JACKSON
Mississippi's U.S. Senate race remains too close to call, with incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith holding a lead of just over 2,000 votes against Democratic challenger Scott Colom as of Friday mid-afternoon. State election officials cannot confirm the exact number of outstanding ballots.
The uncertainty stems from Mississippi's highly decentralized election process, which is among the slowest in the United States. The state also lacks any legal provisions for recounts in its election code.
The Colom campaign said late Tuesday it was aware of more than 15,000 provisional ballots still needing verification. The chair of the state Republican Party estimated Thursday that 20,000 ballots remained outstanding, a figure that includes potential absentee votes.
Mississippi law allows absentee ballots to be received by officials until Nov. 10, provided they were postmarked by Election Day.
Secretary of State Michael Watson acknowledged his office does not know the precise number of provisional ballots left to count. Watson said Friday that over 9,000 provisional ballots had been processed across the state's 82 counties.
"Until we have the certified results, the individual counties will be the best source of the latest and most up-to-date information," Watson said in a statement. Counties are not required to transmit their certified election results to the state until next week.
Provisional ballots, known as affidavit ballots in Mississippi, are cast by voters whose eligibility is questioned. These votes are segregated and reviewed case-by-case before they are counted.
If the Colom campaign's estimate of 15,000 affidavit ballots is accurate, this would represent approximately 1.5 percent of the total ballots cast in the Senate race, based on unofficial results. Federal data from the 2022 midterm elections shows only four states had a provisional ballot rate higher than 1.5 percent. Mississippi's current provisional rate appears nearly double that of North Carolina this year.
Michael Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies voting, said the state's election administration is flawed. "Mississippi is not a model of election administration," Morse said. "Right now I would love to know a lot of things about the process and I am struggling to figure out what is unfolding here. I cannot tell you basic things."
