Lawrence Shelton Jr.

Racism Is Alive and Well in Mississippi: They're Trying to Steal a Senate Seat From a Black Man This is naked voter suppression dressed up as "election integrity." Thousands of Mississippians are being screwed out of their votes right now because the state's Republican secretary of state deliberately used sloppy commercial credit data to purge the rolls — and the mess is landing hardest in a race where a Black Democrat is beating a Republican incumbent. Scott Colom is narrowly ahead of Cindy Hyde-Smith. That lead is under attack because large numbers of voters were forced onto provisional (affidavit) ballots after their names vanished from the poll books. Both campaigns admit thousands of people were hit. CNN has the receipts. Andrew Couch is one of the casualties. He'd voted at the same polling place in the last two elections without a problem. On Election Day he was told he was registered in a county he hadn’t lived in for six years. On Monday he was informed his ballot is dead. His reaction: "I'm very upset. If people lose faith in the process… it's going to hurt voter turnout in the future." That's the point. Secretary of State Michael Watson signed off on using Experian credit data to flag "moved" voters. The result: more than 230,000 people — roughly 1 in 9 registered voters statewide — were dumped into inactive status and left off the poll books before Election Day (Mississippi Today). In a state where over 9 percent of residents are unbanked, this data was always going to be garbage. Experian itself has run away from the whole thing, telling CNN its product "was not designed or intended to validate voter records" and that it stopped working with the state in early 2025. This isn’t some innocent clerical error. It's the same old Mississippi playbook: make it harder for certain people to vote when the outcome looks like it might go the wrong way. A Black man is on the verge of winning a Senate seat the state hasn't handed to a Democrat in decades, and suddenly the rolls are a disaster. This is Republican racism in action.