Lawyers, advocates hover as Mississippi election officials count final Colom, Hyde-Smith votes

Warring lawyers and advocates swarmed election offices across Mississippi on Friday to continue watching poll workers count outstanding ballots in the state’s U.S. Senate race.  

With all but one other U.S. Senate race across America already decided, the nation has fixed its attention on the Magnolia State nail-biter between Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic challenger Scott Colom. Local election officials continued processing thousands of outstanding absentee and affidavit ballots.

The narrow margin between Hyde-Smith and Colom has already shocked many across the nation, but it remained too close to call on Friday. Colom led by nearly 2,500 votes with nearly 1 million votes cast.

READ MORE: 2026 Mississippi election results

At a press conference in front of the state Capitol in Jackson on Friday, a coalition of voting rights organizations called for transparency in the counting of remaining ballots, but urged the public not to disrupt the process.  

Harya Tarekegn, the director of advocacy and policy for the Mississippi Center for Justice, said there were about 20,000 affidavit ballots —​​ called “provisional ballots” in many other states — cast in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race. 

Tarekegn told Mississippi Today there were about 2,100 affidavit ballots in north Mississippi’s DeSoto County, a traditional Republican stronghold where Colom currently leads by six percentage points, an illustration of Colom’s massive inroads in areas dominated by the GOP.

“What are Republican areas? DeSoto County, they said that was a Republican area. We won,” Colom said. 

Tarekegn also said on Friday there were 1,667 affidavit ballots left in Rankin County, where Hyde-Smith leads, and 1,931 in Madison County, another often Republican-voting county where Colom holds a narrow lead. 

But Hinds County, the state’s most populous area and a Democratic stronghold, is “the big enchilada,” Colom’s supporters note. Election officials told Mississippi Today they expected the counting of affidavits to continue through the weekend ahead of a Nov. 13 deadline.

Media, allies and observers from both campaigns flocked to the Hinds County Election Commission’s downtown Jackson office on Friday, filming commissioners as they processed ballots by hand.

Ray Chambers, attorney for the Hinds County Election Commission, didn’t want to speculate on a timeline beyond noting the deadline.  

“I predict they’ll be done in time,” Chambers said.  

In the north Jackson suburb of Madison, the Madison County Election Commission posted a sign saying the commission started processing affidavit ballots a day after the election. But commissions across the state are not following a unified schedule. Instead, a patchwork of meetings across the state sent representatives of both candidates scrambling to observe the counting of the ballots that will decide the Mississippi Senate race. 

Mississippi has a “bottom-up” system of election administration, where 82 county circuit clerks and election commissions are responsible for processing their own affidavit and absentee ballots. 

They are required to process the ballots and transmit the results to Secretary of State Michael Watson’s office by Nov. 13. 

Tarekegn said the election commission meetings are open to the public, but the public should not disrupt or publicly challenge decisions made by election officials. 

She also said voters who cast affidavit ballots only need to return to their local circuit clerk’s offices if they experienced voter ID issues at their polling place so that they can present a valid ID. 

The campaigns for Hyde-Smith and Colom have both said they believe they have a path to win the election.  

Hyde-Smith said on Friday that her campaign is not backing down and that the election was not over. She has not made any public appearance or scheduled a press conference since Tuesday’s election. One of her few public statements since the election was published in a social media post written in the third person.  

Touring a Black-owned bookstore on Jackson’s historic Farish Street, Colom on Friday stopped short of calling on her to concede the race, but he said she needs to answer questions from the public and the media as she continued trailing in the election results. 

“She’s still our senator,” Colom said. “Where is she? Why is she not doing any interviews? Why can’t she explain what her pathway to success is?” 

Upbeat and optimistic on Friday, Colom outlined what his early legislative priorities would be in Congress and, promoting Marshall’s Bookstore, told reporters about his affinity for the works of authors Leo Tolstoy and Robert Caro.  

A possible legal fight over the count also continued brewing Friday, a day after the fundraising arm of the Senate Republicans demanded election officials around the state separate and preserve affidavit ballots. 

In response, the Colom campaign sent a letter claiming the Republican group’s request was illegal and violated voters’ right to privacy. Once affidavit votes are accepted and counted, they are supposed to be treated like other ballots, and not have anyone’s name attached. State and federal courts have upheld voters’ right to privacy and secret ballots.