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In the days before the midterms Tuesday, a coalition of the nation’s leading civil rights groups warned Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson he needed to reinstate any voters inactivated by his office’s deployment of unverified credit bureau data by Election Day. He never responded.

In the wake of that decision, an unknown number of eligible voters arrived at the polls Tuesday, only to find what has happened in nearly every federal election since Mississippi’s first experiments with Experian’s information two years ago: Properly registered voters had been mistakenly inactivated after the secretary of state provided local election officials with inaccurate address lists pulled from commercial data.

The letter the coalition sent Watson, obtained by Mississippi Today, warned the state’s top elections official that known errors in the data could threaten to disrupt voting in the midterms.

Elections experts say the errors now open up more room for uncertainty in ruby-red Mississippi’s razor-thin U.S. Senate race, as Democratic candidate Scott Colom’s narrow lead threatens to unseat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in what would be an historic upset. Local election officials are steeling themselves for more days of counting thousands of affidavit ballots, which include votes cast by inactive registrants, after a surge in inactivations left over 230,000 voters statewide inactive by Election Day.

County election officials said many wrongful inactivations trace to Watson’s $50,000 deal with Experian in 2024 to supply the company’s unverified address data to all 82 counties. From there, election commissioners would use the information to identify and inactivate voters who may have moved. It marked the first time that the state turned to anything other than government data, primarily records from the U.S. Postal Service, to accomplish the routine task of cleaning the voter rolls.

When the secretary of state’s office began sending out address lists from the data to every county last year, Watson’s office announced the deal would “strengthen the integrity of elections.” But Mississippi Today uncovered in March that errors in Experian’s data went unverified at every stage of the voter-roll maintenance process, resulting in properly registered voters discovering they had been mistakenly inactivated.

To prevent these issues from arising during the midterms, the coalition of national and state civil rights groups — including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU of Mississippi and the Southern Poverty Law Center — sent a list of demands to Watson and Laura Henderson-Courtney, senior attorney of the secretary of state’s elections division, four days before the midterms. Their top demand was that the secretary of state’s office “protect” voters by reinstating by Election Day anyone inactivated based on Experian’s data.

“Mississippi voters did everything the law asked of them,” the coalition wrote to Watson, who is currently running for lieutenant governor. “We urge your office to do the same, and to restore them to the rolls before they go to the polls Tuesday.”

The groups also urged the secretary of state’s office to preserve inactive voters’ access to the ballot box by giving the poll managers and local officials responsible for conducting the midterm elections written instructions to ensure inactive voters were provided with affidavit ballots, as state law requires. 

“The voters on this list did nothing wrong,” the letter stated. “Restoring them to active status does not weaken list integrity.”

The secretary of state’s office did not respond to any of the groups’ demands, according to records obtained by Mississippi Today. Neither Watson nor his office agreed to an interview with the news organization, but Assistant Secretary of State Liz Jonson acknowledged that the office received the coalition’s letter.

“The ACLU, nor any other third party, have the authority to dictate applicable state and federal laws regarding elections in Mississippi,” Jonson wrote in an email. “Per state law, the Statewide Election Management System (SEMS) is currently in a blackout period thus no systemic voter roll maintenance is allowed.”

While Mississippi law bars officials from inactivating or purging voters 90 days before a federal election, it places no such restrictions on correcting voters to active status.

Voter records and local election officials have both confirmed that errors followed the secretary of state’s decision to introduce Experian’s data, but on Friday, Watson stopped short of acknowledging the known errors as anything more than a possibility in an interview with the Magnolia Tribune. 

“The state did move to commercial data for voter roll maintenance, and I’ve seen some folks saying it was bad data,” Watson said. “Was some of the data off? Perhaps.”

After months of warning signs, problems mount on Election Day

By the afternoon of Election Day, problems quickly emerged: Voters discovered their names were missing from poll books, election hotlines sounded off with questions from inactive voters, and the local officials running the polls said they were overwhelmed with the influx.

Amid the chaos, Watson took to Facebook to respond to concerns posted by a Lee County election commissioner.

Four hours after the polls had opened, Election Commissioner Jamie Gunnells, who oversees the Tupelo area, was seeing so many voters learn they were inactive that he posted a warning on Facebook alerting anyone else coming out to vote about the situation. 

He told constituents there was a “major disruption” at the polls due to what he called the “Experian fiasco:” A set of “old” address data that the secretary of state provided earlier this year for voter-roll maintenance had made “many” voters inactive.

Gunnells told Mississippi Today he felt he needed to get the information out before more inactive voters were blindsided at the polls. As he cycled among the three polling places in his district, his 13-hour Election Day shift was filled with confusion, anger and fear from voters who were surprised to find they were inactive. 

He said some voters were so frustrated about the issue that they left the polls without casting an affidavit ballot.

In response to Gunnells’ Facebook post, Watson stated that the responsibility for errors in the data fell on election commissioners like him.

“Ultimately, no matter what data is sent to the election commissioners, you should understand your job is to verify the information before acting upon it,” Watson replied. “That said, our goal is to send you the best information available, and we did so.”

Mississippi is a bottom-up state for elections, meaning the actual work of cleaning voter rolls and marking voters as inactive falls to county election commissioners. Under state law, however, the secretary of state is legally responsible for training these county officials to do that job.

Gunnells and other election commissioners said the secretary of state never cautioned them beforehand that they should check the list of addresses pulled from Experian’s data for errors, leaving them to discover the mistakes after voters had already been inactivated.

When Watson’s office announced its partnership with Experian, the office wrote that the deal would “bring a new level of reliable data” to the voter rolls. But records released by the secretary of state’s office show that in the contract for the deal, Watson’s office signed off on Experian’s disclaimers that the company couldn’t guarantee the “accuracy or reliability” of its data.

“He started pointing figures at us: ‘We should have verified the data that they sent to us,’” Gunnells said. “I mean, how are we gonna verify it?”

Even more voters mistakenly inactivated

The issues that emerged during the midterms came as no surprise to voters like Thomas Minor and Heather Williams, who discovered in the primaries that they had been mistakenly inactivated. Address lists the secretary of state pulled from Experian’s data incorrectly flagged they had moved.

The list placed Williams at an address she hadn’t lived at in years. Minor had lived in Itawamba County his whole life, but the list said he resided 160 miles away, in a Delta town he had never stepped foot in.

In the voting-rights coalition’s letter to Watson last week, the groups outlined both voters’ cases as proof of the known errors tied to the secretary of state’s decision to introduce Experian’s data. 

“He could have rectified some of this stuff and made the process a lot easier,” Minor said. “They should have learned their lesson back then.

“It makes me think he doesn’t care about the voting process.”

Harya Tarekegn, the director of advocacy and policy for an organization in the coalition, the Mississippi Center for Justice, said in a press conference Friday that she believes many affidavit ballots in the midterms were cast by voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data.

One of them was Starkville resident Kailyn Lott. Eight months after what happened to Minor, Lott said she encountered a strikingly similar situation when she showed up to vote for the midterms Tuesday. She learned that she was marked inactive when she came to vote at the same fire station where she voted in her first election, the 2024 presidential contest.

When she got to the polling place, she discovered her name was missing from the poll book. She was inactive.

As she waited in line for an affidavit ballot, she said she saw more and more people encounter the same issue. At the front of the line, she discovered what caused the problem in her case: Her voter registration listed her address as her parents’ house in Pontotoc County, which she said is linked to an old credit card she opened as a kid.

Voter records from the secretary of state’s office show county election officials originally inactivated Lott last year due to address conflicts, a month after Watson’s office provided them with a list of addresses pulled from Experian’s data.

Despite the confusion, Lott was adamant about her right to vote. She showed poll workers her voter ID card and ultimately cast an affidavit ballot. But she’s worried others weren’t so lucky.

“When people hear stuff like this, it definitely deters them from voting because it just further instills in their mind that it doesn’t matter if they go and vote,” Lott said. 

Minor said in his case, his inactive status ultimately kept him from casting a ballot during the primaries — marking the first time he’s missed an election in 12 years. While poll workers provided him with a ballot envelope, he said they failed to give him the affidavit ballot itself for him to fill out his vote.

It was his first time going through the process, and in his confusion and rush to get to his job at north Mississippi’s Toyota car plant, he thought he had done everything he needed to vote.

It wasn’t until after he left the polls that he realized he never filled out a ballot.

Watson posted on social media Friday that the affidavit process exists as a “safety net” to correct “errors” made by election commissioners and preserve inactive voters’ right to the ballot box. 

“We have implemented every available resource to ensure our elections are secure, and to ensure we do not have dead people, illegal aliens, people with false addresses, or nonresidents voting in our elections,” Watson stated. “It may take voters a little longer for final results to come in, but it will result in more accurate voter rolls which will speed up the process in the future and decrease opportunities for voter fraud in MS.”

But to voting rights advocates, Minor’s experience is a testament to how inactivation can threaten eligible voters’ right to the ballot box, especially when they’re not aware of the affidavit process.

“The State cannot walk away from an unreliable data source while leaving in place every inactivation that source produced,” the voting rights groups stated in their letter last week.

Consequences beyond the midterms

Under state law, any voters inactivated by the data are now on the path to have their voter registrations purged if they don’t correct their status with their county’s circuit clerk or vote within two federal general elections — a period of about two to three years. Once a voter is purged, they need to reregister before their ballot will count again.

Now that the midterm elections have passed, the door has opened up for election commissioners to begin purging some of the first voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data. These voters were marked inactive in early 2024 in Lafayette County, where the secretary of state first experimented with using Experian’s data to clean the voter rolls.

Watson called the pilot a “success,” and it cleared the way for his office to expand the use of Experian’s data to all voters on the state’s rolls.

But Mississippi Today found errors emerged from the data during those early tests, resulting in the inactivation of properly registered voters. One was Jordan Jones Higginbotham, an Ole Miss student who discovered she was inactive before the 2024 primaries after an address list that the secretary of state drew from Experian’s data incorrectly placed her in Madison County.

Any Lafayette County voters in this experiment who were inactivated before the 2024 presidential election and who have not voted since then are now on the board to be purged. The voting-rights groups demanded Watson to agree by next Friday to halt any purges of voters who were inactivated based on Experian’s data and to stop using any unverified address data from a commercial broker on the voter rolls.

Jonson wrote that the secretary of state’s office would respond to the coalition’s letter in “keeping with our standard operating procedure.” She did not answer questions from Mississippi Today about whether the office would act on the groups’ demands.

But as the country turns its eyes to Mississippi’s Senate race and the candidates’ campaigns gear up for a legal battle over the vote count, the coalition remains hopeful for change.

“One of the unintended benefits of all of this chaos is that it shines a light on how antiquated election administration is in Mississippi,” said Amir Badat, the Mississippi voting rights attorney with Fair Fight Action who represented the groups in the letter. “That’s going to be critical for us to be able to advocate for improvements to the system.”

Last week, the secretary of state’s office said it has stopped providing Experian’s data for voter roll maintenance, although the office did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about exactly when or why the partnership ended.

The secretary of state’s office wrote in a statement to WAPT that it had switched to IDI Data, a smaller company that brokers information drawn from a variety of sources — including the major credit bureaus and government records — to help customers track people down.

On Election Day, Watson posted on Facebook that his office had a “new vendor with more features and info than the last.” But voting rights groups remain unconvinced that errors will no longer emerge just because the secretary of state’s deal with Experian has ended.

“That decision speaks for itself,” the coalition wrote to Watson last week. “If Experian’s data is not reliable enough to use going forward, it was never reliable enough to strip Mississippians of active status and subject them to potential removal.”

You can check your voter registration status and track your affidavit ballot on the secretary of state’s website at yallvote.ms.

Warring lawyers and advocates swarmed election offices across Mississippi on Friday to continue watching poll workers count outstanding ballots in the state’s U.S. Senate race.  

With all but one other U.S. Senate race across America already decided, the nation has fixed its attention on the Magnolia State nail-biter between Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic challenger Scott Colom. Local election officials continued processing thousands of outstanding absentee and affidavit ballots.

The narrow margin between Hyde-Smith and Colom has already shocked many across the nation, but it remained too close to call on Friday. Colom led by nearly 2,500 votes with nearly 1 million votes cast.

READ MORE: 2026 Mississippi election results

At a press conference in front of the state Capitol in Jackson on Friday, a coalition of voting rights organizations called for transparency in the counting of remaining ballots, but urged the public not to disrupt the process.  

Harya Tarekegn, the director of advocacy and policy for the Mississippi Center for Justice, said there were about 20,000 affidavit ballots —​​ called “provisional ballots” in many other states — cast in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race. 

Tarekegn told Mississippi Today there were about 2,100 affidavit ballots in north Mississippi’s DeSoto County, a traditional Republican stronghold where Colom currently leads by six percentage points, an illustration of Colom’s massive inroads in areas dominated by the GOP.

“What are Republican areas? DeSoto County, they said that was a Republican area. We won,” Colom said. 

Tarekegn also said on Friday there were 1,667 affidavit ballots left in Rankin County, where Hyde-Smith leads, and 1,931 in Madison County, another often Republican-voting county where Colom holds a narrow lead. 

But Hinds County, the state’s most populous area and a Democratic stronghold, is “the big enchilada,” Colom’s supporters note. Election officials told Mississippi Today they expected the counting of affidavits to continue through the weekend ahead of a Nov. 13 deadline.

Media, allies and observers from both campaigns flocked to the Hinds County Election Commission’s downtown Jackson office on Friday, filming commissioners as they processed ballots by hand.

Ray Chambers, attorney for the Hinds County Election Commission, didn’t want to speculate on a timeline beyond noting the deadline.  

“I predict they’ll be done in time,” Chambers said.  

In the north Jackson suburb of Madison, the Madison County Election Commission posted a sign saying the commission started processing affidavit ballots a day after the election. But commissions across the state are not following a unified schedule. Instead, a patchwork of meetings across the state sent representatives of both candidates scrambling to observe the counting of the ballots that will decide the Mississippi Senate race. 

Mississippi has a “bottom-up” system of election administration, where 82 county circuit clerks and election commissions are responsible for processing their own affidavit and absentee ballots. 

They are required to process the ballots and transmit the results to Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office by Nov. 13. 

Tarekegn said the election commission meetings are open to the public, but the public should not disrupt or publicly challenge decisions made by election officials. 

She also said voters who cast affidavit ballots only need to return to their local circuit clerk’s offices if they experienced voter ID issues at their polling place so that they can present a valid ID. 

The campaigns for Hyde-Smith and Colom have both said they believe they have a path to win the election.  

Hyde-Smith said on Friday that her campaign is not backing down and that the election was not over. She has not made any public appearance or scheduled a press conference since Tuesday’s election. One of her few public statements since the election was published in a social media post written in the third person.  

Touring a Black-owned bookstore on Jackson’s historic Farish Street, Colom on Friday stopped short of calling on her to concede the race, but he said she needs to answer questions from the public and the media as she continued trailing in the election results. 

“She’s still our senator,” Colom said. “Where is she? Why is she not doing any interviews? Why can’t she explain what her pathway to success is?” 

Upbeat and optimistic on Friday, Colom outlined what his early legislative priorities would be in Congress and, promoting Marshall’s Bookstore, told reporters about his affinity for the works of authors Leo Tolstoy and Robert Caro.  

A possible legal fight over the count also continued brewing Friday, a day after the fundraising arm of the Senate Republicans demanded election officials around the state separate and preserve affidavit ballots. 

In response, the Colom campaign sent a letter claiming the Republican group’s request was illegal and violated voters’ right to privacy. Once affidavit votes are accepted and counted, they are supposed to be treated like other ballots, and not have anyone’s name attached. State and federal courts have upheld voters’ right to privacy and secret ballots.

Lawyers for Mississippi’s foster care system and attorneys representing the children who’ve lived inside it will each have 40 minutes to argue early next year if  the state’s child welfare system still needs continued federal safety oversight. 

The hearing, scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Jan. 25 in Jackson, signals the next iteration of the Olivia Y. v. Barbour federal lawsuit — a decades-old case in which lawyers alleged that Mississippi children, like then-three-year-old Olivia Y., were unconstitutionally endangered in the state’s foster care system. 

In 2008, attorneys for both sides agreed to court-mandated monitoring of Mississippi’s child welfare system. Monitoring requirements have changed since then, but versions of the oversight have remained. Reports from the monitors have consistently found dangerous conditions in the system. 

In May, lawyers for Gov. Tate Reeves and Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services Commissioner Andrea Sanders filed a motion to end this court oversight. They wrote that the state had taken the necessary steps to guarantee foster children’s rights to reasonably safe living arrangements “now and in the future.”

That statement was scrutinized in July, when the court monitoring group Public Catalyst published its 2025 report of conditions within Mississippi’s child welfare agency. The group found that the department had met just 22 of 107 applicable safety measures. Failed measures included the rate of foster child abuse within the system and social workers placing children in unlicensed homes, like hotel rooms.

Sanders and Marcia Lowry, the lead plaintiff lawyer representing Mississippi foster children, have each publicly defended their positions since. Sanders, at an October legislative budget hearing, said meeting all the measurements of the federal monitoring is unrealistic. Lowry told Mississippi Today in September that lawyers for the state Child Protection Services Department had already agreed to meet them.

Now, each party will make their case in early 2027 to U.S. Chief District Judge Halil S. Ozerden, who’s overseen the lawsuit since 2020.

Mississippi Today Ideas is a platform for thoughtful ideas to be shared about our state’s past, present and future. Opinions expressed in guest essays are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of Mississippi Today. You can read more about the section here.  

Voters elected Johnny DuPree to the Mississippi Senate. His 2025 win marked the first time that Hattiesburg residents would have a Black senator representing them in Jackson, even though over half of the city’s population is Black. Now, because of machinations with the legislative map, that representation could be in jeopardy.

DuPree may be one of the first Black politicians to bear the brunt of the Supreme Court’s consequential April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. But he won’t be the last. An NPR analysis predicts that post Callais redistricting could portend the largest drop in Black representation across the country since the collapse of Reconstruction.

Some politicians are already sharpening their knives. Gov. Tate Reeves has said it is a matter of when, not if, the tenure ends for Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is the sole Black member of the state’s congressional delegation holding one of Mississippi’s four House seats.

In Mississippi, like in many other states in he aftermath of the Callais U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a state-level Voting Rights Act has  been introduced in the Legislature. However, voter suppression policies aimed at Black voters, along with hostile  majorities in the state’s legislative chambers, make the legislation’s pathway for enactment incredibly narrow.

DuPree’s district only had a Black majority because a federal court found that parts of the state’s 2022 legislative maps violated the Voting Rights Act. The 2025 maps sought to correct a historic injustice. With that map likely gone because of Callais, the Black majority district it created could be wiped away too. For DuPree, the erasure is unsurprising given the state’s tradition of voter suppression.

In an October interview, he quipped, “here we go again.”

Black Mississippians have been saying some version of that since 1890. In an interview earlier this year, community organizers Oleta Fitzgerald and Phaedra Robinson told Human Rights Watch, “Courts are stacked, the Legislature is stacked. It’s always been a fight for us in Mississippi, and it feels like they want to go back to the good old days.”

The legislative maps are one front, but not the only one. Take a look at Section 241 of the state Constitution, which was drafted back in 1890 to codify Jim Crow era restrictions. That constitutional section imposes a lifetime bar on voting for crimes the delegates believed Black people were more likely to commit.

In 2022, the full U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed the original provision was “steeped  in racism” but upheld it anyway.

The Sentencing Project estimates at least 43,700  Black Mississippians couldn’t vote in the 2024 elections because of that rule. Getting your vote back takes a governor’s pardon or a two-thirds vote of the Legislature. Between 2000 and  2015, only 335 people managed to claw back their right to vote.

That’s not all.

Mississippi ranks dead last nationally in the Cost of Voting Index, which measures how hard states make it to vote. The state requires photo identification at the polls, offers no early voting for most residents and no online registration.

Following the adoption of the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, near-universal registration among Black eligible voters dropped to around 7% and stayed that way until 1964. Within three years of the Voting Rights Act, nearly 60% of Black Mississippians were registered. Black Mississippians still register at rates among the highest in the country. That progress came from federal enforcement action and the Voting Rights Act. Those federal protections are exactly what Trump administration policies and Supreme Court rulings have been dismantling.

Within  hours of the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted parts of the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi announced it would move forward with restrictive voter ID rules. It also requires notarizing  both absentee ballot applications and ballot envelopes.

A new law Gov. Reeves signed in April called the SHIELD Act took effect July 1. It lets local officials demand a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers from applicants and current voters whose citizenship they cannot confirm. Those documents cost money and time. Rural and low-income Mississippians, many of them Black women running households, often don’t have either to spare.

The U.S. has human rights obligations under international law that point the way back onto a better path. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has said that drawing electoral boundaries should not distort the distribution of voters or discriminate against any group.

 In 2014 it also said the US “should ensure that all states reinstate voting rights to felons who have fully served their sentences.” The Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination prohibit laws with racially discriminatory effects even when they look neutral.

Mississippi organizers have outlasted worse. Medgar Evers was shot in his own driveway in 1963 after a meeting about voter registration.

Today, Black women across this state are the ones knocking on doors and arranging childcare, so mothers and grandmothers can get to the polls.

As the winds at the federal level shift, it’s all the more important to pass the Mississippi Voting Rights Act, which would enshrine powerful and critical voting rights protections into state law. 

Henry Hicks is a consultant at Human Rights Watch.

Cassandra Welchlin is the executive director & co-convener of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable. 

Like some middle schoolers, La’David Hall never thought about going to college. Back then, anything beyond high school wasn’t part of his plan. 

That changed when Hall, a seventh grader at the time, heard a career coach speak at an assembly about careers in nursing, engineering, teaching, law and medicine. 

“We never really had people talk to us about our futures or careers,” said Hall, now a junior at  O’Bannon High School in Greenville. “I remember leaving school that day curious and thinking like, “‘Yeah, I can see myself doing any of those things.’” 

The 2021 event marked the start of Delta State’s participation in Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP, a federal, grant-funded program that aims to help students attending high-poverty schools prepare for education and careers after high school. 

The program is one example of efforts across Mississippi to help disadvantaged students in rural areas navigate higher education and careers after high school.

The U.S. Department of Education awarded Delta State a $15 million grant to prepare students across the Mississippi Delta for college through programs and resources including summer camps, mentoring, academic support and trips to the Cleveland campus. 

In 2019, before Delta State earned a federal GEAR UP grant, Mississippi State University was awarded a $28 million GEAR UP state grant to work with Greenville, McComb and Meridian school districts. Two years later, completed applications for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, increased by about 4% among the participating high schools.

Only about 73.4% of Mississippi’s graduating high school seniors completed FAFSA applications in 2025, according to estimates from the National College Attainment Network, a national organization that advocates for federal and state policy issues around college affordability and support services. Completing the federal application is considered a key indicator that a student will enroll in college. 

Now, Jackson Public Schools is also participating in GEAR UP. In August, JPS officials announced the district secured a $10.67 million GEAR UP federal grant. The grant will go toward serving 2,000 middle schoolers across six schools — Blackburn, Brinkley, Cardozo, Kirksey, Lanier and Peeples — over seven years. JPS is partnering with local colleges and universities, museums and education-based organizations to provide mentoring, summer camps, career exploration programs and parental college financial guidance workshops. 

About 52% of JPS graduating senior class of 2025 enrolled in college, said Jana Williams, the district’s college and career readiness manager. Supporting the participating middle schools with graduation-based career coaches will help students envision opportunities beyond high school and provide guidance on the academic and financial steps needed to pursue them, she said. 

“It’s about exposure,” Williams said, “seeing their eyes open up and providing them the  opportunity to learn more about college.” 

Helping students see higher education as a viable option

When the Delta State program began, about 43% of students surveyed in Delta communities believed they could attend college, said Sha’Ketta Davis Drungole, executive director of the university’s Mississippi Delta GEAR UP Partnership. Now, program data indicate that 64% of students plan to attend. 

“I have seen growth and development in the way they present themselves, the way they talk about college or careers in their thought processes, the way they engage with each other as students,” Drungole said, “and it’s just really heartwarming to see.”

Delta State’s GEAR UP program has served more than 4,600 students and provided 88,500 hours of services including parent workshops, teacher training and college visits to students, Drungole said. 

The program also provides staff and advisers to offer training for teachers in Delta-area school districts and to help students understand how to apply for college and how to transition to college after high school. 

Glenda Lollis-Hawkins said her daughter Laroya, a senior at Cleveland Central High, has gained money management skills such as budgeting through attending GEAR UP summer camps. The program also offers parents access to resources that help with financial aid applications and understanding college admissions. 

“GEAR UP not only educates the child but [also] the parent about the importance of advancing your career past high school,” Lollis-Hawkins said.

“GEAR UP’s workshops help me parse through the important information,” she said. “They let us know about the ACT, the deadlines and finances when it comes to college.” 

Uncertain federal funding for GEAR UP may put such programs at risk. The Trump administration has proposed budgets that would eliminate funding for GEAR UP, but Congress has pushed back and rejected the request. 

Funding for the program is not guaranteed even if states or school districts were previously awarded grants, said Brandi Lyndall, director of college access strategy and statewide outreach at Get2College, a college access program of Woodward Hines Education Foundation.

For now, the program is helping Mississippi students and their families prepare for higher education. 

Hall, the O’Bannon High School student, said his curiosity led him to ask his parents questions about college. He wanted to know how to apply. He also asked his mother how she got her nursing degree and her master’s degree in social work. Hall’s father, who did not attend college, encouraged him to keep up with his studies.  

Hall has attended science and entrepreneur summer camps at Mississippi Valley State University over the past few summers. He has toured Mississippi State University’s campus in Starkville. He has also talked with his high school advisers about applying to college. He is now looking beyond his hometown for potential careers such as becoming a teacher, mortician or funeral director. 

“It’s just a new world out there for me,” Hall said.

Mississippi’s environmental regulators released details this week on a set of penalties against SpaceXAI for violating state water pollution laws by starting construction on its Southaven data center facilities without needed permits. 

The company first announced the potential fines to investors two weeks ago, speculating the amount could reach as much as $6.1 million. 

To limit pollution from construction reaching public bodies of water, state law requires companies to first obtain a permit. Without proper protections, rain, for instance, can carry debris and chemicals off construction sites and pollute natural habitats, drinking water systems and recreational areas, federal regulators warn. 

Earlier this year, SpaceXAI  – through its subsidiary, MZX Tech LLC – asked the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality for permits allowing construction within its growing Southaven footprint, which includes a power plant as well as land to build a $20 billion data center facility called MACROHARDRR. 

But during a July meeting between MDEQ and MZX Tech, “it became apparent” the company had already begun construction on the land in question, impacting about 30 acres, MDEQ records show. 

On July 16, a day after the meeting, MDEQ staff visited Southaven and confirmed the infractions. The agency sent two notices of violation to MZX Tech on Aug. 10, both of which “will be subject to the maximum statutory penalty” of $25,000 for each day construction continues without the needed permits, MDEQ wrote. 

“The Company is cooperating with MDEQ and is in discussions to resolve the matters through a single agreed order,” SpaceXAI wrote in its Oct. 22 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

It’s unclear where the $6.1 million figure came from. Based on the $25,000-per-day figure, it could suggest the violations lasted for several months. But MDEQ declined to say if the amount was accurate, citing its policy not to comment on pending enforcement matters.

At one of the MZX Tech properties, a former Southaven training facility that neighbors Horn Lake Creek, MDEQ staff found that “no steps have been taken to protect stormwater infrastructure at the site,” and that there was a lack of protection against “fugitive dust emissions.” 

At the 2400 Stateline Road property, the site for MACROHARDERR, the staff found “no controls around storm inlets.” The MDEQ inspectors noted that, while construction appeared to have started around the beginning of 2026, the property’s last construction storm water permit expired in 2023. 

MDEQ responds to federal judge about its turbine exemptions

Last week, a federal judge found that MDEQ had misinterpreted federal clean air statutes when allowing SpaceXAI to run 69 temporary natural gas turbines without a permit. U.S. District Court Judge Debra Brown included the opinion in her ruling against a motion to dismiss the NAACP’s April lawsuit against the data center company. 

MDEQ relied on a federal Clean Air Act exemption intended for mobile generators, and SpaceXAI’s turbines clearly did not meet that criteria, Brown reasoned. That distinction is a key focus of the NAACP’s argument against the company. 

The agency responded to the order in a statement to Mississippi Today on Wednesday. 

“MDEQ is aware of the Court’s order and takes seriously all opinions by a federal court,” agency spokesperson Jan Schaefer said. “Nonetheless, MDEQ is not a party to that case and the order is not binding upon the agency.  Furthermore, that litigation is ongoing and subject to appeal so it is not final at this point.  

“MDEQ always seeks to make sure our policies are in compliance with state and federal law and will do the same here once that litigation concludes.”

The agency first told the Elon Musk-owned company last year that it could run the generators without a permit because the units are “affixed to a portable unit (i.e., a flatbed trailer)” and are therefore considered mobile. 

Brown, though, disagreed. She argued that, given the size of the generators and the fact they aren’t “self-propelled or intended to be propelled” while operating, the federal exemption for mobile sources can’t apply.

Whitney Lipscomb, the general counsel for the Republican Attorneys General Association, announced Thursday that she is running for Mississippi secretary of state next year in the Republican primary. 

“I am more convinced now more than ever that Mississippi needs leadership with unwavering conservative convictions, a deep desire to make a difference and the ability to get things done,” Lipscomb said at a press conference at the Mississippi Republican Party headquarters in Jackson. 

While this is her first time running for office, Lipscomb has spent much of her career in Republican politics and government. 

Lipscomb was deputy chief of staff and an attorney for then-Gov. Phil Bryant. She served as deputy attorney general for about five years under Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is running for governor next year.

“I have spent my career in the fights that matter to Mississippi because I love this state,” Lipscomb said, citing her work under Bryant and Fitch, both of whom were seated in the front row during her announcement.

The secretary of state’s responsibilities include overseeing state elections as well as managing business formations and managing state-owned land. Lipscomb said her top priorities are cutting red tape for business owners and protecting “every lawful vote” in elections. 

“We’re going to continue to protect the integrity of Mississippi’s elections. If people do not trust elections, they won’t trust their government,” Lipscomb said. “Process matters and the rules must be followed. We are seeing exactly how important that is right this very moment.”

Lipscomb’s campaign committee filed its initial paperwork in May.

Shuwaski Young, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state in 2023, has said that he is running again for the position next year as a Republican. No Democratic candidate has announced a run for the office. 

Current Secretary of State Michael Watson is running for lieutenant governor next year. Current Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is term-limited.

As Democrat Scott Colom narrowly leads incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith in a race for U.S. Senate, it appears Mississippi will see a partisan legal fight over thousands of affidavit ballots that will decide the outcome.

Mississippi Republican Party Chairman Mike Hurst vowed at a Thursday press conference to “fight like hell” to ensure that only “legally cast” ballots are counted and that the process to review and count the outstanding ballots is aboveboard. 

READ MORE: Thousands of affidavit ballots outstanding in Mississippi Senate election. Campaigns prepare for legal fight

“Let me be clear: This race is far from being over,” Hurst said. “Right now, we estimate that there could be approximately 20,000 outstanding ballots left to be counted.” 

Hurst said, without providing evidence, that the areas where a large number of affidavit ballots remain outstanding are traditional Republican-leaning areas of the state. When asked if he would name those specific counties, he declined. 

The razor-thin margin of votes between Hyde-Smith and Colom in a state considered a Republican stronghold has sent shockwaves across the nation, but it remained too close to call on Thursday. Only 1,764 votes separated the two candidates. The Associated Press reported that Colom led 466,226 to 464,502, with 96% of the vote counted.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the fundraising arm of the Senate GOP, sent letters to circuit county clerks and election commissioners asking them to preserve and set aside affidavit ballots. 

Kyle Kirkpatrick, former head of the elections division at the Mississippi secretary of state’s office, questioned on social media how productive that exercise would be because once affidavit ballots are scanned, it is “impossible to determine” what voter that ballot was associated with. 

Jacquelyn Lopez, an attorney at Elias Law Group who is representing the Colom campaign, wrote its own letter to circuit clerks and election commissioners saying that the NRSC’s demands violate state law.

“There is no basis whatsoever in Mississippi law for creating or maintaining records that would allow any accepted ballot to be linked to any particular voter’s identity,” Lopez wrote.  “Doing so would violate voters’ constitutional rights.”

PODCAST: When will we know who won Mississippi’s Senate midterm election?

Election attorneys, voting rights advocates and reporters from around the globe have descended on Mississippi over the past 48 hours, scrambling to make sense of what remaining ballots were left, when they would be counted and how Colom found himself in striking distance of pulling off a victory in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in over four decades.  

Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy organization, said the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic election attorneys from Elias Law Group have deployed hundreds of volunteers and local lawyers across all 82 counties to oversee the final rounds of counting. 

Mississippi has no automatic recount law. A recount would happen only if a court ordered it. For that to happen, a campaign or political party would have to file a lawsuit against a county or county election commission. 

A state judge would likely hear the case on an expedited basis, and the lower court’s decision would be appealable to the Mississippi Supreme Court. 

After the election results are certified, campaigns can conduct ballot box examinations, which can be used as evidence in a lawsuit. The dispute over which affidavit ballots are accepted and rejected would likely be the subject of litigation. 

If a court fight ensued, it could be a disjointed, chaotic process. Mississippi law does not establish a system for challenging ballots on a statewide scale, only on a county-by-county basis. 

The Republican Party chairman declined to say in which specific county he’s considering filing a lawsuit, but he referenced Hinds County, Mississippi’s largest county and a Democratic stronghold, as a likely option. 

“It’s no surprise that this is a traditionally Democratic county, and I don’t think it’s any surprise that this election commission, in particular, has had a number of issues in the past that frankly are not just Republican issues, but even Democratic election commissioners have complained about how the electoral system in Hinds County has operated,” Hurst said. 

The press conference displayed the awkward and surprising position the state GOP currently finds itself in, a Deep South state that has consistently sent Republicans to the U.S. Senate for the last four decades. 

For the first time in a generation, an incumbent Republican senator in Mississippi running for reelection has been caught flat-footed and put on the defensive after Black voters turned out in droves and many Republican voters crossed over to vote for Colom. 

Hurst, who also serves as general counsel for the Republican National Committee, acknowledged that Democratic candidates did “pretty well” around the country and this was the closest Senate race that reliably conservative Mississippi has had in a “very, very long time.” 

Though he claimed that Hyde-Smith would ultimately win the election, Hurst said he would accept the results of the election if the votes show Colom lawfully won.

Voters have until Nov. 10 to correct issues related to presenting a voter ID at their local circuit clerk’s office, which is also the same date election officials have to count late-arriving mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day.

WASHINGTON — There are just four races for U.S. Senate and governor that The Associated Press has not yet called as of Thursday.

Contests in Alaska, Kansas and Mississippi have narrow margins with votes still outstanding even as the scale of Democrats’ midterm victory across the country comes into focus, ensuring the party will control the House and the Senate next year.

LIVE: 2025 Mississippi election results

In the House, 35 races in which party control of the seat is at stake have yet to be called.

The AP does not make projections and will declare a winner only when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidate to close the gap.

In Mississippi’s Senate race, Democrat Scott Colom has seen his lead of a few dozen votes over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith grow to 1,145 votes with 96% of ballots counted.

Several thousand provisional ballots are expected to be counted in the race, and the state has until Nov. 10 to resolve those ballots. Those votes will be decisive. In 2022, the state counted about 5,700 provisional ballots. Mississippi does not have an automatic recount process, but a challenger can seek a court order for one.

The AP also has not called Alaska’s Senate contest between incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola, who had a 637-vote lead over Sullivan with an estimated 74% of votes counted. Peltola had 48.2% of the votes, to Sullivan’s 47.9%. Under Alaska law, if neither candidate gets more than 50% of the votes then it goes to ranked-choice tabulation.

Also in Alaska, Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has a 20-percentage-point lead over Republican Bernadette Wilson in the governor’s race. Kreiss-Tomkins had 49.2% of the vote with an estimated 74% of the ballots counted.

Like the Senate contest, the governor’s election advances to another round if no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes.

In Kansas, Democrat Cindy Holscher has less than a 1-percentage-point lead over Republican Ty Masterson in the governor’s race. Holscher’s 7,045-vote lead with an estimated 99% of votes counted comes after Democrat Adam Hamilton became the first member of his party to win a Senate seat in the state in nearly a century.

Holscher and Masterson both serve in the state Senate, where the Republican serves as its president.

DeSoto County voters elected the county’s first Black circuit and chancery court judges to newly created positions from last year’s redistricting efforts. 

John Hughes, a Southaven attorney and Walls Municipal Court judge, received 61% of the vote to become a circuit court judge. Gwen Baptist, a Southaven attorney, received 51% of votes to become a chancery judge, according to unofficial results. 

On Wednesday, both recognized how their wins made history and thanked supporters. 

Hughes said it was humbling to be both the first Black municipal judge and circuit judge to be elected in DeSoto County. 

“All citizens deserve a court that balance(s) fairness with the temperance of justice and compassion, when within reason,” Hughes wrote on his campaign Facebook page. “I am proud to be your humble public servant and neighbor.”

The circuit court is responsible for felony criminal prosecutions, which includes trials and sentencing. It also handles civil claims over $200 and hears appeals from the county and justice courts. 

Throughout her campaign, Baptist shared her family’s generational roots in DeSoto County and her connection to land, including a few videos of her on family land. In a message to supporters after Election Day, she said her father and grandfather had to conduct legal business outside the courthouse during the state’s Jim Crow era, but the win gives her the privilege to walk through the doors and serve from the bench.

“This victory is both a profound professional honor and an opportunity to honor my father, recognize the sacrifice of those who came before me and carry forward their legacy through service,” she wrote on Facebook.

The chancery court is responsible for wills and estates, adoption, child custody, divorce, guardianships and conservatorships. The court can also approve final domestic abuse protection orders. 

The only countywide Black official in DeSoto is Sheriff Thomas E. Tuggle II, who was elected  in 2023. 

The milestone comes several months after a federal lawsuit challenged the creation of the majority-Black subdistricts that eventually elected Baptist and Hughes.  

Last year, lawmakers redrew state court districts using the most recent 2020 U.S. Census data. In DeSoto County, one of the fastest growing counties in the state, lawmakers created the two majority-Black subdistricts in parts of Horn Lake and Southaven. Black residents make up over a third of the county’s population. 

U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock on Aug. 13 denied efforts by four DeSoto County residents, including county Supervisor Robert Foster, to prevent subdistrict of voters from electing the two countywide judges.

Foster argued that a small section of voters discriminated against white residents and that voting should be opened across the entire county. In her ruling, Aycock said the evidence presented at trial did not clearly point to race as the justification for the drawing of the judicial maps.

In the DeSoto case, Aycock ruled that just because race was referenced when the Legislature created the subdistrict and statistics show that it created a majority-Black subdistrict, it didn’t necessarily mean it was an unconstitutional gerrymander. 

She also noted that Rep. Dan Eubanks, a Republican from Walls, had testified that the Legislature added one circuit court judge and one chancery judge because the county needed help with the case backlog that stemmed from its growing population. 

Foster filed the lawsuit after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that enabled the drawing of majority-minority districts. In Callais, the high court rejected Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district, finding it relied too heavily on race and calling it an “unconstitutional gerrymander.”

That ruling has led to worries that Republican-led states would try to eliminate majority-Black and Latino electoral districts. Some state lawmakers have called for the state’s only majority-Black congressional district to be eliminated.

Republican states including Mississippi began redistricting efforts after the Callais decision. The state Senate formed a redistricting study committee that traveled across the state to hear from residents. 

Redistricting is also expected to be taken up during the 2027 legislative session that starts in January. 

DeSoto County previously faced a lawsuit that alleged its 2022 electoral map diluted Black voting power in county office elections and called for creation of majority-Black districts. In June, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding the plaintiffs didn’t provide enough proof that maps were drawn to intentionally dilute Black voting power.