OurTupelo

Mississippi state Auditor Shad White on Monday announced that he will seek the Republican nomination for governor in 2027, calling himself a pro-Trump candidate who will “shut down Jackson’s Good-Old-Boys Club.” 

The announcement comes after White said repeatedly over the past year that he was considering a run for the state’s top job. White was set to kick off his campaign at an in-person announcement in Laurel, and published a video in which he vowed to bring down a network of government insiders. 

“There might be two parties in Jackson, but there’s only one good-old-boys club,” said White. “They tried to ban my office from even looking for government waste. As governor, I’m shutting the whole rotten system down.”

White joins a growing Republican primary field to replace term-limited incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves. That field now includes Attorney General Lynn Fitch, Agriculture Commissioner Andy Gipson and former House Speaker Philip Gunn.

Other Republicans considering entering the race for governor include Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, former U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, and billionaire businessman Tommy Duff.

On the Democratic side, Priscilla Williams Till, a civil rights advocate and distant cousin of Emmett Till, has entered the race along with Ivana Williams, a former Mississippi Highway Patrol trooper who is suing over her termination.

In an interview with Mississippi Today ahead of his announcement, White said his campaign would focus on addressing household costs by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in state government. And he didn’t back away from his support of President Donald Trump, whose popularity has soured nationally, costing down-ticket Republicans in the midterm elections. 

“As long as you are willing to take on that (good-old-boys) club and do what is best for the people of Mississippi,” White said. “I think that will have broad appeal, and I think you can absolutely both energize the people who voted for President Trump two years ago and win a general election in Mississippi.” 

A native of Sandersville in Jones County, White is a former Rhodes Scholar and graduate of the University of Mississippi and Harvard Law School. 

His career in state government began when he served as director of policy to then-Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant in 2011. In 2018, Bryant appointed him state auditor to replace Stacey Pickering, and White won the office unopposed in 2019 and was re-elected in 2023. He also serves as an attorney in the Mississippi National Guard and was recently deployed to the Middle East for several months. 

White’s tenure as auditor has largely been defined by his role in investigating the state’s TANF welfare scandal, the largest public fraud scheme in state history. That ignited a legal battle with former NFL star Brett Favre, a close friend of Donald Trump Jr., who sued White, alleging defamation over comments White made in a book he wrote about the scandal and in media interviews.

White has filed a countersuit asking a court to require Brett Favre to repay welfare funds, but White’s authority to do so was later contested successfully by Fitch, an issue that could arise on the campaign trail. 

Republican candidates running for governor in Mississippi appear to have been working hard to win over Trump and his supporters, often in strikingly similar terms. 

Some political observers and conservative commentators have wondered whether White’s battles with Favre could cost him Trump’s endorsement, but White has said his relationship with the administration remains strong.

Alex Meyer, a former White House official for President Donald Trump, is set to host a fundraiser in Oxford for White on Wednesday. 

While many polls indicate Trump’s approval rating has cratered, his endorsement is still considered a powerful factor in Mississippi Republican primaries. 

White has earned a reputation for a brand of pugilistic politics, whether it was trading barbs with a Democratic lawmaker at a public hearing or threatening to sue a former Republican lawmaker at another. 

Meyer previously told Mississippi Today he thinks that style could help White win over Trump’s base.

“Shad has a lot of the energy that I see in the Republican primary electorate in Mississippi, and across the country. They’re looking for someone who will go to war and will fight for them,” Meyer said.

White has over $3.8 million in cash on hand, leading a fundraising battle that is sure to accelerate before the Aug. 3 primary.

White’s announcement comes as Mississippians are waiting to see who won the nail-biter U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic challenger Scott Colom. Colom has been leading as final votes are counted, and his potential victory has been a political earthquake in ruby red Mississippi, which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1982. 

The results have stunned the nation, and could result in more investment and attention from national Democrats. White said it shows candidates must be focused on reigning in consumer costs. His pitch will be to target fraud in state government and use savings for tax relief, including lower car tag fees and grocery taxes, continued phase-out of the state income tax and property tax freezes.

“I think if you’re running for governor or really any other state office, it is clear that it’s incumbent on you to have a very clear plan about how to help normal working families,” White said. “That’s the stuff that we have to start talking about and execute to give voters faith that we understand what they are going through every single day.”

For closing in on a decade, all a Mississippi Republican candidate needed was an endorsement from Donald Trump and to run ’round parroting the red-meat social phobias he peddled.

No need to propose any real policy. 

No need to push back against anything Trump did or didn’t do –  even if it hurt Mississippi – or anything he said, no matter how awful. 

Heck, no need to really campaign very hard. A blessing from Trump and pledge to blindly follow him was a Willy Wonka golden ticket for a Mississippi Republican politician.

Until it wasn’t.

On Tuesday, Nov. 3, the law of political gravity reasserted itself in Mississippi, for Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

As final votes trickle in, she’s still trailing Democratic challenger Scott Colom, and her defeat looks likely, although, in true Trump fashion, Mississippi GOP leadership has vowed to “fight like hell” as final vote counting is done, whatever that means. Hyde-Smith herself, as she is wont to do, has gone to ground, not been seen in person since election night.

Win or lose, Mississippi voters sent Hyde-Smith and state Republican leaders some messages:

Turns out you can’t just go along without a peep with tariffs, trade wars, shooting wars and big beautiful bills that hammer Mississippians in their pocketbooks and take away access to health care.

Turns out you can’t hide from constituents and back-home media, going for years without holding town halls, granting only the rare, curated interview with friendly media and making a few social media posts. An occasional breakfast at Mama Hamil’s with local Republican leaders and politicians is not constituent outreach.

Turns out saying Mississippians have “so many proteins to choose from” when asked about the exorbitant price of beef you helped bring about is not good messaging. (See also, Marie Antoinette.)

Turns out heavy-handed purges of voter rolls expected to thwart the other side can come back and bite Republicans in the butt.

Turns out threats of Trump-led redistricting, a thinly veiled attempt to suppress Democratic voters, can drive turnout of the very voters you plan to suppress. (Note to state Legislature: RAFO, redistrict and find out. You really sure you want to make districts a little more competitive right now in an attempt to gerrymander the maps overall for Republicans? See also, Texas.)

Turns out complacency, and abandoning the principles your party once espoused about government spending, national debt and free markets, will eventually turn off some of your Republican base, even in Mississippi. 

Turns out a last-minute Trump rally, held in an area you already have sewn up, doesn’t do much good. It might even drive turnout for your opponent.

Turns out you might have to actually campaign, even if you’re a Republican incumbent, to get reelected in Mississippi. (See also, Thad Cochran, 2014.)

And it turns out, you might have to actually do your job in Congress, particularly the part about being a check on executive power and corruption.

It appears it will take a few more days, and counting a few more votes to determine whether the big blue national wave also engulfed Mississippi. But it certainly lapped at its shores at a minimum.

Turns out, Mississippi voters have been paying attention.

Mukta Joshi is a reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow. Joseph Cranney is a reporter at Verite News. Both report for the Deep South Today Investigative Reporting Center in collaboration with The Times.

SENATOBIA – The Mississippi police officer who fatally shot a Black toddler in a Walmart parking lot this summer had a history of aggressive behavior and escalating traffic stops into violent confrontations, an examination of more than a dozen incidents captured on video reveals.

The videos show the officer, Hunter Foster, quickly ramping up encounters that began over minor infractions: resorting to physical force without warning, cursing at people and sometimes pointing his gun at them.

Foster came under scrutiny in June when he and four other officers ran out of the Walmart in Senatobia and surrounded a car as two young women tried to flee. Foster ran and stood in front of the car and then opened fire as it drove toward him, video shows, and continued to fire as it passed him. One of the bullets struck and killed 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, who was sitting in his mother’s lap in the passenger seat.

Foster was the first officer to point his gun at the car, and the only one to open fire. In October, Attorney General Lynn Fitch declined to bring charges against Foster, 33, saying in a press release that the officer’s actions had been justified. He resigned from the police department later that week.

The death of a Black toddler at the hands of Foster, a white police officer, was another episode in what many residents describe as a painful history of policing in the state.

It also raised questions about the proportionality of the police officers’ response. The women had been accused by employees of shoplifting a box of Pampers Easy Ups and baby clothes.

Reporters for The New York Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News interviewed Foster’s former colleagues and reviewed lawsuits, court records and police reports to catalog other incidents in which he used force over his seven-year career in law enforcement.

The examination included video from 12 incidents from his time at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office, the only agency among Foster’s former employers that provided detailed records in response to a public records request. Reporters also reviewed video footage included in two federal lawsuits Foster was named in, and from an incident flagged by community members in which Foster shouted profanities at a group of women when responding to a report of domestic violence.

Foster was patient and polite at the beginning of most of the encounters, even when the motorists he had pulled over were unruly or intoxicated. But several incidents quickly devolved into violence, with Foster tackling, punching or drawing his Taser or firearm in response to minor provocations.

The encounters reviewed by the news organizations represent a small sample of Foster’s interactions with the public. But three policing experts who separately examined the videos at our request said they raised questions about Foster’s aggression,  temperament and professionalism.

Foster’s behavior displayed “an orientation toward going to force almost without warning,” said Michael Gennaco, a former federal civil rights prosecutor who now operates a police oversight consultancy in California. In several of the videos, Gennaco said, Foster appeared “out of control.”

In one case, Foster tackled a man after he didn’t immediately put his hands behind his back, then punched him at least 14 times while he was pinned to the ground.

In another, Foster continued to yank on a man’s arm while he screamed in pain. Foster was attempting to detain him after detecting a discrepancy with his vehicle tags.

After reporters shared a detailed summary of this article’s findings, Foster’s lawyer, Martin Zummach, briefly replied that some of the characterizations of his client’s behavior was slanderous, though he didn’t respond to a list of questions, or follow-up phone and email messages.

Zummach has described the Walmart shooting as “unfortunate,” but maintained that Foster did not know there was a child in the car, and that he had acted in defense of himself and other officers.

In most of the cases reviewed by the news organizations, Foster filed reports to explain why he felt physical force was necessary. Those descriptions did not always line up with what video evidence showed.

And the Walmart parking lot incident was not the first time that Foster said a vehicle had posed a threat. He was one of several officers named in a lawsuit accusing them of falsifying incident reports to say that a driver, who officers later beat, had accelerated his car, “almost running” one of them over. But video shows the car never drove toward, or nearly hit, any of the officers. 

In court papers, Foster, who did not participate in the beating, denied knowing that any part of his report was inaccurate. The lawsuit was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed amount.

‘Traumatic, traumatic experience’

Foster grew up in northeastern Mississippi, the son of a longtime law enforcement officer. He went to high school about an hour east of Starkville, in Caledonia, where he was a lineman on the football team.

He spent several years in the Army National Guard before switching to law enforcement in 2019, working for three departments over the next seven years in northern Mississippi. 

Most of Foster’s former coworkers and supervisors declined to answer our questions, citing the sensitivity of the fatal shooting.

Two of his former colleagues in Senatobia described Foster as a good officer with an even demeanor. An ex-girlfriend with whom Foster shares a child said he was “a good person and an amazing father,” but declined to answer more questions. “It seems like everyone has already painted an awful picture of him,” she said. 

From 2021 to 2024, Foster worked at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office, where he built a reputation as a prolific patrol officer.

Two years in a row, he won an award for issuing the most DUI citations of any officer in the state of Mississippi. In one month in 2022, he wrote more than 150 traffic citations, an average of about seven per workday, court records show.

On a Sunday afternoon in 2022, Laterrius Inge encountered Foster on a county road just outside Memphis. Inge said the used Camaro he recently purchased had started jerking, so he pulled over. Foster pulled up just as Inge popped open the hood.

Body-worn camera footage shows the two chatting calmly at first, but things change after a dispatcher informs Foster that the license plate on the car doesn’t match the Camaro, and that he can’t be identified by the name he had given.

Without warning, Foster reaches out to cuff his left hand.

Inge asks why he is being detained. Instead of answering, Foster repeatedly says “Stop,” raising his voice, the video shows.

“I ain’t did nothing! What are you doing?” Inge asks, raising his right hand in surrender. Foster, still holding Inge by his handcuff, points his Taser, threatening to shock Inge if he doesn’t turn around.

Foster then grabs Inge by his arm and shoves him against the car. Inge crumples to the ground and wails in pain for nearly 10 minutes, repeatedly screaming, “My wrist!” At one point, footage shows, Foster drags Inge by his handcuffs across the pavement, tearing his hoodie.

Foster later wrote in his report that he had dragged Inge to get him on his stomach, but that he kept rolling on his back, refusing to give up his right arm.

Matt Steffey, a criminal and constitutional law professor at Mississippi Christian University who helped draft the state’s rules on criminal procedure, said the video could be “a training video on how not to conduct a traffic stop.” He noted that the officer did not ask Inge to put his hands behind his back before cuffing or dragging him.

Inge was charged with careless driving, failure to surrender his driver’s license, being an uninsured motorist and having a switched tag. In an interview, he said that Foster had caused a shoulder injury that still requires treatment.

“It was a traumatic, traumatic experience,” he said.

‘Why are you beating me up?’

Experts who reviewed the footage said that Foster appeared to have escalated some situations without cause or warning.

One night in 2023, he stopped a man named Jonathan Fields on the side of a highway over an improper vehicle tag. Footage from the incident was captured on the squad car’s dashboard camera.

Foster asks if Fields has a gun in the car. He says that he does, and Foster asks where it is. (Mississippi is an open carry state.)

In his incident report, Foster wrote that Fields had “grabbed the firearm.” The action isn’t clear from the footage, but Fields can be heard saying, “I was just trying to show you where it’s at.”

Audio from the footage captures Foster berating and cursing at Fields for touching the gun. Then, the officer tells him to step out of his Chevrolet sedan. When Fields doesn’t immediately exit, seven seconds later, Foster draws his gun and points it at Fields until he complies, the footage shows.

A few moments later, Foster tells Fields not to move while he questions him about having marijuana in the car. When Fields takes a few steps toward his car, a second deputy tells him to stop. When he does, the officer tries to handcuff him, Fields waves his hands away, and Foster tackles him to the ground.

In his incident report, Foster later wrote that the man had “ripped” his arms away from the other deputy.

Foster punches Fields at least 14 times while the other officer holds him down. “Why are you beating me up?” Fields yells.

In his use-of-force report, Foster called his punches “distractive,” delivered when he felt Fields tense his body, which he interpreted as part of an effort to fight back.

Steffey, the law professor, noted that Foster began striking Fields before asking him for his hands.

“That looks like assault,” Steffey said.

Another night, in 2023, Foster pulled over an Uber driver for failing to dim his high beams. Footage shows officers eventually ordering a passenger out of the car, too, after Foster said he smelled marijuana.

Then, all of a sudden, Foster shoves the passenger face down toward the hood of a squad car, grabbing the back of his neck.

The second officer pulls the man’s hands above his head while instructing him to put his hands behind his back. In the ensuing struggle, Foster punches him at least six times, including before giving the man any clear commands.

Barbara Attard, a policing consultant and former Independent Police Auditor for the city of San Jose, said Foster’s use of force that day was “totally inappropriate” and “excessive.”

Four months later, Foster arrived at a scene where two other officers were trying to get a man out of his car in his driveway. Within 13 seconds of arriving, Foster opens the door and pulls the unarmed man from his vehicle, tackling him to the ground, dashboard camera footage shows.

Foster later curses at the man for attempting to record the interaction on his cellphone.

‘Can you please stop cussing?’

By the time Foster started working in Senatobia, the city of roughly 8,400 people — 40 percent of whom are Black — was already reeling from a string of policing controversies.

In 2023, the city’s chief of police, who is white, was caught on camera barging into a Black man’s home and choking him. The chief at the time said officers had believed a fleeing suspect to a shooting was hiding there. The same year, the department faced criticism after its officers arrested a 10-year-old Black boy for urinating in a parking lot. The chief said that officers had violated their training.

The following year, two Black teenage girls accused the chief of shouting “get your Black ass out of the road” when he arrested them outside a public housing complex. The year after that, a Black woman was thrown to the ground by an officer after she parked in a handicapped spot in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen was later killed. City leadership voted to remove the chief.

So when news broke in June that a white officer had killed a Black toddler in a dispute over shoplifting, many residents saw the incident as part of a pattern of racist policing. 

Things intensified in August when The Times, Mississippi Today and Verite News obtained internal department complaints alleging that Foster had used racially offensive language toward his colleagues. In September, we revealed the police chief at the time had routinely used racist slurs in texts to a colleague. That chief was pushed out too.

Experts noted that Foster frequently stopped Black motorists over minor infractions, like not having a license plate light, then accused them of drug use before searching them and their cars. Those actions carry the hallmarks of pretextual stops, which some states have placed heavy restrictions on, though not Mississippi.

Experts agreed that the most problematic incident they reviewed was in response to a domestic call in early May that was captured on body-worn camera footage and recently obtained by reporters.

Within a minute of arriving at a home in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Senatobia, where a woman had accused her child’s father of hitting her, Foster launches into an expletive-filled tirade.

Upon learning the man accused of assault had left, Foster immediately raises his voice at her and other women standing outside, who are Black, calling them a “bunch of motherfuckers.”

“Can you please stop cussing?” Kenesha Herron, the mother of the man who had left, asks. “No, ’cause I’m sick of this shit,” he says.

He accuses the group of women, who are standing with two children, of trying to hide the man. “I’m tired of y’all doing this,” Foster says.

“Tired of who doing what?” Kenesha Herron, the man’s mother, asks, having interpreted Foster’s comment as being racially motivated. She later said in an interview that she had “never felt so openly hated” because of her skin color.

Moments later, Foster tells other officers he’s sick of “this place,” adding another expletive, video shows.

“He’s the kind of officer that is to blame for the fact that communities of color have no confidence in public safety,” said Gennaco, the former civil rights prosecutor.

Foster’s body-worn camera footage shows him apologizing to Herron after their altercation. “I’m sorry for being loud with you,” he says. “Sometimes things get heated.”

Sheelagh McNeill of The New York Times and Julie Lee of Mississippi Today contributed reporting.

A Times analysis and review by experts found that the police officer who opened fire on a vehicle, killing 1-year-old Kohen Wiley in Senatobia, violated basic policing protocols and his department’s use-of-force policy.

If Democrat Scott Colom ultimately wins Mississippi’s closely contested U.S. Senate race, upsetting Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, he needs to send a special thank you to the Memphis suburb of DeSoto County.

Surprisingly, it appears Colom will win DeSoto County, long viewed as one of the state’s Republican strongholds. But more important than the DeSoto victory for Colom is the vote totals in the county.

In the 2024 presidential election, Republican Donald Trump garnered 48,064 votes in DeSoto County to 29,023 for Democrat Kamala Harris.

When all the votes from Tuesday’s election are finally counted in the coming days, Colom will ultimately match Harris’ vote total in DeSoto County or fall just short of it. By the same token, Hyde-Smith garnered fewer than 25,000 votes in DeSoto County, significantly underperforming Trump. The last time she was on the ballot, in the presidential election year of 2020, Hyde-Smith performed as well as Trump in DeSoto County, winning more than 40,000 votes.

Put simply, if she had performed as well this year as she did in 2020 in that one county – DeSoto – she would not be staring at a potential history-making upset.

If he does win, Colom would be the first Democrat in Mississippi to win a U.S. Senate race since 1982 and the first challenger to upset an incumbent Mississippi senator since, gulp, 1942.

A long-running joke is the political prognosticator proclaiming to a spellbound audience that the outcome of the election would depend on turnout. All election outcomes depend on turnout.

But Tuesday’s Senate election in Mississippi really, no really, depended on turnout, and Scott Colom and his team should be credited for a campaign that turned out his voters for what could be one of the most improbable victories in the history of not only the state but the nation. Hyde-Smith was not able to turn out her voters at the same level.

It is no secret that midterm election turnout is generally much less than the turnout in presidential elections. The turnout for this year’s midterm in Mississippi is most likely record-breaking, nearing 1 million votes, but still more than 200,000 short of the turnout in the 2024 presidential election and more than 300,000 short of the total in the 2020 election.

The midterm turnout will be about 100,000 more than the 2023 Mississippi gubernatorial election in which incumbent Republican Tate Reeves beat Democrat Brandon Presley by about 25,000 votes.

DeSoto County provides the example of how Colom was able to exceed Presley’s performance. Colom got nearly 15,000 more votes than Presley in the county.

DeSoto is not the only reason for Colom’s stunningly strong performance, but it is the biggest factor.

And it should be noted that DeSoto County has long been a bit of an enigma when it comes to Mississippi electioneering.

DeSoto for years has been the fastest or one of the fastest-growing Mississippi counties, thanks in large part to Memphis transplants. While the county grew to one of the state’s largest, it also was home to a large number of low-propensity voters. The Tennessee transplants did not appear to take much of an interest in Mississippi elections.

In 1999, Ronnie Musgrove, Mississippi’s last Democratic governor, barely lost to Republican Mike Parker in DeSoto County by a vote of 9,301 to 9,144. But in 2003, Musgrove’s Republican challenger, Haley Barbour, recognized the potential of DeSoto County and spent an inordinate amount of time campaigning in the Memphis suburb. Then-President George W. Bush campaigned for Barbour in DeSoto County. Barbour’s work led to him defeating Musgrove in DeSoto by 18,689 votes to 8,876 votes.

With that performance, DeSoto was birthed as one of the state’s  Republican strongholds.

Trump captured more than 60% of the votes in DeSoto County in each of his three presidential campaigns and a high of 48,064 votes in 2024. Remember, Hyde-Smith won fewer than 25,000 votes there last week.

Outside of presidential elections, though, DeSoto countians still appear to have only a lukewarm interest in Mississippi elections and politicians.

That is most likely why Trump came to DeSoto in 2018 during Hyde-Smith’s initial Senate campaign to stump for her.

This year, Trump opted to go to Corinth in northeast Mississippi instead of DeSoto County on the northwest side of the  state to campaign for Hyde-Smith.

Perhaps that decision was the wrong one. Or perhaps, Trump’s policies are unpopular even in what is believed to be a Republican stronghold like DeSoto County.

In the days before the midterms Tuesday, a coalition of the nation’s leading civil rights groups warned Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson he needed to reinstate any voters inactivated by his office’s deployment of unverified credit bureau data by Election Day. He never responded.

In the wake of that decision, an unknown number of eligible voters arrived at the polls Tuesday, only to find what has happened in nearly every federal election since Mississippi’s first experiments with Experian’s information two years ago: Properly registered voters had been mistakenly inactivated after the secretary of state provided local election officials with inaccurate address lists pulled from commercial data.

The letter the coalition sent Watson, obtained by Mississippi Today, warned the state’s top elections official that known errors in the data could threaten to disrupt voting in the midterms.

Elections experts say the errors now open up more room for uncertainty in ruby-red Mississippi’s razor-thin U.S. Senate race, as Democratic candidate Scott Colom’s narrow lead threatens to unseat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in what would be an historic upset. Local election officials are steeling themselves for more days of counting thousands of affidavit ballots, which include votes cast by inactive registrants, after a surge in inactivations left over 230,000 voters statewide inactive by Election Day.

County election officials said many wrongful inactivations trace to Watson’s $50,000 deal with Experian in 2024 to supply the company’s unverified address data to all 82 counties. From there, election commissioners would use the information to identify and inactivate voters who may have moved. It marked the first time that the state turned to anything other than government data, primarily records from the U.S. Postal Service, to accomplish the routine task of cleaning the voter rolls.

When the secretary of state’s office began sending out address lists from the data to every county last year, Watson’s office announced the deal would “strengthen the integrity of elections.” But Mississippi Today uncovered in March that errors in Experian’s data went unverified at every stage of the voter-roll maintenance process, resulting in properly registered voters discovering they had been mistakenly inactivated.

To prevent these issues from arising during the midterms, the coalition of national and state civil rights groups — including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU of Mississippi and the Southern Poverty Law Center — sent a list of demands to Watson and Laura Henderson-Courtney, senior attorney of the secretary of state’s elections division, four days before the midterms. Their top demand was that the secretary of state’s office “protect” voters by reinstating by Election Day anyone inactivated based on Experian’s data.

“Mississippi voters did everything the law asked of them,” the coalition wrote to Watson, who is currently running for lieutenant governor. “We urge your office to do the same, and to restore them to the rolls before they go to the polls Tuesday.”

The groups also urged the secretary of state’s office to preserve inactive voters’ access to the ballot box by giving the poll managers and local officials responsible for conducting the midterm elections written instructions to ensure inactive voters were provided with affidavit ballots, as state law requires. 

“The voters on this list did nothing wrong,” the letter stated. “Restoring them to active status does not weaken list integrity.”

The secretary of state’s office did not respond to any of the groups’ demands, according to records obtained by Mississippi Today. Neither Watson nor his office agreed to an interview with the news organization, but Assistant Secretary of State Liz Jonson acknowledged that the office received the coalition’s letter.

“The ACLU, nor any other third party, have the authority to dictate applicable state and federal laws regarding elections in Mississippi,” Jonson wrote in an email. “Per state law, the Statewide Election Management System (SEMS) is currently in a blackout period thus no systemic voter roll maintenance is allowed.”

While Mississippi law bars officials from inactivating or purging voters 90 days before a federal election, it places no such restrictions on correcting voters to active status.

Voter records and local election officials have both confirmed that errors followed the secretary of state’s decision to introduce Experian’s data, but on Friday, Watson stopped short of acknowledging the known errors as anything more than a possibility in an interview with the Magnolia Tribune. 

“The state did move to commercial data for voter roll maintenance, and I’ve seen some folks saying it was bad data,” Watson said. “Was some of the data off? Perhaps.”

After months of warning signs, problems mount on Election Day

By the afternoon of Election Day, problems quickly emerged: Voters discovered their names were missing from poll books, election hotlines sounded off with questions from inactive voters, and the local officials running the polls said they were overwhelmed with the influx.

Amid the chaos, Watson took to Facebook to respond to concerns posted by a Lee County election commissioner.

Four hours after the polls had opened, Election Commissioner Jamie Gunnells, who oversees the Tupelo area, was seeing so many voters learn they were inactive that he posted a warning on Facebook alerting anyone else coming out to vote about the situation. 

He told constituents there was a “major disruption” at the polls due to what he called the “Experian fiasco:” A set of “old” address data that the secretary of state provided earlier this year for voter-roll maintenance had made “many” voters inactive.

Gunnells told Mississippi Today he felt he needed to get the information out before more inactive voters were blindsided at the polls. As he cycled among the three polling places in his district, his 13-hour Election Day shift was filled with confusion, anger and fear from voters who were surprised to find they were inactive. 

He said some voters were so frustrated about the issue that they left the polls without casting an affidavit ballot.

In response to Gunnells’ Facebook post, Watson stated that the responsibility for errors in the data fell on election commissioners like him.

“Ultimately, no matter what data is sent to the election commissioners, you should understand your job is to verify the information before acting upon it,” Watson replied. “That said, our goal is to send you the best information available, and we did so.”

Mississippi is a bottom-up state for elections, meaning the actual work of cleaning voter rolls and marking voters as inactive falls to county election commissioners. Under state law, however, the secretary of state is legally responsible for training these county officials to do that job.

Gunnells and other election commissioners said the secretary of state never cautioned them beforehand that they should check the list of addresses pulled from Experian’s data for errors, leaving them to discover the mistakes after voters had already been inactivated.

When Watson’s office announced its partnership with Experian, the office wrote that the deal would “bring a new level of reliable data” to the voter rolls. But records released by the secretary of state’s office show that in the contract for the deal, Watson’s office signed off on Experian’s disclaimers that the company couldn’t guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data.

“He started pointing figures at us: ‘We should have verified the data that they sent to us,’” Gunnells said. “I mean, how are we gonna verify it?”

Even more voters mistakenly inactivated

The issues that emerged during the midterms came as no surprise to voters like Thomas Minor and Heather Williams, who discovered in the primaries that they had been mistakenly inactivated. Address lists the secretary of state pulled from Experian’s data incorrectly flagged they had moved.

The list placed Williams at an address she hadn’t lived at in years. Minor had lived in Itawamba County his whole life, but the list said he resided 160 miles away, in a Delta town he had never stepped foot in.

In the voting-rights coalition’s letter to Watson last week, the groups outlined both voters’ cases as proof of the known errors tied to the secretary of state’s decision to introduce Experian’s data. 

“He could have rectified some of this stuff and made the process a lot easier,” Minor said. “They should have learned their lesson back then.

“It makes me think he doesn’t care about the voting process.”

Harya Tarekegn, the director of advocacy and policy for an organization in the coalition, the Mississippi Center for Justice, said in a press conference Friday that she believes many affidavit ballots in the midterms were cast by voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data.

One of them was Starkville resident Kailyn Lott. Eight months after what happened to Minor, Lott said she encountered a strikingly similar situation when she showed up to vote for the midterms Tuesday. She learned that she was marked inactive when she came to vote at the same fire station where she voted in her first election, the 2024 presidential contest.

When she got to the polling place, she discovered her name was missing from the poll book. She was inactive.

As she waited in line for an affidavit ballot, she said she saw more and more people encounter the same issue. At the front of the line, she discovered what caused the problem in her case: Her voter registration listed her address as her parents’ house in Pontotoc County, which she said is linked to an old credit card she opened as a kid.

Voter records from the secretary of state’s office show county election officials originally inactivated Lott last year due to address conflicts, a month after Watson’s office provided them with a list of addresses pulled from Experian’s data.

Despite the confusion, Lott was adamant about her right to vote. She showed poll workers her voter ID card and ultimately cast an affidavit ballot. But she’s worried others weren’t so lucky.

“When people hear stuff like this, it definitely deters them from voting because it just further instills in their mind that it doesn’t matter if they go and vote,” Lott said. 

Minor said in his case, his inactive status ultimately kept him from casting a ballot during the primaries — marking the first time he’s missed an election in 12 years. While poll workers provided him with a ballot envelope, he said they failed to give him the affidavit ballot itself for him to fill out his vote.

It was his first time going through the process, and in his confusion and rush to get to his job at north Mississippi’s Toyota car plant, he thought he had done everything he needed to vote.

It wasn’t until after he left the polls that he realized he never filled out a ballot.

Watson posted on social media Friday that the affidavit process exists as a “safety net” to correct “errors” made by election commissioners and preserve inactive voters’ right to the ballot box. 

“We have implemented every available resource to ensure our elections are secure, and to ensure we do not have dead people, illegal aliens, people with false addresses, or nonresidents voting in our elections,” Watson stated. “It may take voters a little longer for final results to come in, but it will result in more accurate voter rolls which will speed up the process in the future and decrease opportunities for voter fraud in MS.”

But to voting rights advocates, Minor’s experience is a testament to how inactivation can threaten eligible voters’ right to the ballot box, especially when they’re not aware of the affidavit process.

“The State cannot walk away from an unreliable data source while leaving in place every inactivation that source produced,” the voting rights groups stated in their letter last week.

Consequences beyond the midterms

Under state law, any voters inactivated by the data are now on the path to have their voter registrations purged if they don’t correct their status with their county’s circuit clerk or vote within two federal general elections — a period of about two to three years. Once a voter is purged, they need to reregister before their ballot will count again.

Now that the midterm elections have passed, the door has opened up for election commissioners to begin purging some of the first voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data. These voters were marked inactive in early 2024 in Lafayette County, where the secretary of state first experimented with using Experian’s data to clean the voter rolls.

Watson called the pilot a “success,” and it cleared the way for his office to expand the use of Experian’s data to all voters on the state’s rolls.

But Mississippi Today found errors emerged from the data during those early tests, resulting in the inactivation of properly registered voters. One was Jordan Jones Higginbotham, an Ole Miss student who discovered she was inactive before the 2024 primaries after an address list that the secretary of state drew from Experian’s data incorrectly placed her in Madison County.

Any Lafayette County voters in this experiment who were inactivated before the 2024 presidential election and who have not voted since then are now on the board to be purged. The voting-rights groups demanded Watson to agree by next Friday to halt any purges of voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data and to stop using any unverified address data from a commercial broker on the voter rolls.

Jonson wrote that the secretary of state’s office would respond to the coalition’s letter in “keeping with our standard operating procedure.” She did not answer questions from Mississippi Today about whether the office would act on the groups’ demands.

But as the country turns its eyes to Mississippi’s Senate race and the candidates’ campaigns gear up for a legal battle over the vote count, the coalition remains hopeful for change.

“One of the unintended benefits of all of this chaos is that it shines a light on how antiquated election administration is in Mississippi,” said Amir Badat, the Mississippi voting rights attorney with Fair Fight Action who represented the groups in the letter. “That’s going to be critical for us to be able to advocate for improvements to the system.”

Last week, the secretary of state’s office said it has stopped providing Experian’s data for voter roll maintenance, although the office did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about exactly when or why the partnership ended.

The secretary of state’s office wrote in a statement to WAPT that it had switched to IDI Data, a smaller company that brokers information drawn from a variety of sources — including the major credit bureaus and government records — to help customers track people down.

On Election Day, Watson posted on Facebook that his office had a “new vendor with more features and info than the last.” But voting rights groups remain unconvinced that errors will no longer emerge just because the secretary of state’s deal with Experian has ended.

“That decision speaks for itself,” the coalition wrote to Watson last week. “If Experian’s data is not reliable enough to use going forward, it was never reliable enough to strip Mississippians of active status and subject them to potential removal.”

You can check your voter registration status and track your affidavit ballot on the secretary of state’s website at yallvote.ms.

Warring lawyers and advocates swarmed election offices across Mississippi on Friday to continue watching poll workers count outstanding ballots in the state’s U.S. Senate race.  

With all but one other U.S. Senate race across America already decided, the nation has fixed its attention on the Magnolia State nail-biter between Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic challenger Scott Colom. Local election officials continued processing thousands of outstanding absentee and affidavit ballots.

The narrow margin between Hyde-Smith and Colom has already shocked many across the nation, but it remained too close to call on Friday. Colom led by nearly 2,500 votes with nearly 1 million votes cast.

READ MORE: 2026 Mississippi election results

At a press conference in front of the state Capitol in Jackson on Friday, a coalition of voting rights organizations called for transparency in the counting of remaining ballots, but urged the public not to disrupt the process.  

Harya Tarekegn, the director of advocacy and policy for the Mississippi Center for Justice, said there were about 20,000 affidavit ballots —​​ called “provisional ballots” in many other states — cast in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race. 

Tarekegn told Mississippi Today there were about 2,100 affidavit ballots in north Mississippi’s DeSoto County, a traditional Republican stronghold where Colom currently leads by six percentage points, an illustration of Colom’s massive inroads in areas dominated by the GOP.

“What are Republican areas? DeSoto County, they said that was a Republican area. We won,” Colom said. 

Tarekegn also said on Friday there were 1,667 affidavit ballots left in Rankin County, where Hyde-Smith leads, and 1,931 in Madison County, another often Republican-voting county where Colom holds a narrow lead. 

But Hinds County, the state’s most populous area and a Democratic stronghold, is “the big enchilada,” Colom’s supporters note. Election officials told Mississippi Today they expected the counting of affidavits to continue through the weekend ahead of a Nov. 13 deadline.

Media, allies and observers from both campaigns flocked to the Hinds County Election Commission’s downtown Jackson office on Friday, filming commissioners as they processed ballots by hand.

Ray Chambers, attorney for the Hinds County Election Commission, didn’t want to speculate on a timeline beyond noting the deadline.  

“I predict they’ll be done in time,” Chambers said.  

In the north Jackson suburb of Madison, the Madison County Election Commission posted a sign saying the commission started processing affidavit ballots a day after the election. But commissions across the state are not following a unified schedule. Instead, a patchwork of meetings across the state sent representatives of both candidates scrambling to observe the counting of the ballots that will decide the Mississippi Senate race. 

Mississippi has a “bottom-up” system of election administration, where 82 county circuit clerks and election commissions are responsible for processing their own affidavit and absentee ballots. 

They are required to process the ballots and transmit the results to Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office by Nov. 13. 

Tarekegn said the election commission meetings are open to the public, but the public should not disrupt or publicly challenge decisions made by election officials. 

She also said voters who cast affidavit ballots only need to return to their local circuit clerk’s offices if they experienced voter ID issues at their polling place so that they can present a valid ID. 

The campaigns for Hyde-Smith and Colom have both said they believe they have a path to win the election.  

Hyde-Smith said on Friday that her campaign is not backing down and that the election was not over. She has not made any public appearance or scheduled a press conference since Tuesday’s election. One of her few public statements since the election was published in a social media post written in the third person.  

Touring a Black-owned bookstore on Jackson’s historic Farish Street, Colom on Friday stopped short of calling on her to concede the race, but he said she needs to answer questions from the public and the media as she continued trailing in the election results. 

“She’s still our senator,” Colom said. “Where is she? Why is she not doing any interviews? Why can’t she explain what her pathway to success is?” 

Upbeat and optimistic on Friday, Colom outlined what his early legislative priorities would be in Congress and, promoting Marshall’s Bookstore, told reporters about his affinity for the works of authors Leo Tolstoy and Robert Caro.  

A possible legal fight over the count also continued brewing Friday, a day after the fundraising arm of the Senate Republicans demanded election officials around the state separate and preserve affidavit ballots. 

In response, the Colom campaign sent a letter claiming the Republican group’s request was illegal and violated voters’ right to privacy. Once affidavit votes are accepted and counted, they are supposed to be treated like other ballots, and not have anyone’s name attached. State and federal courts have upheld voters’ right to privacy and secret ballots.

Lawyers for Mississippi’s foster care system and attorneys representing the children who’ve lived inside it will each have 40 minutes to argue early next year if  the state’s child welfare system still needs continued federal safety oversight. 

The hearing, scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Jan. 25 in Jackson, signals the next iteration of the Olivia Y. v. Barbour federal lawsuit — a decades-old case in which lawyers alleged that Mississippi children, like then-three-year-old Olivia Y., were unconstitutionally endangered in the state’s foster care system. 

In 2008, attorneys for both sides agreed to court-mandated monitoring of Mississippi’s child welfare system. Monitoring requirements have changed since then, but versions of the oversight have remained. Reports from the monitors have consistently found dangerous conditions in the system. 

In May, lawyers for Gov. Tate Reeves and Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services Commissioner Andrea Sanders filed a motion to end this court oversight. They wrote that the state had taken the necessary steps to guarantee foster children’s rights to reasonably safe living arrangements “now and in the future.”

That statement was scrutinized in July, when the court monitoring group Public Catalyst published its 2025 report of conditions within Mississippi’s child welfare agency. The group found that the department had met just 22 of 107 applicable safety measures. Failed measures included the rate of foster child abuse within the system and social workers placing children in unlicensed homes, like hotel rooms.

Sanders and Marcia Lowry, the lead plaintiff lawyer representing Mississippi foster children, have each publicly defended their positions since. Sanders, at an October legislative budget hearing, said meeting all the measurements of the federal monitoring is unrealistic. Lowry told Mississippi Today in September that lawyers for the state Child Protection Services Department had already agreed to meet them.

Now, each party will make their case in early 2027 to U.S. Chief District Judge Halil S. Ozerden, who’s overseen the lawsuit since 2020.

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful ideas to be shared about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.  

Voters elected Johnny DuPree to the Mississippi Senate. His 2025 win marked the first time that Hattiesburg residents would have a Black senator representing them in Jackson, even though over half of the city’s population is Black. Now, because of machinations with the legislative map, that representation could be in jeopardy.

DuPree may be one of the first Black politicians to bear the brunt of the Supreme Court’s consequential April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. But he won’t be the last. An NPR analysis predicts that post Callais redistricting could portend the largest drop in Black representation across the country since the collapse of Reconstruction.

Some politicians are already sharpening their knives. Gov. Tate Reeves has said it is a matter of when, not if, the tenure ends for Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is the sole Black member of the state’s congressional delegation holding one of Mississippi’s four House seats.

In Mississippi, like in many other states in he aftermath of the Callais U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a state-level Voting Rights Act has  been introduced in the Legislature. However, voter suppression policies aimed at Black voters, along with hostile  majorities in the state’s legislative chambers, make the legislation’s pathway for enactment incredibly narrow.

DuPree’s district only had a Black majority because a federal court found that parts of the state’s 2022 legislative maps violated the Voting Rights Act. The 2025 maps sought to correct a historic injustice. With that map likely gone because of Callais, the Black majority district it created could be wiped away too. For DuPree, the erasure is unsurprising given the state’s tradition of voter suppression.

In an October interview, he quipped, “here we go again.”

Black Mississippians have been saying some version of that since 1890. In an interview earlier this year, community organizers Oleta Fitzgerald and Phaedra Robinson told Human Rights Watch, “Courts are stacked, the Legislature is stacked. It’s always been a fight for us in Mississippi, and it feels like they want to go back to the good old days.”

The legislative maps are one front, but not the only one. Take a look at Section 241 of the state Constitution, which was drafted back in 1890 to codify Jim Crow era restrictions. That constitutional section imposes a lifetime bar on voting for crimes the delegates believed Black people were more likely to commit.

In 2022, the full U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed the original provision was “steeped  in racism” but upheld it anyway.

The Sentencing Project estimates at least 43,700  Black Mississippians couldn’t vote in the 2024 elections because of that rule. Getting your vote back takes a governor’s pardon or a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. Between 2000 and  2015, only 335 people managed to claw back their right to vote.

That’s not all.

Mississippi ranks dead last nationally in the Cost of Voting Index, which measures how hard states make it to vote. The state requires photo identification at the polls, offers no early voting for most residents and no online registration.

Following the adoption of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, near-universal registration among Black eligible voters dropped to around 7% and stayed that way until 1964. Within three years of the Voting Rights Act, nearly 60% of Black Mississippians were registered. Black Mississippians still register at rates among the highest in the country. That progress came from federal enforcement action and the Voting Rights Act. Those federal protections are exactly what Trump administration policies and Supreme Court rulings have been dismantling.

Within  hours of the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted parts of the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi announced it would move forward with restrictive voter ID rules. It also requires notarizing  both absentee ballot applications and ballot envelopes.

A new law Gov. Reeves signed in April called the SHIELD Act took effect July 1. It lets local officials demand a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers from applicants and current voters whose citizenship they cannot confirm. Those documents cost money and time. Rural and low-income Mississippians, many of them Black women running households, often don’t have either to spare.

The U.S. has human rights obligations under international law that point the way back onto a better path. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has said that drawing electoral boundaries should not distort the distribution of voters or discriminate against any group.

 In 2014 it also said the US “should ensure that all states reinstate voting rights to felons who have fully served their sentences.” The Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination prohibit laws with racially discriminatory effects even when they look neutral.

Mississippi organizers have outlasted worse. Medgar Evers was shot in his own driveway in 1963 after a meeting about voter registration.

Today, Black women across this state are the ones knocking on doors and arranging childcare, so mothers and grandmothers can get to the polls.

As the winds at the federal level shift, it’s all the more important to pass the Mississippi Voting Rights Act, which would enshrine powerful and critical voting rights protections into state law. 

Henry Hicks is a consultant at Human Rights Watch.

Cassandra Welchlin is the executive director & co-convener of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable.