.

“I could think of someone who was living in that community at that time, that would be a seminal moment in their lives,” Blackmon said.

Where Archie has had slim success in his political career — winning just one of at least nine campaigns for office and serving one term as supervisor — he’s excelled at recruiting a loyal audience.

On his podcast, a recording by an R&B singer introduces the host, “David Archie, yeah, he’s a man that will take a stand,” before shifting into an Alvin Garrett tune belting, “If you won’t fight with me, if you don’t believe in me, I’m going to walk on by myself.”

Archie has been stirring up news long before the blockbuster supervisor’s meeting: getting arrested at a protest against racial profiling, holding a demonstration against a civil rights figure or alleging excessive force against Jackson airport officials after a bloody altercation during his 20s, when he worked as a fraud prevention officer with the state’s welfare department, according to the Clarion Ledger. 

“I know some of y’all are afraid to shake the system, to challenge government, to challenge status quo,” Archie told listeners on one of his most recent broadcasts. “And then you get mad at me because I’m fighting to make it better for you.”

Earlier this year, Archie ran for mayor of Jackson, then took a job in constituent services at City Hall at the tail end of then-Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s term before getting canned by incoming Mayor John Horhn.

He’s nothing if not persistent — a quality Hetrick and Walker say they can get behind.

Walker said in the majority of her election reviews, when she has recommended candidates challenge their election, they say they don’t have the money or energy. “No one thought David would go this distance,” Walker said.

Hetrick, who left her job under former Mayor Harvey Johnson in 2001 after a local newspaper printed her address, rattling the mother of a then-middle schooler, feels similarly ready to fight now.

Smith’s attorney in the election challenge, Warren Martin, offered another perspective: “He’s convinced people to follow him no matter what, follow him through the desert to water. But it’s a mirage. They’re drinking sand.”

Hetrick said the detractors are missing the point: The case isn’t just about Archie’s supervisor’s seat. It’s about shining a light on the brazen mishandling of elections at large. She doesn’t wish for the spectacle to discourage voters from participating in elections, but to ignite them to demand better.

“Even if we lose the trial, we’re not through,” Hetrick said.

By now, Smith has served nearly half of his four-year term. Judge Ford asked lawyers in the case to agree on a hearing date in the coming days, but it’s possible another appeal could delay it further. By the time Archie’s team exposes the evidence it says it has, the next election could be underway.

So will Archie run again? 

“I hope to be in the position before then,” he said. “And I absolutely, 100%, unless I’m sick or fall off the face of the earth, will run in 2027.”