@theatlantic: Tens of thousands of Mississippi voters were marked as inactive—and now a Senate seat could come down to a legal battle, Toluse Olorunnipa and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez report. Last summer, Mississippi began an effort to “continue to build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” as Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson put it. “Using data from the credit-reporting agency Experian, the state scrutinized its list of registered voters, searching for anyone who may have moved, left the state, or died,” Olorunnipa and Wingett Sanchez write. On Election Day, many voters whose registration was switched to inactive status—a crucial step toward purging them from the rolls—“showed up at the polls, only to be told that they were not properly registered. Their best option was to fill out an affidavit ballot, a more involved process that increases the likelihood that a vote will not count,” Olorunnipa and Wingett Sanchez continue. Now the Democratic challenger, Scott Colom, narrowly leads the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith. “And voting-rights advocates say that Mississippi, a state with a long history of voter suppression and discrimination, has once again undermined one of its citizens’ most sacred rights,” the writers report. “Experian now says that its data were never supposed to be used to scrub Mississippi’s voter rolls in this way,” Olorunnipa and Wingett Sanchez write. “A postelection legal battle over the affidavit ballots is intensifying, as lawyers from the campaigns and voting-rights groups argue over how those ballots should be treated. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has called for affidavit ballots to be separated from regular ballots, suggesting that it may attempt to challenge their validity in the days ahead. Colom’s campaign has said there is no legal basis for treating affidavit ballots any differently once they are processed. The back-and-forth could be a precursor to a legal battle in which the courts could ultimately decide whether Colom or Hyde-Smith prevails.” Read more at the link. 📸: Aron Smith / Jackson State University / Getty

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Tuesday 10 November 2026 23:15:00 GMT