The fight is growing over ballot counting in Mississippi’s tight Senate race

CNN

By Fredreka Schouten, Annie Grayer, Tierney Sneed, CNN

Jackson, Mississippi (CNN) — National party operatives, lawyers, grassroots activists and content creators are descending on Mississippi to observe the vetting of thousands of provisional ballots in the coming days and to gear up for possible legal challenges over the final results.

Mississippi, a state not used to the national spotlight for close elections, now sits at the forefront of a fight that will determine the size of the Democrats’ majority in the US Senate next year.

Democrat Scott Colom has a razor-thin lead over Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly 40 years and no Black person to the Senate since Reconstruction.

Both Colom and Hyde-Smith have assembled extensive teams ready to observe and potentially challenge ballot-counting procedures ahead of Mississippi’s December 3 deadline for certifying the results.

“We were prepared for this for months,” Colom told reporters Wednesday. “We have an army of lawyers. We have local lawyers. We have everybody involved to make sure the process is followed according to the law.”

At a press conference Thursday, the state GOP touted the 50-plus volunteer attorneys and observers it had sent across the state, and Mississippi Republican Party Chair Michael Hurst said many more are prepared to jump in to help.

“Our attorneys and observers will continue to be in different parts of Mississippi – watching as election commissioners review and process these outstanding ballots, ensuring that our elections are followed and that only ballots which have been legally cast are counted,” he said.

The nonpartisan NAACP also is engaged in post-election work.

NAACP members and volunteers are being deployed to all of the state’s 82 counties to monitor how election officials vet outstanding provisional ballots – known as “affidavit” ballots in Mississippi – cast because the voters lacked photo ID or were not showing up in their precincts’ poll books.

In cases in which a voter failed to provide identification, the NAACP’s volunteers will scramble to contact voters and encourage them to head to the county courthouse with the proper documentation before the November 10 deadline to resolve any issues at the county level.

“Our interest is no individual, particularly African Americans, disenfranchised in this process because of lack of ID,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson told CNN.

One voter in Hinds County, home to Jackson, told CNN she had to jump through extra hoops to cast a ballot for Colom this week. Dajia Williams, 23, said she updated her driver’s license and voter registration in May after moving to Hinds from a nearby county.

She said she checked the online registration on the Sunday before the election to make sure she was there and grew concerned when she couldn’t spot her name. Williams, who voted in the primary and presidential elections in 2024, figured the change hadn’t posted yet.

But on Election Day, poll workers couldn’t find her either. The election official provided her with a provisional ballot and told her to go to the circuit court and show her ID again, even though she’d brought it to the polls.

“I don’t feel like people should have to feel like they’re jumping through hoops to to go vote, especially in Mississippi,” she told CNN, adding that “a lot of people don’t even know what an affidavit or a provisional ballot is.”

It’s not clear how many provisional ballots remain to be counted. Officials in Colom’s campaign pegged the number at 15,000 earlier this week. Republicans estimated that as many as 20,000 absentee ballots and provisional ballots were outstanding as of Thursday afternoon.

Secretary of State Michael Watson has said the total number is unknown.

Colom told CNN that he was optimistic his lead – at about 1,800 votes late Thursday – would continue to grow as more ballots were counted.

“You look at the ballots that are left, you know, it’s going in our favor,” he said.

Intense scrutiny of ballots and counties

The proceedings during which county election committees announce whether to accept or reject a provisional ballot are open to the public, but the levels of transparency vary county to county, advocates say.

Dueling letters sent to local election officials Thursday from the Democratic and Republican attorneys showcased the intense scrutiny the state will be under.

A letter from the law firm representing the Hyde-Smith campaign requested that local officials segregate affidavit ballots from the rest of the count, and that they preserve other election-related records.

Colom’s lawyers shot back Thursday night with a letter of their own calling the request “unlawful,” and warning against taking any step that would allow “particular ballot to be traced to a particular voter,” in violation of ballot secrecy laws.

In the state’s largest county that is home to Jackson, county commissioners are sorting through hundreds of affidavit ballots in a way that is open for the public to observe. One commissioner has over 600 affidavits to manage, and on Thursday was trying to make a dent in the 233 affidavit ballots from students at Jackson State University. Hinds County Election Commissioner Felicia McClinton said she had to reject a number of them because the young voters were not registered in the right precinct.

In one instance, McClinton tried searching for a college student’s birthday, name, and social security number but could not locate her in the system.

“This will be rejected,” McClinton told CNN, as representatives from the Colom campaign looked on and took notes.

Armies of lawyers and observers

The tight race may have been a shock to some across the country, but Democrats say they began preparing early for the possibility that the results could come down to a small number of votes, requiring close attention to Mississippi’s election procedures.

The Elias Law Group – a voting rights law firm aligned with Democrats – ramped up its attention Mississippi’s election protocols in early 2026, using a team of researchers set up within the firm called the Election Protection Intelligence Collaborative. The work included monitoring in-state media, watching meetings of local election commissions, and developing a granular level of knowledge about how elections are run in the state.

Lawyers for the firm, which is representing the Colom campaign, began arriving in Mississippi on Wednesday.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has also recently deployed lawyers and resources for the state, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Fair Fight Action, a voting rights focused political organization founded by Stacey Abrams, is playing a central role, working with the Colom campaign and the DSCC.

Mississippi Votes, a nonpartisan civic organization, has set up a voter information hotline and virtual phone banking to help anyone who has questions about the ballot curing process as volunteers from across the country arrive to help the effort.

Lily Moens, the policy and research director at Mississippi Votes, told CNN that her team is hearing that the majority of ballots that are being rejected are because voters tried to vote at the incorrect precincts.

“It’s disheartening to see folks’ ballots being rejected because they were just at the wrong location,” Moens said.

In one sign of the national focus on Mississippi, Jess Craven, a progressive activist and content creator, flew to Jackson this week from her home in Los Angeles at the invitation of the NAACP. She said she was there to “make sure that every vote is counted.”

“It’s not just about picking up another seat,” Craven said. “It’s about a seismic event in the South that’s long overdue.”

In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Colom said it took him months to get his party and the nation to pay attention to his Senate race in Mississippi.

Without specifying how many lawyers and representatives he has, Colom said he has “enough” resources, including a late influx of cash from an aggressive fundraising push.

“I’m confident about where we are,” he said. “I’m glad people are doing what it takes to get us over the finish line.”

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Grayer reported from Jackson, Mississippi. CNN’s Aleena Fayaz and Allison Gordon contributed to this report.