UPDATE: The Associated Press has now declared Scott Colom the winner of the Mississippi Senate race. Read more.
Democrat Scott Colom widened his lead in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race Wednesday as election officials entered the final stage of tallying results and certifying them to the state.
Colom led Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 4,585 votes, or 0.5 percentage points, according to unofficial results from the Associated Press.
CNN on Wednesday afternoon projected that Colom will win the race. The AP, which does not project outcomes and waits until it’s confident that trailing candidates have no paths to victory, has not yet called a winner.
The latest tallies padded the slim margin Colom has maintained over the past week. Most updates to the vote count have favored the Democrat, and the latest batches Wednesday increased his margin by more than 1,500 votes.
About 99 percent of ballots have been counted. Counties have until Friday to certify their results, and new tallies will continue to trickle in between now and then.
Colom’s campaign manager, Gerard Henderson, called on Hyde-Smith to concede Wednesday, saying there was no way for her to win.
“Scott Colom will be the next U.S. Senator for Mississippi and his victory is now a guarantee,” Henderson wrote in a campaign memo. “Cindy Hyde-Smith has no path to win this race and she should concede.”
A spokesman for Hyde-Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mississippi law doesn’t include a recount process for Senate races, but the trailing candidate could go to court to seek a retallying of ballots or to challenge the results. Flipping the results would be difficult because victories with margins of more than 1,000 votes nearly always stand, said David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a group that assists election officials.
Most of the outstanding votes are known as affidavit ballots, which voters cast if they don’t have identification with them at the polls or were listed as having inactive voter registrations.
Voters who didn’t have ID with them had to provide a copy by Tuesday. Election officials are spending the coming days checking the voter registrations of others who cast affidavit ballots and ensuring that they voted in the right precinct.
About three-quarters of affidavit ballots are being approved to be counted, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson (R) said Wednesday on X.
The acceptance rates vary by area, and in the Democratic stronghold of Hinds County, only about a third of affidavit ballots qualified to be counted, according to the county.
Affidavit ballots can be rejected for several reasons, including because a voter moved, cast a ballot in the wrong precinct or missed the cutoff date for registering to vote.
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