Three days after Election Day, Mississippi still does not know who will represent it in the United States Senate, and the count has now become a legal fight as well as an arithmetic one. Democrat Scott Colom holds a narrow lead of about 2,000 ballots, or 49.1 percent to 48.8 percent, over Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, with 96 percent of votes counted as of noon on November 6, according to the Associated Press. Within 24 hours, lawyers for both candidates, as well as the Mississippi Republican Party, had weighed in on the laws governing the counting process, sending letters to election officials across the state 82 counties.
Why it matters
The Republican legal team moved first. On November 5 it sent a letter to county election commissioners and circuit clerks demanding that affidavit ballots be separated from the rest during the counting process, a step that would make them easier to challenge later. The Democratic legal team, including attorneys from the Elias Law Group, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have deployed hundreds of volunteers and lawyers to all 82 counties, and they have sent their own letters in the opposite direction. The two sides are now arguing, county by county, about the rules for ballots that were cast by voters whose eligibility was questioned at the polls.
The numbers behind the argument are large. About 20,000 ballots might still remain uncounted across the state, according to the Mississippi Republican Party chair, and an estimate put the figure at about 30,000 on Friday afternoon, after an earlier estimate of 44,000 that morning. About 3,600 absentee ballots sent by mail are still outstanding, and they must have been postmarked by Election Day and arrive by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, November 10. An unknown number of affidavit ballots also remain, and the Colom campaign estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 are still uncounted, although that figure has not been confirmed independently.
What happens next
Mississippi is the only state in the country without a recount provision in its laws, which means there will be no automatic recount and neither candidate can request one. The losing candidate can challenge the result through the court system, a usually time consuming process that Mississippi courts could opt to accelerate given the time crunch of sending a senator to Washington by early January. Counties must submit their certified results by Friday, November 13, and a winner will be declared shortly after that, but that will almost certainly not be the end of the contest.
What happens next will be decided by the ballots still to be counted, and by the courts if the margin stays this close. If Colom lead holds, he would be the first Democrat to win a United States Senate race in Mississippi since John Stennis in 1982, and the Democratic majority would grow to at least 55 seats. If Hyde-Smith closes the gap, the Republicans will have saved their last seat of the night. Either way, the count will proceed at its own pace, and the responsible course is to wait for it rather than to declare a result that the ballots have not yet produced.
