Provisional ballot rate may rank among highest in the country this cycle
At midday Friday, fewer than 2,000 votes separated Hyde-Smith and Colom, and the contest remained uncalled. What could not be established was how many ballots were still waiting to be counted, leaving the size of the outstanding vote an open question.
The uncertainty has focused attention on how Mississippi administers elections, a process NPR describes as among the slowest and most decentralized in the country. The state’s 82 counties run their own contests and are not required to transmit results to the state until next week, an arrangement that leaves county officials as the most current source of returns.
“Mississippi is not a model of election administration,” said Michael Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies voting.
The estimates of what remains diverge. The Colom campaign said late Tuesday it was aware of more than 15,000 provisional ballots, which require verification before they are counted. The chair of the state Republican Party said Thursday he thought there were 20,000 outstanding ballots, including potential absentee votes that can legally be received by officials until Nov. 10 if they were postmarked by Election Day.
Watson, the state’s top voting official, said counties run their own elections and that even his office did not know how many provisional ballots were left to count. He said Thursday that nearly 7,000 of them had been processed, with “roughly 80% of them being accepted.”
“Until we have the certified results, the individual counties will be the best source of the latest and most up-to-date information,” Watson said in a statement.
Morse said he was shocked by the lack of good information available for such a high-profile race. “Right now I would love to know a lot of things about the process and I am struggling to figure out what is unfolding here,” Morse said. “I cannot tell you basic things.”
What is becoming clear is that the rate of provisional ballots, which are called affidavit ballots in Mississippi, may end up being among the highest in the country this election cycle. Those ballots are cast by people whose eligibility is questionable, according to local officials, so those votes are segregated and officials decide case by case whether they will be counted. If the Colom campaign’s estimate of 15,000 affidavit ballots holds true, that would represent roughly 1.5% of the total ballots cast in the Senate race, according to unofficial results.
In the last midterm year, 2022, just four states had a provisional ballot rate higher than that, according to federal data. Mississippi also appears to have a provisional rate close to double North Carolina’s this year, based on preliminary data in both states.
One factor is a detail of Mississippi’s voter registration law. In most states, voters who sit out a certain number of election cycles, or whose records suggest they have moved or are otherwise ineligible, are moved to “inactive” status but remain able to vote normally for a period of a few years mandated by federal law before they confirm their eligibility or are removed. Mississippi is one of the few states that requires those “inactive” voters to vote provisionally, filling out another form whose information must be reviewed by local officials before the ballot counts.
It is unclear at this point why so many voters had questionable eligibility when they showed up to vote. The local outlet Mississippi Today has reported extensively on the state’s experimental use of credit data to cull voter lists.
Morse said that list maintenance technique is drawing attention, but that it is not the whole story. “It’s pairing the experiment with credit data, which could introduce some unreliability, with an undermining of the typical procedural process [in many other states], where a voter [marked “inactive”] could cast a regular ballot for at least the next two federal general elections,” he said.
Watson has defended the state’s registration process. “The extra few minutes it may take to vote via affidavit ballot are well worth the election integrity added by having cleaner voter rolls!” he wrote Tuesday in a post on X.
Kathy Boockvar, the former Democratic secretary of state of Pennsylvania, told NPR that many people who have to vote with a provisional ballot are likely to be ultimately deemed eligible, but that the process does not breed trust among those who interact with it. “It feels like you have to go talk to the teacher or something in the back room,” she said. “It’s a little bit of a suspicious-seeming thing because somebody who’s going through it generally thinks that they’re eligible to vote and feels like they’re being asked to do something other than that.”
Boockvar added that the difficulty of obtaining information is a sign Mississippi has not been in the limelight the way traditional battleground states have. “We all have to be prepared whether we expect it or not,” she said. “Transparency and good data is one of the best solutions we have to combating all the suspicion and distrust.”
The Senate contest remains uncalled. Counties are not required to transmit their results to the state until next week, and the outcome rests on ballots that have not yet been verified and counted.