No one knows how many ballots are outstanding in Mississippi's Senate race

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.

Loading...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."What is becoming clear is that the rate of provisional ballots, which are ca...