Amid razor-thin Mississippi Senate battle, concerns raised over voter challenges and data

Thousands of affidavit ballots could prove decisive in Mississippi's razor-thin race for U.S. Senate and lawyers representing both Democrat Scott Colom and Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith are girding for the possiblity of a protracted legal fight over which ballots should be counted.

The race could be projected as soon as Wednesday. Colom holds a small lead over Hyde-Smith with most of the vote counted.

Affidavit ballots in Mississippi are provisional ballots that allow people to cast a vote even if they show up at the polls without voter ID or do not show up as a registered voter at their polling place.

Officials in Hinds County, which is among the state's largest counties and contains the city of Jackson, finished processing affidavit ballots on Wednesday.

Hinds County is heavily Democratic and voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 by over 40 percentage points. Around 70% of the county's population is Black, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Questions over many voters' registrations and whether they need to cast affidavit ballots date back to early 2025, when Mississippi officials began deactivating voters from state voter rolls in part by using data from Experian, a credit-reporting company.

State election leaders said at the time that the Experian data was meant to be used as a supplemental tool by county election officials "to bring a new level of reliable data for county election commissioners to utilize in maintaining Mississippi's voter rolls."

But an Experian spokesman said its data should not have been used for the purpose of deactivating voters.

"The solution provided at that time consisted of supplemental address information and was not designed or intended to validate voter records," Scott Anderson, vice president of corporate communications at Experian, told ABC News. "Decisions regarding voter registration policies, procedures and record updates are made solely by election officials in accordance with applicable local, state and federal laws."

An estimated 230,000 voters were deactivated from the state's voter registration lists ahead of the 2026 midterms, according to local news reports and a voting advocacy group. Mississippi Today reported that the Experian data could have led state and local officials to inadvertently deactivate eligible voters from registration lists.

However, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office told ABC News on Wednesday that those 230,000 people were not all deemed inactive in 2026 alone, however, as that list “is a cumulative list that is added to as commissioners place people on in active status.”

The spokesperson said it reflects years of work by election commissions in the state, and is not just a reflection of how the Experian data was used.

According to the spokesperson, Experian data pointed to approximately 113,000 individuals for local election officials to review, which included voters identified for review from U.S. Postal Service data and from Experian data.

The office of Mississippi's Secretary of State also told ABC affiliate WAPT that it is not using Experian data anymore and that no voters had their registration deactivated within 90 days before the election, consistent with federal law.

Colom and voting rights advocates have raised concerns that far more voters are casting affidavit votes because they had their registrations incorrectly deactivated than there should have been, leading to more general challenges for voters.

Colom placed the blame on Secretary of State Michael Watson.

"Experian told him they were not reliable. He did it anyways. So I think that this chaos is the result of that decision, and it's not me just saying it," he said.

Watson, appearing on a talk radio show on Monday, said that the state had found that it couldn't get all of the information from the U.S. Postal Service that it needed about voters who may have moved, but had done a pilot program with Experian in a county and found it helpful.

Trey Grayson, an attorney and former Kentucky Republican secretary of state, told ABC News that Mississippi did nothing wrong by using Experian data in addition to other data sources and pointed out that voters who had their registrations deactivated incorrectly were still able to cast ballots.

"I believe that states should use as many valid sources as possible when it comes to list maintenance. Fortunately, the safeguards built into the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) prevent a voter from being purged when a state receives evidence of a move. Instead, those voters are classified as inactive and they are still eligible to vote for the next two federal election cycles so long as they provide evidence of their address."

"This safeguard in the NVRA helps states balance the need to maintain accurate voter rolls with the need to ensure that every eligible voter is able to vote," Grayson wrote.