Democrat Scott Colom wins Mississippi Senate race over Cindy Hyde-Smith

Colom leads by 4,669 votes with fewer than 12,000 left to count

The Associated Press on Wednesday declared Democrat Scott Colom the winner of Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race, after several counties reported updated results that included the last-to-count provisional ballots.

The call came just before 6 p.m. ET, after officials in Jackson County updated their vote count with an additional 2,173 votes. The update put Colom ahead of Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by 4,669 votes out of 962,237 counted, a margin of 0.5 percentage points.

Colom led by just 43 votes after the final election night update in Mississippi, which arrived at 3:03 a.m. ET from Pike County. His lead has grown in the days since as counties completed their vote counts and reported the outcomes of their reviews of provisional ballots.

Colom has won the vast majority of those final updates, and by a large margin — in every region of the state and in all but the most Republican counties.

To come back and take the lead, Hyde-Smith needed to win the late updates in Republican-leaning counties such as Jackson. Instead, Colom won the Jackson County update by just over 1 percentage point.

The AP estimates fewer than 12,000 votes remain for county election officials in Mississippi to review before the Friday deadline for counties to certify their results. Many of the votes left to count are provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots in Mississippi, and a good number may not ultimately be counted once election officials review and assess them.

Mississippi has no recount law, meaning Hyde-Smith’s remaining path would run through the courts: she would need to persuade a court to order a review of the election. In many states, the standard for conducting a recount is a margin of 0.5 percentage points between the top two candidates — the margin Colom now holds.

About 40 recounts have taken place in statewide elections since 2000, according to the AP. Only three have resulted in a new winner, and all three were decided by hundreds of votes, not thousands. There is no precedent this century for a recount overturning an election with a margin as wide as the one in Mississippi.