Kelly Jacobs was burnt out after the 2024 election season. She stopped going to meetings, paying her dues and socializing with her usual groups. But after connecting with election advocacy group Indivisible DeSoto, she found a new calling: helping Mississippi voters avoid being purged from poll books.
Jacobs, who is now the chairperson of Indivisible DeSoto, has found that thousands of DeSoto voters are listed as inactive. Inactive voters remain registered, but the designation means county election commissioners encountered an issue with their registration, such as a possible address change. If the inactive voter does not confirm their address and vote within a certain time period, the Mississippi Secretary of State is authorized to purge that voter from the voter rolls.
Mississippians received “check your voting status” messages over the last few months, linking to a page on the Mississippi Secretary of State’s website that allows voters to check their status by inputting their names, social security numbers, birth date and addresses.
The page tells voters if they are registered, but does not include their status.
“This is what I find so very alarming and deliberate,” Jacobs told the Mississippi Free Press.
Jacobs worries that people who do not vote regularly might decide to head to the polls last-minute, thinking, “Hmm, I’m gonna go vote this time” and be told by the poll worker that their name is not in the book, she told the Mississippi Free Press.
What to Do If You Are an Inactive Voter
If a person goes to cast a vote and finds out that their name is not in the book, they should be able to vote using an affidavit ballot as long as they have an ID with them, Legal Defense Fund attorney Brenda Wright explained.
“If you know you’re a registered voter, and you’re living in the same place that you always have, but you just happen not to have voted in the last couple of elections, it’s possible that you’ll be flagged as inactive,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “If you go to vote, you’ll need to cast an affidavit ballot, which then should be counted if nothing about your registration status has changed, but … the concern is that this could cause a lot of delays at the polling places.”
But in Kelly Jacobs’ experience voting in Mississippi, voters are not always offered affidavit ballots, she told the Mississippi Free Press.
“The cure for that is to go and vote absentee,” Jacobs said. “Absentee voting is not for everyone—you have to have an excuse, and the best excuse for them to use is that they’re going to be out of town.”
Absentee voting reduces lines on Election Day and ensures your voting status is active prior to Election Day, avoiding potentially undesirable weather, Jacobs told the Mississippi Free Press, though Mississippi’s absentee voting requires a qualifying excuse.
“(Being marked as inactive) just adds another hurdle to the voting process, and Mississippi laws are already among the most restrictive in the nation when it comes to facilitating the right to vote, so to us this just seems like another unnecessary burden to put on the voter,” Wright told the Mississippi Free Press.
DeSoto and Harrison counties saw the largest drops in eligible voters between January and September, losing about 1,750 and 1,150 active voters respectively; more than 30 Mississippi counties saw a net loss in active voters, Mississippi’s voter count data shows.
Inactive Voters and Voter Removals
Much like Kelly Jacobs, MIT Elections Lab founder Charles Stewart III has thrown himself into elections research.
Marking voters as inactive is the first step in having them removed from voting rolls completely, Stewart told the Mississippi Free Press. While removing voters from the rolls is commonly called “purging,” Stewart prefers to call it “voter removal.”
“It’s come to actually have kind of an ideological meaning, and in particular, among voting rights activists especially, it’s seen as being a kind of a nefarious activity on the part of election administrators to deny (and) basically suppress the vote by eliminating people’s voting registration,” Stewart told the Mississippi Free Press. “So, with that in mind, I tend to talk about removals just because it’s more of a value-neutral term.”
The National Voter Registration Act, which governs election regulations in the U.S., gives specific guidelines on the processes states can use to remove voters from their roles.
“You can’t be removed for not voting per se, but not voting can set up a process that allows the county to begin a series of mail notifications that eventually could lead to your being removed,” Stewart told the Mississippi Free Press.
The government marks voters it thinks might have moved as inactive and, if they miss the next two federal elections, they are removed from the voting roll. The entire removal process could potentially occur within a period of about two years, depending on the election cycle, Stewart said.
The notification process for letting voters know they are at risk of being marked as inactive, or at risk of being removed from voter rolls completely, is based on the mail service, relying on non-forwardable mail.
Stewart believes this is the voter registration system’s greatest flaw.
Only about half of people register their address changes with the federal government, Stewart said, which is what the voting system depends on. Address change registrations can be made on the U.S. Postal Service website.
More than 10% of Americans move each year on average, Census records show, with that rate slowly declining over the last two decades.
Community housing—dorms, nursing homes or military barracks—can also complicate the process because residents often do not have individual mailing addresses recognized by the national voting system, Steward told the Mississippi Free Press.
Issues like these mean some groups of voters are more likely to be marked as inactive than others.
“We know that African Americans are much more mobile than whites in general, and have lower income than whites in general, so both of those things are highly correlated,” Stewart told the Mississippi Free Press. “Irregardless of race, those things are highly correlated with falling off the voting rolls, usually because of this mobility issue.”
Families living below the poverty line are 50% more likely to move within a year than families living above the poverty line, U.S. Census data shows, and Black Americans are more likely to live below the poverty line than any other demographic.
Statewide Active Voter Rate Changes
Most of Mississippi’s remaining counties saw net increases in active voter counts, with Rankin and Madison counties leading the increase at 807 and 245 voters, respectively. Madison County’s voter count still increased despite marking more than 1,400 voters as inactive and permanently removing about 200 voters from election rolls in August alone, county records show.
An average of 84% of estimated eligible voters are marked as active across Mississippi counties as of September.
More than two-thirds of Mississippi’s counties have less than 80% of potential eligible voters listed as active. Two of those counties—Jackson and Lauderdale counties—were among the counties with the highest active voter increases this year.
Jackson County saw an increase of more than 1,400 active voters between June and September, but a net gain of only 284 due to voter removals earlier in the year. Lauderdale County’s active voter count first reached its current high of more than 38,000 in March, making its way back up to that number in September after a series of drops over the summer.
Only one county, Chickasaw, saw no change in net active voter count between January and September.
Concerns Over Disenfranchisement
Kelly Jacobs’ concerns for Election Day do not stop at inactive voters or voter removal.
Jacobs’ concerns are also growing for voters with criminal records, who are being told that their felony conviction and drugs has caused them to lose their voting rights, Jacobs told the Mississippi Free Press.
Jacobs, who sponsored the first attempt to use a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana in Mississippi in 2015, helps show those with prior drug convictions that drug crimes are not among the disenfranchising felonies for Mississippi residents.
Mississippi is one of 10 states that permanently disenfranchise people convicted of certain felonies, even if their criminal record is expunged, although several states ban people convicted of election-related crimes permanently as well. Jacobs worries about how this may disproportionately affect African Americans, a cohort that is arrested and prosecuted at higher rates for drug crimes than other populations.
While people may not be as involved as Jacobs, she is working to make sure that her fellow citizens get through the election process as swiftly and easily as possible.
The Mississippi Free Press’ map of voter precinct locations throughout the state can be found here.
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of the 2026 elections and read past stories here.
Mississippi Free Press stories are always free because we believe everyone should have access to quality journalism. Donations from readers like you make that possible. Please click here to give to help sustain and grow vital, people-over-power journalism for Mississippians.
Readers can sign up for our free newsletters here.
