Secretary of state turned to unverified credit data to check voters' addresses for 'election integrity'

JACKSON — When Pastor Frank Hall was a little boy in Greenville during the Civil Rights Movement, organizers refused to stop meeting at his neighborhood church, even as white supremacists attacked Black churches throughout the South. They showed him voting was a right you had to fight for.

Now, decades later, when Hall discovered that the Washington County Election Commission had moved over 2,000 voters to inactive status ahead of this year’s congressional primaries Tuesday without advance notice, he knew what he had to do: fight.

“We are facing a critical moment with the Voter Roll,” a flyer from the election commission warned voters. “We are asking you to act now before Election Day.”

Those voters in Washington County were among the 50,000 registered voters who were made inactive in Mississippi due to address conflicts after Secretary of State Michael Watson rolled out a controversial method statewide last July as another way to perform the routine job of checking voters’ residences: using unverified credit data, according to a Mississippi Today analysis of voter records from Watson’s office.



https://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/secretary-of-state-turned-to-unverified-credit-data-to-check-voters-addresses-for-election-integrity-a1bdeb52/