The Mississippi Free Press Is Using Journalism to ‘Make Democracy Work a Little Better’

Ashton Pittman on the groundwork that prepared journalists to cover a deadlocked US Senate race.

After most elections, Ashton Pittman, the news editor of the Mississippi Free Press, wraps up the paper’s results coverage by Wednesday night. But as updates trickled in on the slim margin between Cindy Hyde-Smith, the incumbent GOP senator, and Scott Colom, her Democratic challenger, in last week’s midterms, Pittman and a team of six reporters were still tracking ballot counts more than a week later. In a state that has not elected a Democrat to the United States Senate in forty-four years, the race remains too close to call.

For years, the Mississippi Free Press, a Jackson-based nonprofit news site, has been digging into the minutiae of the state’s county-based election system. Since 2020, when COVID-19 altered voting habits, Free Press reporters have been tracking polling-place location changes every state and federal election cycle; this year, they found eighteen incorrect locations listed in state voter resources. The outcome of this year’s Senate race hinges on affidavit ballots, also known as provisional ballots, given to people who show up to vote but whose eligibility cannot be immediately verified. Since the polls closed, Mississippi Free Press journalists have deployed their granular knowledge of the state’s decentralized system to track affidavit votes.