Secretary of state ignored demands to reinstate inactivated voters

In the days before the midterms last 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.

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