In Mississippi's too-close-to-call U.S. Senate race, every ballot matters.
But no one can say for sure how many ballots there are left to count.
The razor-thin margin between incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democratic challenger Scott Colom is shining a light on an election process in Mississippi that is among the slowest and most decentralized in the country.
"Mississippi is not a model of election administration," said Michael Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies voting.
As of midday Friday, fewer than 2,000 votes separated the two Senate candidates. But information about exactly how many ballots were outstanding was hard to come by.
The Colom campaign said late Tuesday it was aware of more than 15,000 provisional ballots, which require verification before they're counted. And 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.
Mississippi's top voting official, Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson, said counties run their own elections, and even his office didn't know how many provisionals were left to count. He said Thursday 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. There are 82 counties in Mississippi, and they are not required to transmit election results to the state until next week.
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."
Mississippi has a relatively high rate of provisional ballots
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 on a case-by-case basis 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. And Mississippi looks to have a provisional rate close to double of that in North Carolina this year, based on the preliminary data in both states.
One potential reason is an in-the-weeds detail on how Mississippi does voter registration.
In most states, when voters don't cast ballots over a certain number of election cycles, or local officials come across data that indicates a voter has moved or is ineligible for some other reason, they move that voter to what's known as "inactive" status. But the voter is still able to vote normally for a period of a few years, mandated by federal law, before they either confirm their eligibility or are eventually removed.
Mississippi is one of the few states that makes those "inactive" voters have to vote provisionally. That means those voters need to fill out another form and their information needs to be reviewed after the fact by local officials before their votes are counted.
It's unclear at this point why so many voters had questionable eligibility when they showed up to vote, although 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 garnering attention, but it's 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," Morse said.
Watson, the Republican secretary of state, has already come out in defense of 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!" Watson wrote Tuesday in a post on X.
But Kathy Boockvar, the former Democratic secretary of state of Pennsylvania, told NPR that while many people who have to vote with a provisional ballot are likely to be ultimately deemed eligible, the process doesn't breed trust from those who have to interact with it.
"It feels like you have to go talk to the teacher or something in the back room," Boockvar 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 fact that information has been so hard to come by is a sign Mississippi hasn't been in the limelight like traditional battleground states before.
"We all have to be prepared whether we expect it or not," Boockvar said. "Transparency and good data is one of the best solutions we have to combating all the suspicion and distrust."
