What Is an Affidavit Ballot in Mississippi?
An affidavit ballot is Mississippi's name for a provisional ballot. A voter casts one when there is a question about their eligibility at the polling place — most often because they have no acceptable photo ID, their name does not appear in the poll book, or they have gone to the wrong precinct. The ballot is not fed into the counting machine. It is sealed in an envelope with a signed affidavit, set aside, and counted only after election officials verify that the voter was eligible. A voter who lacked photo ID has five business days to take acceptable ID to the county circuit clerk's office, and counties must finish the review and certify their results within ten days of the election — this year, by November 13.
The plain reality is that Mississippi's Senate race is no longer being decided by the ballots counted on election night, but by this pile set aside from them. As of Friday afternoon, the Associated Press put Democrat Scott Colom ahead of Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by 2,574 votes out of more than 950,000 cast, and the ballots still being processed are mostly affidavit ballots — Secretary of State Michael Watson estimates between 12,000 and 20,000 of them, a pile several times larger than the margin. About 3,600 mail ballots, postmarked by Election Day and accepted for five business days afterward under a rule the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in June, are arriving alongside them.
What the two campaigns claim shows why a definition has become a fight. Hyde-Smith's lawyers formally asked state officials to separate, secure and preserve all affidavit ballots, presenting it as protecting the count. Colom's campaign called the request an "unlawful attack on voter privacy," as WLBT reported. The state Republican chairman, Mike Hurst, has called the estimated number of affidavit ballots "very abnormal" in Mississippi's history. Colom's side answers that the pile has a plain cause: before the election the state put more than 230,000 Mississippians — about one voter in nine, up from roughly 166,000 in 2024 — on the inactive voter list, and a voter on that list could vote only by affidavit ballot.
"Every ballot cured is going to be a ballot for a better future." — Scott Colom, on the work of getting affidavit ballots verified and counted
The common-sense principle is simple: a ballot cast is not the same thing as a ballot counted. For every other voter, election night is the count. For an affidavit voter, election night is only the application — the vote counts when the eligibility behind it is proven, in open county meetings, one envelope at a time. That is not a loophole in the system; it is the system working exactly as Mississippi law wrote it, for voters whose right to vote was never in doubt but whose paperwork was.
The consequence is already visible in the numbers. Colom's lead has grown at every stage of this process — 28 votes at midnight on election night, 1,138 by Thursday morning, 2,574 by Friday evening — because the affidavit ballots are breaking his way. In Lafayette County, home of the University of Mississippi, they went 142 to 60 for Colom, 69 percent to 29 percent, far beyond his narrow 49-to-48 overall margin in the county; about 6,900 affidavit ballots had been checked statewide by Thursday evening and roughly four in five were accepted. Thousands more are expected from Hinds County, where Colom leads the overall vote 79 percent to 19 percent and officials are still counting. And because Mississippi has no recount law, there is no second look waiting at the end: the review of each affidavit ballot is the battleground itself, on the timetable set out in our report on when the race will be called — the ID and mail-ballot windows close on Tuesday, November 10, and counties certify on November 13. Which raises the question that follows from it: if a United States Senate seat is decided by ballots that were not counted on election night, will the losing side accept a result delivered by the slowest, most scrutinised votes in the state?
The answer will be written by the voters who cast those ballots and then finished the job — the ones who went back with their photo ID so their vote would count. Colom put their part of it plainly: "Every ballot cured is going to be a ballot for a better future."