While Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race results are still uncertain, Democrats are optimistic about Scott Colom’s impending victory. What forged his unsuspected path to victory? Creative campaigning, a grassroots rebuke of post-Callais redistricting, and a Republican challenger who failed to make herself visible to voters combined to strengthen his successful run.
Mississippi Today’s Editor in Chief, Emily Pettus, joins Jen to explain what to expect from Mississippi’s affidavit ballot counting process this week. Highlighting the strengths of Colom’s campaign and how he took the lead in his tough race, Pettus talks about the emotional response she has observed from Black voters across the state.
Emily Pettus is the Editor in Chief of Mississippi Today. She has worked as a journalist in Mississippi since 1989, with a focus on politics and government.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I am delighted to welcome Emily Pettus, who is the editor-in-Chief of Mississippi Today. It is an independent, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in the great state of Mississippi. Welcome, Emily.
Emily Pettus
Good morning, how are you?
Jen Rubin
It’s wonderful to be here. You guys have been on top of a story for quite some time about how we wound up with over 200,000 so-called inactive voters in Mississippi. That has resulted in tens of thousands, we don’t even know how many, of these so-called affidavit ballots. Explain to us what the Secretary of State did, and what a lot of voter groups were afraid was going to happen.
Emily Pettus
Yes, thanks for the question, Jen. So, let me just give a quick plug to our investigative reporter, Madeline Wynn, who broke this story and has done a great job following it. Secretary of State Michael Watson used unverified data from experience. It’s a credit reporting company. to, check people’s addresses. Now, they weren’t checking people’s credit scores. What they were doing was looking at data that can show multiple addresses for the same name. So, if somebody lived in an apartment 5 years ago, that address would show up. their current address with the voter registration should also show up. The Secretary of State provided this information to local election officials and said. You can take this, and you can try to verify voter registration by, for example, sending a postcard to one of these addresses. We do know about situations where postcards went to addresses people have not lived at in years. There’s at least one man in North Mississippi. A postcard went to an address where… to a town he had never even been to, much less lived in. If the postcard goes to an old address, or an address where someone never lived. And the person does not respond to the local election officials. They can get put onto the inactive voter roll. And so, this has created a lot of difficulty for people across the state. If you go to vote on Election Day, and you show up, and you are not on the active voter list that the poll workers have, you’re given what is called an affidavit ballot. where it… we vote by paper here, so you get a paper ballot and an envelope, and you have to fill it out, and it has to be signed in a certain place. The poll worker has to sign it in a certain place. There is just a number of ways that things can go wrong. with affidavit ballots. Any one of these things that goes wrong can be a reason to challenge the ballot and not count it. And so, a lot of people in Mississippi are very stressed out about this. They feel like they’ve done everything right. They have registered to vote, they have been active voters, and then, because of something beyond their control, with the use of this Experian data. They have been put on an inactive list, and they don’t know if their vote’s going to count or not.
Jen Rubin
So, you guys wound up with the most inactive voters, practically, I think, of any state in the union. As I said, over 230,000. What was the reason for this? Was there some problem that he was attempting to solve?
Emily Pettus
So, Mississippi does have a history, okay, first of all, let’s take Mississippi’s history generally, right? I mean, this is a state where people… were arrested and, you know, they faced violent consequences. Some people were killed for the right to vote. Right. And then the… Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act that helped bring in changes across the Deep South, in particular, as well in Mississippi, and so what happened was, voter registration increased. Now, about… 10 or 15 years ago, when I was working for the Associated Press, I did stories about how Mississippi had inflated voter rolls. That is, in the 82 counties, there were a fairly large number of counties that had more registered voters than people who were alive of voting age. After that, there were a number of counties that came in and tried to trim down the voter rolls, try to make sure that they were updated, to make sure that people who were registered to vote were actually alive and living in the counties. There are very few counties at this point that have that kind of inflation on their rolls. So… there have been efforts over the years to try to, like, clean up, make sure that things are current, make sure, like, you don’t want… like, you don’t want people to be disenfranchised. You don’t also want a situation where somebody’s registered to vote in four different places, and theoretically could cast 4 different ballots, right? You want a clean system. So, this use of the credit data, or the Experian data, I think was an effort to try to make sure that voting rolls were clean and current and accurate.
Jen Rubin
Now, a number of civil rights organizations, voters’ groups, warned the Secretary of State that this data was inaccurate, was filled with errors. That happened before the election. Did he respond to that? And since they’ve had this debacle, has he had any response to what’s occurred?
Emily Pettus
So, if he responded to it, his office has not let us know about it. In our reporting on this issue, Mississippi Today has consistently reached out to the Secretary of State’s office. That office has been critical of some of our reporters.
Emily Pettus
You know, they are, they are, facing public criticism over these actions.
Jen Rubin
Yes, sir.
Emily Pettus
So, part of their response has been not responding to journalists.
Jen Rubin
Now, the process is going on in these 82 counties, from what I understand, that do not have uniform systems, do not have a single way of doing this, where they’re going to have to go through individually and determine whether to accept or reject these affidavit ballots, and then to tabulate and count them. What have you found out in terms of the process? Is this proceeding smoothly? Are people doing the job they’re supposed to? Are people able to observe this publicly?
Emily Pettus
We have not heard a lot of complaints about this being a private process.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Emily Pettus
a lot of what’s going on is that Scott Colom’s campaign in particular, but I think both campaigns at this point, his and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s. Are bringing in observers.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Emily Pettus
go keep eyes on it, as they should. Like, this should be a public process. There should be scrutiny about how these votes are being counted. And so, as you mentioned, things are not consistent across the 82 counties. Some counties are much more efficient than others. Some counties have many more affidavit ballots to count. Hines County, which is the largest by population in the state, it’s where Jackson is located. No surprise, Hines County has the largest number of affidavit ballots. It has the largest number of ballots cast overall. So, I think I looked this morning, and something like 90… 3% or 90… 90-something percent of the vote in Hines County has been tabulated, but it’s always the last few that take longer than anything, right?
Jen Rubin
I’m…
Emily Pettus
Yeah.
Jen Rubin
Right? Now, this process is going to go on tomorrow, my understanding is the last day for absentee ballots to be received. And then the certification process is supposed to end on Friday. Do you think that will end in a timely fashion, that we will have a certified winner by the end of the week, or is this going to drag on, do you think?
Emily Pettus
I have faith that the local election officials will meet their deadline. there’s not…history of them kind of blowing that. But really, I mean, frankly, this election is messier than some others have been in the past. There’s one more thing at play here, dealing with voter ID.
Jen Rubin
Yes.
Emily Pettus
If a person shows up to vote on Election Day, and they don’t have their government-issued photo identification with them. they are allowed to cast an affidavit ballot, but they have to do what is called curing the ballot, which is, you have to come back by, by tomorrow, like a week later, to show your ID, to have your ballot counted. If you don’t show up, and you don’t cure the ballot by then, that is just going to be set aside, and it’s not going to be counted.
Jen Rubin
So there’s the so-called yellow marks ballots, and there are a smaller number of those than there are overall of the affidavit ballots, my understanding is.
Emily Pettus
Yes.
Jen Rubin
Tell us about the turnout and the results that it looks like we are headed to, which would be truly extraordinary, given the history of Mississippi. What motivated this turnout? Why is Scott Colom even… on the cusp, on the potential for being elected in a state like Mississippi.
Emily Pettus
There are a number of factors here with Scott Colom. He started early and campaigned often. He had a lot of town hall events across Mississippi. He showed up at festivals to shake hands. He had a lot of personal outreach. That’s one thing. Another thing is that he had… I’ve heard a lot of people say that he had an extraordinarily good presence on social media and on traditional paid TV. His Pick Another Protein ad was.
Jen Rubin
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Emily Pettus
Yes. That really resonated with people. His ad that was released on Halloween that played off of the movie Sinners, which is a Mississippi movie. That’s actually him and his identical twin brother. You know, a lot of viral moments like that. In addition to that, it’s, you know, you cannot ignore the fact that the Democratic Party came in here and invested in this race very late in the game. But still, there was an investment, which you often do not see in Mississippi races.
Jen Rubin
Right.
Emily Pettus
National Democratic groups generally don’t consider Mississippi a great investment because it has such a history of being such a strong Republican state in the last 25 or 30 years. And so, I do think that that… that investment here allowed the Cologne campaign to really Get its message out a whole lot more.
Jen Rubin
How much of this do you think was a reaction to the Calais decision, what’s perceived as an attack on voting rights in general by this administration?
Emily Pettus
A lot of people are ticked off about the Calais decision. Mississippi is not one of the states To do redistricting yet.
Jen Rubin
Right.
Emily Pettus
We still do expect redistricting, at least for judicial districts and for state House and Senate districts. I honestly don’t see a scenario where the Mississippi legislature could redraw the four U.S. House districts in a way that would be more Republican-friendly than it was. I mean, they gerrymandered a whole lot to help the Republicans in the last elections, in the last cycle of redistricting. There are people who complain that, you know, Mississippi only has one gerrymandered congressional district, and it is for the Black Democrat. That is not true at all. All four of those districts are very much gerrymandered for partisan purposes.
Jen Rubin
Do you think, if Scott Colom is successful, that this is going to reverberate, you’re going to have gubernatorial elections, other elections coming up, that this would kind of change the political equation in Mississippi?
Emily Pettus
You know, possibly. I mean, I think if National Democratic groups see Mississippi as a place that’s worth… worthy of investment, that maybe some of that money will start flowing to the state. Republicans have had a pretty easy time here in the last generation, right? in… look, Mississippi has a 38% Black population, so that… and… and a history of… racially polarized voting. Generally speaking, there are Black people who vote for Republicans, there are… there’s a fairly significant number of white people who vote for Democrats, but to put together a coalition to… for a Democrat to win, you have to have strong turnout by Black voters. And you have to have significant turnout from white voters who are either just, like, generally independent, kind of undecided, unhappy with the status quo, and you have to, like, have people motivated to actually Turn out to vote. There’s been sort of a failure or a falling short in that voter turnout area for the last elections. If you look at the last gubernatorial election, the Democrat came close, but didn’t get there, obviously. Mississippi has state elections in 2027. Eight statewide offices, including governor, which will be open, because the current governor, Republican Tate Reeves, is term-limited. All of the legislative seats will be on the ballot as well, and you’ll also have County level, like county supervisors. And those, those, you know, those local elections really drive turnout as well.
Jen Rubin
So, last question for you. It’s very unusual for any incumbent senator to lose an election. is even more unusual for a Republican in the South who’s an incumbent. Did Cindy Hyde-Smith go to sleep on this election? Was she absentee? Was she missing? What did she do to get herself in such deep trouble?
Emily Pettus
She really, look, she ran a campaign that would have won the election if she had had a… Democratic challenger who… Was not as strong. She chose not to have… She chose not to debate him. Yeah. She chose not to have, like, town hall meetings. He had, I think I’ve read 60 of those, where she was really largely, not completely. But largely invisible. from big events. I mean, she did have… she did tour at the end of the campaign. She went to a lot of very Republican-friendly places around the state. I mean, frankly, a lot of the places she went were really small and wouldn’t draw a lot of votes. You know, she was spending time in counties near her home Bass, and like… Why campaign near your home base when there are a larger number of votes to get in other places? So she really was kind of like. Not entirely absent, but she could have done a whole lot more to be active here.
Jen Rubin
Last question for you. There are a lot of African Americans Who, as children, they grew up in the pre-civil rights era. and are now on the cusp of seeing a African American perhaps be their U.S. center. Is it an emotional time for African Americans in Mississippi?
Emily Pettus
Oh my goodness.
Jen Rubin
What’s been the reaction? I mean, what’s been the atmosphere that you’ve seen?
Emily Pettus
Yes, it is… it is… clearly an emotional time for a lot of people who grew up under, like, terrible, oppressive circumstances. And, you know, the thought of it in their lifetime, to potentially see a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. Mississippi has had two Black senators, but they were both during Reconstruction, they were both elected by the legislature. This would be the first African American senator elected by… this would be the first Black statewide candidate elected by popular vote in Mississippi. That is huge. Huge.
Jen Rubin
Wow. Well, Emily, thank you for all you do. Your publication is a miracle. Pulitzer Prize-winning miracle. Your reporters do absolute phenomenal work. If people want to find you, if people want to subscribe or get the news, where do they go?
Emily Pettus
We are at MississippiToday.org, and free to read, no paywall, but if people do want to give financial support to help You know, support this, to help, pay for this coverage. Happy to have that as well.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely, and this is what we always advocate, which is independent news. This is where we get hard journalistic work, independent investigative work. You guys have done great coverage, we’ll look forward to having more of it. I look forward to having you back. Thanks so much, Emily.
Emily Pettus
Thank you, Jen, appreciate it.
