The Archie Case
Election safeguards must protect every voter and every lawful candidate, regardless of party.
Let me state the obvious.
David Archie is a Democrat. That is exactly why the case means something.
It is easy to demand that the rules be followed when the rules favor your side. Anybody can do that. The test of whether you actually believe in election integrity is whether you enforce it when the person on the wrong end of a broken system is somebody from another party.
The Circuit Clerk testified he had never had possession of the District 2 ballot boxes. The court found that, across all 26 precincts, voting machines or reports of their serial numbers, machine tapes, voter sign-in books, and chain-of-custody records for memory sticks were missing or unaccounted for. It also found that the will of the voters could not be determined and ordered a new election. It did not find fraud. It found that the safeguards had failed.
Incompetence can do as much damage as fraud.
If that had happened to a Republican in DeSoto County, I would want somebody to do exactly what I did. So I did it.
One standard. Not for some people. For everyone, period.
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Why the case ran from 2023 to 2026
David Archie filed his election contest with the Hinds County Democratic Executive Committee in August 2023. His petition for judicial review was due ten days later. On the tenth day, a cyberattack shut down Hinds County government computers, and the Circuit Clerk sent his staff home. Mr. Archie filed the next day. The defendant moved to dismiss the petition as untimely, and I was hired to oppose that motion.
The trial court dismissed the case. After an appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court sent it back in September 2024 for a hearing on whether the Clerk’s office had been closed on the deadline. The issue mattered because Mississippi law extends a filing deadline when the Clerk’s office is closed, until the next day the office opens (Miss. Code Ann. § 1-3-67 (opens in a new tab)). Following that hearing in 2025, the trial court found that the office had been closed and that the petition was timely. The defendant then attempted another appeal. I moved to dismiss that appeal, the motion was granted, and the case was set for trial.
The case at a glance
View current case status and filings
Case status last updated: October 11, 2026.
Every lawful vote represents a person who got up, stood in line, and decided to trust a stranger with their voice. They are owed care, not carelessness.The Reform Plan
Failures like those uncovered in the Archie case should not require a lawsuit to bring them to light.
I am proposing that the Legislature require the following. The Secretary of State’s office does not have this authority today (see the office’s March 3, 2026 statement (opens in a new tab)). It would require new law.
Immediate notice
Require notice to the Secretary of State when any election contest is filed, including a primary contest filed with a party executive committee, and at each later stage of the proceeding.
Authority to participate
Permit the Secretary of State to appear in a contest that raises significant election-administration issues, limited to how the election was run and never to who should win.
Preserve the record
Today, the law’s rule that a challenged ballot box be kept intact and sealed applies only to a contest before a court, and only until the court hearing (Miss. Code Ann. § 23-15-911(1)(c) (opens in a new tab)). In elections with no federal race on the ballot, absentee ballots can be destroyed after four months (Miss. Code Ann. § 23-15-645(3) (opens in a new tab)). That is backwards. Once a contest is filed, whether before a party committee or a court, every ballot, record, and electronic file from the challenged race should be preserved until the case is over, including any appeal or new election. Then each contest should be used to improve elections statewide.