The Republican Party is demanding that Mississippi election officials “separate and preserve” all provisional ballots cast in the midterms — the first step in a likely bid to throw out votes in the state’s extremely close U.S. Senate race*.
The vote count is ongoing, and Democrat Scott Colom currently leads Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith ® by several hundred votes, with certification due by Nov. 13. His victory would represent a significant upset in the state’s Republican-dominated politics.
Did they stop counting them? The number seems to be holding steady at 96%
https://apps.npr.org/2026-election-results/mississippi.html
Provisional ballots are created when a voter shows up at the poll, but there’s some kind of problem with their registration that prevents them from voting. On election day the provisional ballots are tossed in a metaphorical pile labelled “in case of close race, open me.”
In most elections, the margin of victory is high enough that no one needs to open the provisional ballots or check their eligibility.
But in this race, it is close enough, so they now need to check whether each individual provisional vote is really eligible to vote or not. This is called “chase and cure,” and it usually involves tracking down and talking to the voters and others (the chase) and getting whatever documentation is missing to establish the eligibility (the cure).
The Republican party doesn’t want these ballots to be cured or counted, because they expect the votes inside to skew heavily Democratic. So they will oppose. Partly because they caused a bunch of the provisional ballots by kicking people off the rolls wrongly.
However, I think this is a pretty good position for Colom, if he has an 1,800 lead or so, and he expects any added votes to skew to him.
So, let me get this straight: the Republican candidate is currently behind and wants them to stop counting?
I think the whole strategy is to win the provisional ballot fight and get the secretary of state to trigger a recount on the main ballots and hope that recount goes really well for them and shutdown any further recounting after that and then somehow keep the provisionals from ever being counted.
I think it’s a lot of hopium.
I actually didn’t doubt they have lawyers standing by with a completely procedurally unsound emergency brief to the Supreme Court to demand they stop counting, ready to file at any moment Colom gets behind in the count.