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Anthony “Tony” Smith filed an appeal Tuesday with the Mississippi Supreme Court of a judge’s ruling that could put his Hinds County supervisor seat in jeopardy.

Smith told Mississippi Today that he had no comment on the matter for the time being, but that a big announcement regarding the matter would come “in the next few days.”

Smith, who is the current District 2 supervisor, filed the appeal in response to a recent ruling that would require Smith to rerun for his seat against David Archie, who was seeking a second term in 2023 and claimed fraud in that year’s Democratic primary.

It is unclear how the appeal may affect the upcoming special election between David Archie and Smith. The election is set for July 14.

Special Judge Barry Ford, who oversaw the case, stated in his ruling on June 3 that there would not be a stay in the election, meaning any stay would have to be granted by the Supreme Court in order to pause the election. Warren Martin, who represents Smith, told Mississippi Today he believes the lengthy appeal process itself will postpone the election. 

“It’s June now. You’re looking at six months left, and then they’re gonna be gearing up for the new election for that seat for 2027,” Martin said. “So he may run out of time, but if he does, there’s nothing we did to delay the process.”

The typical appeals process takes several months. Circuit Clerk Zack Wallace would have to ready the record, then court transcripts from the initial court case would have to be gathered. If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, it would enter a briefing schedule and both sides would have several weeks to reply to the briefs. 

Ford had stated in his ruling that the process would be expedited, saying, “Everything is on fast track and I’m in control of the track.” However, now that the appeal has been filed primarily it’s up to the Supreme Court to determine how quickly the matter is solved. 

Martin said he believes the court will overturn Ford’s initial ruling as it was “fraught with error.”

“There are so many errors in the final opinion and I don’t think it can’t be helped but to be reminded by reversal,” Martin said. “So, we’ll see what happens.”

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share their ideas 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.   

Mississippi lawmakers are talking about redistricting again, but this time it’s not legislative districts that are at issue. Both chambers of the Legislature have proposed or are studying potential changes to the state’s school district map through consolidation.

A select committee of the House is looking at the issue. A bill, sponsored by Sen. Education Chair Dennis DeBar during the 2026 session, proposed obtaining information on district size, population, administrative costs and the potential pros and cons of consolidating existing districts.

These are important questions, but they are not the only ones that policymakers should be asking. School system redistricting can achieve much more than efficiency, as New America shows in a recent report, Redrawing the Lines, that features Mississippi. The right boundaries can also be the key to achieving funding fairness and helping Mississippi make good on the promises of its new school funding system.

The Mississippi Student Funding Formula, which passed in 2024 and is in its second year of implementation, is a major achievement. It represents a $200 million increase in support for public schools, and importantly, this investment is targeted to supporting the students and communities that need the most help.

The new formula recognizes the needs of students from low-income backgrounds with a per-pupil funding boost of 30%, up from a paltry 5% under the old system. It also systematically supports English learners for the first time, with a 15% funding bump, where before, Mississippi was one of only two states without specific funding for these students.

And the formula now meaningfully addresses community-level cost-drivers, including sparsity and concentrated poverty.

These are big wins on both the size of Mississippi’s school funding pie and the method for dividing it. The formula strongly signals the state’s priorities of ensuring that kids with all kinds of needs have access to a quality public education.

But ill-placed school district borders will undermine these goals. Conversely, the right district map can make sure that the state is able to make good on the formula’s promises.

How so?

A school district boundary outlines the school system: the neighborhoods from which local kids can go to district schools. But it also defines the area whose property taxes will support those schools. This makes the district boundary a powerful and underused tool of school funding policy.

If Mississippi lawmakers intentionally draw school district boundaries to encompass more neighborhoods with more equal property values, they can ensure that kids in every community receive a fairly funded education.

As an example, take the Yazoo City Municipal School District, which is surrounded on all sides by the Yazoo County School District. The child poverty rate in Yazoo City is a very high 57%. In Yazoo County, 37% of children live in poverty.

Despite the city district’s higher-need population, it has less money to spend. Between state and local dollars, Yazoo City had just over $11,700 per pupil last year, while Yazoo County had more than $15,300. Why the disparity, in the first year of a new funding system meant to give higher-need districts more funds?

It’s not because the new formula isn’t working. It’s because Yazoo County has more local dollars. The formula does indeed allot Yazoo City more state funding, about $8,790 per pupil to Yazoo County’s $6,490. But then come the property tax revenues.

The two districts have nearly identical tax rates at 51.25 and 51.3 mills, respectively, so the city residents are trying just as hard to support public schools. But Yazoo County has the advantage of much higher property values – an especially big advantage given Mississippi’s “27% rule,” which favors wealthy districts with a cap on the amount of local dollars that can be counted against a district’s state education aid.

Once local property tax dollars come in, the county is able to raise far more money per pupil, swamping the state’s efforts at matching funding to student needs. Even with the new formula, Yazoo City students wind up on the losing end, yet again.

It would be astronomically costly to cover the gap with more state funds. But what if Yazoo County School District’s local dollars weren’t fenced off by an ill-placed school district border? What if every kid attending schools within county limits – even those living within Yazoo City itself – got a fair share of its property tax revenues? And what if all schoolkids throughout Mississippi had access to their fair share of the state’s property wealth?

Our New America report shows that if Mississippi adopted a fully county-based school district map – no multi-district counties or carve-outs like the one for Yazoo City – the state would reduce these ground-level inequalities in per-student property wealth by 18.5%.

If lawmakers mandated a more extensive set of consolidations, chosen not only for their efficiency but also for their fairness, Mississippi’s school districts could reduce ground-level tax-base inequality by 57.5%.

We also model an alternative map, drawn from scratch to maximize gains instead of starting from current boundaries, that could improve tax-base equality between districts by an astonishing 81.6%. With the right district lines, it is absolutely possible to give Mississippi kids their fair share of local funding.

Mississippi has invested so much in its kids’ education, but too much of that investment is falling through the cracks between unequal school districts. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Through school system redistricting, the state can make good on the Mississippi Student Funding Formula promise of getting the most education dollars to the kids and communities that are most in need of support.

The Legislature is already talking about it. Let’s make sure they’re having the right kind of redistricting conversation, one that considers not just efficiency, but also ensuring that the state’s school funding system can meet the needs of kids and communities.

Zahava Stadler is project director of the Education Funding Equity initiative at New America. Her work focuses on the policies that govern how school funding is raised and distributed, and how those policies affect the equity of the public education system. Before joining New America, Stadler worked on state school funding policy at The Education Trust. Previously, Stadler served as director of policy at EdBuild, which advised Mississippi lawmakers on an earlier attempt to revise the school funding system.

Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas rank among the lowest in the country on child well-being, according to the latest KIDS COUNT Data Book released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Advocates across all three states said the path forward requires not just good policy, but the political will to fund it.

Deep South Today on Monday convened a virtual forum, which was sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to examine what the 2026 data reveals about children in the region. It was the first in a planned series of events called Families Count in the Deep South.

Leslie Boissiere, vice president of external affairs at the foundation, walked attendees through the latest data book, which pulled together outcomes across dozens of data points to create overall state rankings. Mississippi ranked 50th in the country, Louisiana ranked 48th, and Arkansas ranked 43rd.

The picture is more complicated than the rankings alone suggest. Despite their low overall standings, Mississippi and Louisiana improved in overall well-being year-over-year. Boissiere credited state-level literacy legislation in both states for the gains.

“When leaders invest in policies that support children, children do well,” she said.

On the ground, advocates said the data largely matched what they see daily. Keesa Smith-Brantley, executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, tied the state’s declining rankings directly to more than a decade of tax cuts she said have stripped over $2.5 billion from state general revenue.

“Putting it just as bluntly as I can, it won’t happen for free,” Smith-Brantley said of the investments needed to reverse course. “We have to have not just the will but the dollars behind it to see change.”

Ashley Parker Shiels, CEO of the Children’s Foundation of Mississippi, celebrated the Magnolia State’s education gains while urging against complacency. She noted that 51% of Mississippi children ages 3 and 4 are not in any early childhood education setting, and that the state still ranks last in the country on health indicators. She also flagged that Mississippi’s average teacher pay remains the lowest in the nation.

“Two things can be true,” she said. “We can celebrate the success and it is real and powerful to see the progress … and we also have to acknowledge there’s more work to do and we can’t rest easy on the fact that there’s been improvement. If anything, that has to motivate us to continue this in the other sectors.” 

In Louisiana, Teresa Falgoust, chief data and impact officer at Agenda for Children, said solutions for reducing child poverty are already known. She pointed to the federally expanded child tax credit during the pandemic, which drove child poverty to historic lows before expiring. The challenge, she said, is less about finding solutions than sustaining the political will to fund them.

“There’s no better way to spend a dollar than on children and families,” Falgoust said. “That is literally the future of our country and the future of our state.”

All three panelists expressed concern about the potential impact of federal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and shared specific ideas for what policy changes would improve child well-being outcomes if adopted.

Deep South Today’s network includes Mississippi Today, Verite News, The Current, and the forthcoming Arkansas Today. In-person Families Count convenings are planned in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas later this year.

Watch the entire virtual conversation:

Mississippi’s Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council has selected the Denver-based health consulting firm Steadman Group to advise the committee’s grant application process for the upcoming cycle.

A state law passed in April instructed the council to contract with a third-party agency to help run its opioid settlement grant review process. Lawmakers appropriated $400,000 to Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office for the contract.

Dr. JK Costello, Steadman’s behavioral health and consulting director, told Mississippi Today he expects the work in Mississippi to cost about $350,000. He said both the Attorney General’s Office and Steadman have the option of renewing the contract after this year, if the Legislature provides funding for it again. 

Steadman has contracted with South Dakota and Oklahoma to help those states manage opioid settlement dollars, and Costello said the organization has also worked with over 40 counties nationwide to help spend funds. He said he’s seen governments make thoughtful addiction response decisions, as well as short-sighted choices. 

“We’ve pretty much seen it all at this point,” said Costello, who is in addiction recovery himself. “There’ll always be something different, but I think it’s just been so helpful to have seen it before and dealt with it before.”

Mississippi started receiving payments from national opioid lawsuits in 2022, and those payments are expected to total $430 million by 2040. The settlements require Mississippi to spend about $300 million of that money to prevent future overdoses, and state lawmakers and Fitch allow the remainder to be spent on any public purpose. 

In spring 2025, after every other state had started spending settlement money on addressing addiction, Mississippi lawmakers passed a bill to create an opioid advisory council that oversees the $300 million portion. They tasked the council with creating a grant application for overdose prevention projects, reviewing all the responses and recommending which applications the Legislature should fund — all in around five months.

The council struggled to keep up with this tight timeline. Key instructions for organizations were initially missing from drafted documents, some council members publicly advocated for organizations they were affiliated with and application scores between subcommittees varied drastically. 

Citing these issues at the council’s last 2025 meeting, James Moore, a Hattiesburg recovery advocate and council member, called on the organization to look into outside help. Fitch, the council’s chair, praised lawmakers for passing the bill that instructed the council to contract with a group that could provide this help.

MaryAsa Lee, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, said Steadman was one of three applications the council received. She said Moore and Department of Mental Health Executive Director Wendy Bailey helped the office review the applications. 

The 2026 law says the third-party group will be responsible for administering an online application portal, providing technical assistance to applicants, creating methods for standardized scoring and evaluating the work organizations do with awarded settlement funds. 

Costello said Steadman expects to fulfill all these requirements, and it aims to build a more comprehensive opioid settlement online monitoring system in subsequent years.

“In year two, we’re hoping to move everything into this one-stop-shop,” he said. 

Costello said in his talks with the Mississippi Attorney General’s office, people raised issues with the grant proposal scoring discrepancy between different advisory council subcommittees. Steadman aims to address these issues with grade training before council members score applications, and statistical standardization adjustments after the applications have been assessed. 

The new law still assigns the advisory council with making the final state opioid settlement recommendations, and the Legislature decides which recommendations to approve or reject. It furthered lawmakers’ decision power over these funds, allowing them to change the amounts of money each applicant receives.

In a controversial move, the Legislature took broader authority than some advisory council members thought it would in deciding how the state would award its first opioid settlement dollars. When that happened, Moore said he worried whether the Legislature would listen to the advice of a third-party group. 

Costello said Steadman will accept however the Legislature chooses to consider his organization’s work. He said throughout the year, he will try to keep everyone involved with Mississippi’s opioid settlement distribution informed.

“Ultimately, we’ll deal with that when we come to it,” he said. 

Editor’s Note: Siegler will be a speaker at the 2026 National Opioid Settlement Conference, which is hosted by Steadman Group. Neither he nor Mississippi Today received compensation for this appearance.

The U.S. Department of Justice is intervening on behalf of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, claiming xAI is illegally operating gas turbines to power its data centers in Southaven and Memphis.

xAI on Monday asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that the NAACP does not have legal standing to sue. The DOJ, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Defense, also asked the court to dismiss the case.

“The state urges you to take immediate action to intervene and protect these vital state and national interests,” Reeves said in a letter to the court.

Last summer, xAI began operating 18 mobile and temporary turbines in Southaven and has since upped the number to 57, according to recent court filings. Southaven residents say that nearly constant noise coming from xAI’s turbines is intolerable. In a separate class action lawsuit against xAI, residents detail how the noise has disrupted their daily routines, caused them to lose sleep and lowered their property values.

In Mississippi, mobile generators do not need an air permit if they operate for less than a year.  The Southern Environmental Law Center, which is representing the NAACP, says that the turbines are polluting the air and should require a permit. They have asked the court to stop xAI from operating the generators until it gets air permits for them. 

xAI is using the mobile turbines until it finishes constructing a permanent power plant, which will be early next year according to court documents. In March, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality approved air permits for xAI to build permanent gas turbines at the site. 

Reeves wrote that xAI’s $20-billion investment in Mississippi data centers will create thousands of jobs and prevent electricity rates from going up for other customers. He said that if the state granted the NAACP’s request to shut down the turbines it would create an “immediate and substantial disruption to the state’s economy.” In January, when the investment was announced, Reeves said it was the largest economic development project in the state’s history.

Both Reeves and Stanley said that stopping the turbines would pose a national security risk and threaten U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence. 

Stanley said that xAI’s AI model, Grok Gov Mode, “provides critical support” for the U.S. military and was used in recent attacks against Iran. 

“If xAI is hindered from continuing to improve and upgrade Grok, including the Grok Gov Model, (the military’s) ability to meet its national security mission and keep pace with adversaries will be impaired,” Stanley said in the statement. 

The motions came just days after SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, went public last week with the largest initial public offering in history. 

In xAI’s motion to dismiss the case, the company argued that the NAACP cannot sue xAI on behalf of its members and that under the Clean Air Act states hold “primary responsibility” for implementing federal air quality standards. 

xAI also wrote that the Clean Air Act’s provision that allows individuals to sue a polluter for violating federal environmental law is unconstitutional. It argues that only the executive branch can enforce federal law. Other companies have tried to use this argument, including in two cases that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear last year. 

“At a time when the ultra-rich seem to be protected and supported by some of our government entities, it is important that polluting industries don’t get to benefit at the expense of the health of Black communities,” said Abre’ Conner, NAACP Director of Environmental and Climate Justice. “Laws like the Clean Air Act are a bedrock insurance policy for communities to hold polluters accountable for decisions that cause them harm.”

Update, 6/16/2026: This article has been updated from its initial version to include comments from an NAACP spokesperson.

STARKVILLE – When asked about a race, most people may think of cars. Starkville native Alden Thornhill thinks about dogs. 

The Starkville Derby is an annual festival of wiener dog races, attracting thousands of people to this college town.

The event — which was started by Thornhill in 2023 — was originally meant to fill a void between spring activities in the college town. However, it has since grown to become the world’s largest wiener dog racing event. 

“A lot of people just come up and see the day of and don’t realize the logistics that we start planning this thing back in December for late April or early May,” Thornhill said. “Its pretty incredible what my team can do and what we do when we get together.”

The multi-award winning event takes place every spring in the downtown Cotton District directly next to Mississippi State University. This year’s derby, on April 25, hosted over 315 dogs across 86 races. 

Maui and his owner Chino Nguyen traveled from Houston, Texas, to be a part of this year’s race. 

“It’s his first year racing in Starkville,” Nguyen said of Maui. “We’re just doing it for fun.”

While numbers have not been provided for this year’s attendance, Thornhill told Mississippi Today that it exceeded last year’s 80,000.

The Oktibbeha County Humane Society is the main beneficiary of the derby. The event raised over $75,000 for the nonprofit group this year. 

“They rescue dogs and this is a dog-centric event,” Thornhill said. “So it was a match made in canine heaven.”

The Oktibbeha County Humane Society  manages the Starkville animal shelter. It also provides low-cost spay and neuter operations, and it relocates animals to other areas where they might be more likely to be adopted, helping to serve more than 6,000 animals each year in north-central Mississippi.

The society’s executive director, Michele Anderson, said the derby has boosted awareness for the organization.

“I think the biggest impact that the derby has made, aside from the significant fundraising that it does for us each year, is just creating the awareness and getting the word out,” Anderson said. “We still get people that reach out and say they haven’t heard of us before.”

The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is looking into a police shooting that killed a 1-year-old boy in north Mississippi. 

Officers from the Senatobia Police Department and the Tate County Sheriff’s Department responded to a reported shoplifting Sunday afternoon at a Walmart on U.S. 51 and saw a car driving away, according to a statement from the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. Officers tried to stop the car, but DPS said the driver drove in the officers’ direction and almost hit one, leading an officer to fire at the car. 

After the shooting, the subjects took themselves to a local hospital, where the child died and another person was being treated for critical injuries, according to DPS and local reporting.

Family members identified the child as Kohen Wiley. They are questioning how the police response led to the toddler’s death and are looking for accountability. They dispute that the adults – the child’s mother and aunt – shoplifted diapers from the Walmart. 

“All we know is that a car was shot up and a 1-year-old baby was killed,” Carolyn Stokes, the boy’s great-grandmother, told Memphis TV station WMC. “And then nobody tells us anything like we’re not anybody.”

She and other family members could not be immediately reached for comment Monday.

In a statement after the shooting, Senatobia police said it is committed to full transparency. 

“As the investigation progresses and facts are verified, we will share as much information as possible,” the department wrote in the statement on Facebook. 

As of Monday, officials have not identified the adult driver of the car and passenger.

Tate County Sheriff Luke Shepherd declined to comment about the shooting Monday afternoon because MBI has taken over the investigation and he declined to say whether anyone has been charged in the shooting. He said the department is doing an independent investigation to determine whether any deputies will be placed on leave.

Police Chief Harold Vanderford was not immediately available for comment.

In a Monday statement, Walmart said it is saddened by the shooting death outside the Senatobia store and said the safety of staff and customers is a top priority. The company is also working with law enforcement during the investigation. 

Another example of how Senatobia police officers have interacted with children occurred in August 2023, when officers placed a 10-year-old boy in a police car and took him to the station for urinating behind his mother’s car in the parking lot of a lawyer’s office she was visiting. 

At the time, then-Police Chief Richard Chandler told news outlets  that the child was not handcuffed, but the boy’s mother said he was put into a jail cell.

Chandler said the officers violated training about how to handle children. He said one officer involved in the boy’s arrest was no longer employed with the department and the others would be disciplined. 

Months later, a youth court judge sentenced the boy to three months’ probation and assigned him to write a two-page book report about Kobe Bryant, the late basketball star. The child’s mother refused to sign the probation agreement after reading the full agreement reached by the child’s attorney and a special prosecutor. 

As of mid-June, at least 12 officer-involved shootings have occurred across Mississippi this year, according to news releases from DPS and local media. Children were not injured or killed in any of the earlier shootings this year. 

Missisisppi law enforcement officers have fatally shot at least four teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17 since 2022, according to records maintained by Mississippi Today. In the deaths, officers reported they believed the teens were involved in criminal activity. 

Law enforcement officers have also injured children in shootings, including then 11-year-old Aderrien Murry, who in May 2023 was hit in the chest and suffered a collapsed lung, fractured ribs and a lacerated liver. 

An Indianola police officer responded to his home when the boy helped his mother call for help about a former partner who was acting irate. A Sunflower County grand jury later declined to indict the officer for criminal charges. 

Update 6/15/26: This story has been updated to include a comment from the Tate County sheriff.

NATCHEZ — Adams County civil rights leader Barney Schoby has died. He was 87.

Schoby was the first Black man to serve on the Adams County Board of Supervisors, a position he held from 1974 to 1980.

He went on to serve in the Mississippi House of Representatives representing District 94 from 1980 to 1997, the first African American to serve this district in the state House.

“I am saddened by his passing,” said Natchez’s Phillip West. “He was a real warrior for trying to help bring about improvements in our community during a time when it was very difficult to do so. He was at the forefront of a lot of action that was taken, especially legal action, to improve the situation in our community. I really feel like a part of me has left. Both of us were out there when it was not good to be out there.”

West said if documented properly Schoby’s legacy is playing a key role in “getting us to where we are today. A lot of young people do not know the situations that existed during that day and time. A lot of people politically, from a civil rights perspective, stood up for what was correct and eventually, things got better because of his work and actions and leadership,” West said. “I am really sad about his passing. When you have been on the battlefield for so long, you recognize those who were with you and in front of you. Those are very meaningful kinds of things.”

West succeeded Schoby as representative in the state house for the 94th District.

State Rep. Robert Johnson III followed West and serves as the district’s representative today.

“At the time that Barney Schoby emerged as a leader, it wasn’t an easy time. It took courage to stand up to the status quo. He was revered as a pioneer, a fighter, a colloquial warrior for justice,” Johnson said. “And he was staunch in how he felt about issues. He was always very clear.”

Johnson said Schoby “cut the road and opened up that path that some of us followed. He left a legacy in Natchez as a supervisor, NAACP president and he has a revered legacy in the legislature. We will miss his wisdom and tenacity, but his spirit will continue because we all embody him right now.”

Natchez NAACP President and State NAACP Vice President Joyce Arceneaux Mathis had a different introduction to Schoby.

“I was first introduced to (him) in 1965 as my U.S. Government instructor at Sadie V. Thompson High School. Mr. Schoby was a passionate, dynamic and fiery teacher who embraced life with urgency, knowledge and a need to help his people no matter of the sacrifice he or his family had to make,” Mathis said. “He taught for 32 years with that same passion.

“Throughout my political career, I’ve stood on the shoulders of many pioneers who came before me and laid out a path for me to follow. Mr. Schoby was one of those leaders. He became the first Black supervisor to be elected in Adams County from 1974-1980. That political position was followed by being the first African American member of the House of Representatives elected from Adams County since Reconstruction.”

Even though Schoby worked relentlessly to represent Natchez and Adams County in the legislature, he remained connected to Natchez and the Natchez Community, she said.

In the late 1980s, Schoby became a co-plaintiff challenging a redistricting plan he alleged discriminated against Black voters. He was also intimately involved in the 1988-89 re-integration of schools in Natchez-Adams County.

In 2021, the Natchez Branch of the NAACP presented Schoby with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for his continued work on Civil Rights.

“This award respected Rep. Schoby’s courage, sacrifice and dedication to standing firm on the civil rights awarded to all people through the Constitution of the United States of America. This fierce fighter for the rights of others will be sincerely missed by the people of Natchez and Adams County,” Mathis said.

Schoby’s widow, Joyceria Pickett Schoby said Schoby died at his home in Natchez on Tuesday.

He was born in Liberty on Jan. 14, 1939, to Robert Hughes and Mary B. Schoby. Schoby and Joyceria married on Dec. 22, 1965.

Funeral services for Schoby were being held Monday at Mount Zion Baptist Church on Old Washington Road, with burial at Natchez City Cemetery.

This article is republished from the Natchez Democrat, with permission from the newspaper.

“Voter Voices” is a series of Mississippians sharing their thoughts on voting rights, the state’s history of voter suppression and the new gerrymandering push embroiling Mississippi, the South and the nation.

Since 1988, Bill Gray has been a poll watcher for various Mississippi political campaigns.

During that time, he has seen many Mississippians blocked from voting because they went to the wrong precinct. Sometimes this happened because the precinct had changed, and voters failed to receive notices. Sometimes voters missed the notices. Sometimes voters received incorrect notices.

Mississippi Today, after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Louisiana redistricting case gutted the federal Voting Rights Act, has solicited voters’ stories of their experiences as debate heats up here and nationwide over gerrymandering and voting rights.

In 2019, Gray worked as a poll watcher for the Jim Hood campaign for governor. While working at a Rankin County voting precinct, a man walked in wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.

Gray told the poll manager that the man couldn’t wear a hat like that, and the manager responded that the hat wasn’t political, he said. “And I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And so he gets the Rankin County election commissioner out there. Then he and I go at it because he’s telling me it’s not political.”

He questioned why the secretary of state is now using Experian credit data — and nothing else — to have local election officials clean up Mississippi’s voting rolls.

READ MORE: ‘We’re going backwards.’ Mississippians share experiences of voter suppression, dread of redistricting battle

The Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office spent $50,000 to run nearly 2 million checks of Experian’s unverified commercial data on registered voters, saying it did so to verify their addresses and help determine their status in a push starting last July to “strengthen the integrity of elections” statewide.

The office handed those unverified addresses to election commissioners, which led to the removal of numerous legitimate voters without their knowledge over the past two years.

Gray saw the problem with this approach firsthand after someone stole his credit information.

“They were showing me as previously living in Chicago,” he said. “It took me four or five years to finally clear it up.”