(The Center Square) – Despite backlash from progressive groups, an election integrity organization applauded Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson’s work to clean his state’s voter rolls last summer and ensure the security of the state’s elections.
Executive director of the Honest Elections Project Action Jason Snead told The Center Square that “ensuring voter rolls aren’t bloated by outdated registrations is critical work. Election officials have an obligation to clean the rolls and keep them that way.
“The Postal Service’s change-of-address database is far from perfect and often misses people who move away,” Snead said. “States should be expanding the sources of data they use, which is why even the federal Election Assistance Commission studied using commercial data.”
In the summer of 2025, Watson committed to continuing to “build on the accuracy of Mississippi’s voter rolls and strengthen the integrity of elections,” according to a news release.
“In accordance with Mississippi and federal law, registered voters who have been identified as having a new address will be sent a confirmation card and then placed on ‘Inactive’ status,” the release said.
“Inactive” voters are not immediately removed from the voter rolls, but are given the opportunity to correct their registration, the news release explained.
Further, “inactive” voters still had the ability to vote “by affidavit ballot.”
Watson partnered with ExperianrR for its voter roll project in order to have “reliable data for county election commissioners to utilize in maintaining Mississippi’s voter rolls.”
Watson’s press team has not yet responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.
Watson’s work drew criticism from groups like Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU of Mississippi, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, according to the Mississippi Today. The groups contacted Watson before the midterms demanding inactivated voters be reinstated.
Snead told The Center Square that “no one should be surprised that the same activist organizations that have repeatedly gone to court challenging voter-roll maintenance efforts across America are attacking Mississippi now.
“But their claims of voter suppression overlook an important fact: voters placed on the inactive list were still able to cast affidavit ballots, and more than three-quarters of all affidavit ballots reviewed so far have been accepted,” Snead said “That demonstrates an important safeguard is functioning – allowing election officials to verify eligibility while ensuring legitimate votes are counted.”
Errors should be identified and corrected, Snead said, “But the answer to imperfect data is better verification, not abandoning list maintenance.”
Neither the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU of Mississippi, nor the NAACP Legal Defense Fund responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.
Cleaning voter rolls has been a top issue lately for election integrity.
Honest Elections Project released a report ahead of the 2026 midterms detailing how both Republicans and Democrats reshaped election laws in 2026.
Republican trifectas concentrated on “verifying citizenship, cleaning voter rolls, and strengthening voter ID to name a few for their election-related bills, while Democrat trifectas focused on automatic registration, keeping mail-in ballot deadlines lax and enacting limits on the use of citizenship data, according to the report.
The Center Square reported in July that 6,600 noncitizens were added to New Jersey’s voter rolls from June 2023 to June 2024, and that 400 of them voted.