Thousands of affidavit ballots outstanding in Mississippi Senate election. Campaigns prepare for legal fight

Local election officials on Thursday continued processing thousands of outstanding absentee and affidavit ballots as the nation watched to see who will win Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race.  

The razor-thin margin between Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic challenger Scott Colom has already shocked many across the nation, but it remained too close to call on Thursday. Colom led by 1,764 votes with nearly 1 million cast.

A likely legal fight over the count also continued brewing on Thursday.

Colom’s campaign said he is clearly on track to win, and the voting rights organization Fair Fight said the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic election attorneys from Elias Law Group have deployed hundreds of volunteers and local lawyers across all 82 counties to oversee the final rounds of counting. 

LIVE: 2026 Mississippi election results

The National Republican Senatorial Committee sent a letter on Thursday to county election commissioners and circuit clerks in Mississippi, demanding they separate and preserve all affidavit ballots cast. 

“As the democratic process continues to play out, we are committed to ensuring that every single lawful ballot is accurately counted and the voices of all Mississippians are heard,” said NRSC Regional Press Secretary Samantha Cantrell. 

The letter demands that election officials preserve a wide range of records, pointing to future litigation.  

The state Republican Party was set to address reporters in a press conference in Jackson later on Thursday.

How many votes are left to count?

Secretary of State Michael Watson on Wednesday said that 3,600 outstanding mail-in absentee ballots could be processed, though realistically not all of these ballots will reach local election workers by the statutory Nov. 10 deadline. 

Between 14,000 and 18,000 affidavit ballots remain outstanding throughout the state, according to Lisa Ross, a local voting rights attorney who is leading the effort to monitor election officials processing the remaining ballots. 

Election attorneys, voting rights advocates and national reporters have descended on Mississippi over the past 48 hours, scrambling to make sense of what remaining ballots are out, when they would be counted and how Colom found himself in striking distance of pulling off a victory in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in decades.  

At a breakfast event in Jackson on Thursday morning, Colom greeted a throng of jubilant volunteers and said he had little doubt the race was breaking in his direction. 

“Anybody out there that does an analysis knows where this is going. The affidavit (vote) is always moving in Democratic favor in Mississippi,” Colom said. “You look at the ballots that are left, it’s going in our favor, absolutely.”

Spokespeople for Hyde-Smith’s campaign did not immediately offer a comment about where the number stood on Thursday. 

The Associated Press showed about 10% of the vote remained uncounted in Hinds County, the most populous area of the state and a Democratic stronghold. Election officials in Hinds County have said they expect the review of remaining ballots, most of which are absentee and affidavit ballots, to take days. 

Ballots also remained uncounted in areas along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in the Jackson suburb of Rankin County, both areas Hyde-Smith won. 

Colom did not speculate how long it would take for the remaining ballots to be counted, but said he is confident “Mississippi has decided to go in a new direction.” 

“I’m proud of the lawyers that we’ve got, the organizers we have that are on the ground making sure the law is followed, and that you know we do what we can,” Colom said. “I’m very excited where we are.”  

Election lawyers descend on Mississippi

Lauren Groh-Wargo, Fair Fight’s CEO, said in a statement that “Mississippians turned out in historic numbers” and that the organization would work to “defend the will of the people.” 

“Right now, Scott Colom is ahead, and we are confident that when the votes are tallied, he will be Mississippi’s next U.S. Senator.”

Semafor congressional reporter Nicholas Wu reported on Thursday that the U.S. House Black Caucus’ political arm is “aggressively fundraising for recounts in Mississippi” and a congressional race in North Carolina. 

Mississippi has no automatic recount law. A recount would happen only if a court ordered it. For that to happen, a campaign or political party would have to file a lawsuit against a county or county election commission. 

A state judge would likely hear the case on an expedited basis, and the lower court’s decision would be appealable to the Mississippi Supreme Court. 

After election results are certified, campaigns can conduct ballot box examinations, which can be used as evidence in a lawsuit. The dispute over which affidavit ballots are accepted and rejected would likely be the subject of litigation. 

If a court fight ensued, it could be a disjointed, chaotic process. Mississippi law does not establish a system for challenging ballots on a statewide scale, only on a county-by-county basis. 

How Democrat Colom pulled ahead of a GOP senator

The razor-thin margin has national pundits wondering how a Democrat is on the cusp of managing a stunning upset in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat in over four decades or elected a Black person to the chamber since Reconstruction. 

Colom managed to crack the GOP’s iron grip on the state by turning out large numbers of Black voters, flipping several crucial swing counties blue and convincing Republicans to cross over and vote for him. 

The most surprising feat was Colom winning DeSoto County, a reliably Republican stronghold in a Memphis suburb, by seven percentage points, something Democrats would have viewed as unthinkable last year. 

In 2020, Hyde-Smith won the county with 56% of the vote, while Democrat Mike Espy got 40%. Now Colom has flipped the script and carried the county by 51%, while Hyde-Smith trails at 45%. 

Colom also tempered his losses in Harrison County, a populous coast county that has swamped statewide Democratic candidates over the last decade and become a red firewall for the state GOP. 

In 2020, Hyde-Smith trounced Espy in Harrison County by 17 percentage points. This year, only four percentage points separate Hyde-Smith and Colom. 

The Democratic nominee also managed to flip Lafayette and Madison counties, two majority-white, affluent areas of the state that have become swing areas in recent elections. Brandon Presley, the Democratic nominee for governor in 2023, lost those two areas, but Colom narrowly won them 

Colom said he dramatically overperformed a “generic Democrat” in counties across the state and believed Hyde-Smith’s negative ads had backfired because he visited so many voters in person.