Nobody in Mississippi, including the state's top election official, can say how many ballots are still uncounted in a U.S. Senate race where Democrat Scott Colom led Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by more than 2,500 votes Friday afternoon. The state does not allow recounts, so whoever finishes with the most votes wins.
The result could expand the new Democratic Senate majority. Democrats have already won enough seats to take control of the chamber, and Mississippi is one of only two Senate contests still undecided, along with Alaska's race between GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola. Mississippi has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1982, and President Trump carried it by 20 points in 2024.
Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson said Friday that about 3,300 mail ballots remain outstanding. He said more than 9,000 affidavit ballots, Mississippi's term for provisional ballots, had been processed by midday, but his office does not know how many are left because counties run their own elections. The state's 82 counties do not have to send results to the state until next week.
The campaigns and parties have offered competing figures. The Colom campaign said Tuesday it knew of more than 15,000 provisional ballots, while state Republican Party Chair Mike Hurst said Thursday he believed 20,000 ballots were outstanding, including absentee ballots that can still arrive through Nov. 10 if they were postmarked by Election Day.
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
Michael Morse, University of Pennsylvania law professor
Mail ballots must arrive within five business days. Affidavit ballots must be processed within the 10-day window counties have to certify results, which closes Nov. 13.
Why affidavit ballots are piling up
If the Colom campaign's estimate of 15,000 affidavit ballots holds, they would make up roughly 1.5% of all ballots cast in the race. Only four states had a higher provisional ballot rate in 2022, the last midterm year, according to federal data, and preliminary figures put Mississippi's rate this year near double North Carolina's.
A registration rule may help explain the volume. In most states, voters flagged as inactive can keep voting normally for a few years under federal law, but Mississippi is one of the few states that requires them to vote provisionally, leaving local officials to review their eligibility before those votes count.
Why so many voters had questionable eligibility is not yet clear. Michael Morse, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who studies voting, pointed to the state's experiment with credit data to clean voter lists, which he said could introduce unreliability, combined with dropping the usual protection that lets inactive voters cast regular ballots.
Watson defended the process in a post on X on Tuesday, arguing that the extra minutes affidavit voting takes are worth the integrity of cleaner voter rolls. Kathy Boockvar, a former Democratic secretary of state of Pennsylvania, said many provisional voters are likely to be found eligible but that the process breeds suspicion, and that transparency and good data are the best defense against distrust.
Lawyers and observers move in
The National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Hyde-Smith campaign asked every county to separate and preserve all affidavit ballots. The Colom campaign called that a desperate stunt, and its counsel sent its own letter urging the 82 counties to respect election procedures.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has sent lawyers and resources to Mississippi to monitor the count. Hurst said Thursday the election is far from over and that the state party has attorneys and observers across the state.
Each side is projecting confidence. Hyde-Smith wrote on X that thousands of votes remain to be counted in dozens of Republican counties, while Colom told reporters in Jackson on Thursday that Mississippi had decided to go in a new direction.
Colom, 43, is a district attorney who campaigned on the cost of living and health care. Hyde-Smith, 67, has served since 2018 and in April 2023 declined to back his nomination by then-President Joe Biden to a federal judgeship, which stalled it under the Senate's blue slip tradition. Colom has said losing the judgeship did not motivate his run.
