Four days after Americans voted in the midterm elections, Mississippi still does not know who will represent it in the US Senate. Democrat Scott Colom, a district attorney, led Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 2,574 votes in the latest Associated Press count on Friday evening, with about 97 per cent of the expected vote tallied. The Associated Press has not called the race.
The figures put Colom on 467,930 votes, or 49.1 per cent, against 465,356, or 48.8 per cent, for Hyde-Smith, out of more than 950,000 cast. Independent candidate Ty Pinkins took about 19,900 votes, or 2.1 per cent, far more than the gap between the two leaders. The lead has widened steadily since election night: Colom was ahead by just 43 votes in the early hours of Wednesday, by 65 that afternoon and by 1,138 on Wednesday evening. These are unofficial counts reported by news organisations, not certified results.
What remains is a pool of ballots that could still swing the outcome. Mississippi’s secretary of state, Michael Watson, said about 3,600 mail ballots were still outstanding; they must have been postmarked by Election Day and can arrive until 5pm on Tuesday, 10 November. An unknown number of affidavit ballots, the state’s term for provisional ballots cast by voters who could not show accepted photo ID or whose names were not on the rolls, are also still to be processed. Watson put that figure at between 12,000 and 20,000, while the Colom campaign estimates 10,000 to 15,000, a figure that has not been independently confirmed. The Associated Press has estimated about 30,000 votes remain to be counted in total, and Hyde-Smith would need roughly 53 per cent of them to overtake Colom. Voters who cast affidavit ballots have until Tuesday to show ID and save their vote. Counties must certify their results by Friday, 13 November, and the secretary of state declares the final result on 3 December.
The closeness has already produced a legal fight over the remaining ballots. Lawyers for Hyde-Smith and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have written to all 82 counties demanding that affidavit ballots be separated and preserved. Colom’s campaign says the demand has no basis in Mississippi law. If the margin stays this tight, the state offers no easy way to settle it: Mississippi is the only state in the country with no provision for a recount, automatic or on request.
The contest was not expected to be close. Mississippi is a Republican stronghold, and Hyde-Smith is a staunch ally of President Donald Trump. A Colom victory would make him the first Democrat to win a US Senate race in the state since John Stennis in 1982, and would cap a midterm in which Democrats have already swept races across the country. For now, both campaigns are waiting on the count, and on the thousands of Mississippi voters whose ballots have yet to be resolved.
Sources: Associated Press vote counts, as reported by the Mississippi Free Press and NBC News (https://www.newslooks.com/scott-colom-nears-potential-mississippi-senate-milestone-as-vote-count-continues/ and https://zarknews.com/mississippi-senate-race-still-uncalled-counting-continues/).
