Why AP called the Mississippi Senate race for Scott Colom

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press on Wednesday declared Democrat Scott Colom the winner in the race for U.S. Senate in Mississippi after several counties reported updated results — including those of last-to-count provisional ballots.

Colom led Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes following the final election night update in Mississippi, which arrived at 3:03 a.m. ET from Pike County. Not only has Colom’s lead grown larger as counties in Mississippi have completed their vote count and reported on the outcome of their review of provisional ballots in the days since, but he’s won the vast majority of these final updates — in every region of the state and in all but the most Republican counties — by a large margin.

The AP called the race for the Colom 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 up by 4,669 votes out of 962,237 counted, or 0.5 percentage points.

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

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

There is no recount law in Mississippi: Hyde-Smith 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.

There have been about 40 recounts in statewide elections since 2000. 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.