230,000 Inactive Voters. One Undecided Senate Race. Who Gets Counted?

[UPDATE, Nov. 11, afternoon] CNN has projected that Scott Colom won the race. The AP has not called it, and certification is due Friday. Read the latest.

[CONFIRMED] The race has not been called. Colom led Hyde-Smith by 3,041 votes in the Associated Press's unofficial tally Wednesday morning, with about 98% of the vote counted, Yahoo News reports. The AP has not called the race. Hinds County finished counting more than 8,000 absentee ballots, WAPT reports, and the Secretary of State said more than 15,000 affidavit ballots had been processed statewide. Counties must certify their results by Friday, Nov. 13. "We are still counting votes. There are a few thousand out, and we feel confident," Hyde-Smith said. Colom said Hinds County's affidavit ballots will make his lead "insurmountable." Mississippi has no automatic recount law.

[CONFIRMED] The database behind the count. In 2024, Secretary of State Michael Watson signed a $50,000 agreement with Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, to flag voters who may have moved, theGrio reports, citing Mississippi Today. It was the first time the state used data other than the Postal Service's to maintain its rolls. Nearly 50,000 voters were marked inactive for address issues between July 2025 and March 2026. By Election Day, about 230,000 registrations were inactive, a figure Axios also reports.

[CONFIRMED] Inactive is not removed, but it matters. An inactive voter is still registered. But at the polls, many had to cast affidavit ballots, which count only after election officials review them. Experian said its service "was not designed or intended to validate voter records" and that it has not worked with the state since 2025.

[CONFIRMED] Voters' accounts. Scripps News spoke with voters who say they were marked inactive in error. Kevin Green said he had voted consistently since 2020: "It was very disheartening to be labeled inactive." Thomas Minor said a clerk told him Experian data showed he lived in another city, though he had not moved in a decade. The Secretary of State's office did not respond to Scripps News.

[CONFIRMED] The state's position. Watson called the affidavit process "a safety net for errors election commissioners may make" and said the review would produce more accurate rolls, theGrio reports.

[NOT YET KNOWN] How many affidavit ballots were accepted or rejected statewide, and how many of the 230,000 inactive registrations belonged to voters who had not actually moved. We will report those numbers when counties release them.

[COMMENTARY] When the right to vote depends on the accuracy of a database, someone has to answer for the database. Mississippi borrowed a credit bureau's guesses about where people live and made voters prove it wrong at the polls. Whoever wins this race, that question stays open.

Notice the pattern. Interrupt it.

— Elena Cross, Prodigal Breaking News

Sources: Yahoo News, citing the Associated Press's unofficial tally (Nov. 11, 2026); WAPT, "Colom widens lead over Hyde-Smith as Mississippi Senate count continues" (Nov. 11, 2026); theGrio via Yahoo News, "How reliance on a credit reporting agency led to Mississippi's voting mess" (Nov. 10, 2026); Axios, "Mississippi Senate race puts 230,000 inactive voter registrations under scrutiny" (Nov. 6, 2026); Scripps News, "As Mississippi's vote count drags on, voters say they were marked inactive in error" (Nov. 6, 2026); Mississippi Today; WLBT.

Image: AI-generated illustration, not a photograph.