The outcome of Tuesday's Leflore County School Board race remained in doubt this morning as ballots were still being counted.
Leflore County election commissioners spent all day Wednesday tabulating the paper ballots from the two special legislative contests. They did not attempt to tackle an unknown number of absentee and affidavit ballots.
Those ballots could affect the outcome of the race for the District 4 seat on the School Board.
Initial returns had the incumbent, Jeanette Brown, leading by one vote over challenger Glenda Boyd-Neal, 315 to 314.
Brown is the current school board president. Boyd-Neal is an administrative assistant at Mississippi Valley State University.
Boyd-Neal said she is considering a legal challenge to the election if she loses.
She said the touch-screen voting machines in Sidon and Itta Bena precincts, two of her self-described strongholds, did not display her name on the ballot when polls opened at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
Although the problem was corrected, she said, the first 20 voters at Sidon had already cast ballots before the problem was discovered. An unknown number of ballots had been cast in Itta Bena before the problem was uncovered and corrected.
"Those were votes that I lost. My name wasn't there," she said.
Brown said this morning she is prepared for whatever happens in the contest. "If it's for me, it's for me. If it's not, it's not."
This is Brown's second campaign for the seat but the first time she's faced a challenger. "You can't feel confident with just a one-vote lead," she said.
She said the number of absentee ballots in the race appears to be low. "I had just one person to tell me they voted absentee."
She did not intend to go to the courthouse to witness the final count. "I trust the system."
Edward Course, chairman of the Election Commission, said he expected that the commissioners will be able to finalize the returns in all the races today.
In the only other local contest that could be affected, challenger Leman Gandy was waiting to see if there were enough votes outstanding to close the gap with incumbent Leflore County Judge Solomon Osborne.
In preliminary returns, Osborne led by 293 votes. Gandy, a Greenwood attorney, has declined to concede until the absentee ballots are tabulated.
Gandy was in court this morning and was not available for comment.
