After a month of votes, runoffs, and delays, a single vote determined a winner in the runoff for District 2 Jones County Justice Court judge.
The Jones County Circuit Clerk’s office named Sonny Saul the winner by one vote on Friday evening.
On the November 24 runoff, Saul held a four-vote lead over Noel A. Rogers with an apparent 10 mail-in absentee ballots that had not been received yet by the Circuit Clerk’s office.
After another delay Tuesday, the deadline for the circuit clerk’s office to receive those ballots passed at 5 p.m. Thursday.
After counting the absentee ballots that they could find on Thursday night, the two candidates were tied at 547 votes each, with one ballot under review.
Concetta Brooks from the Circuit Clerk's Office said her office reached out to the Mississippi Attorney General’s office for an opinion on whether that tie-breaking ballot should be counted under Mississippi law.
Friday, according to Brooks, the election commission accepted the ballot for Saul to give him the one-vote win. The candidates would have had to draw straws to determine a winner had it not gone Saul's way.
Rogers was appointed in July by the Jones County supervisors to fill the vacancy created when Governor Tate Reeves appointed Billie Graham as the new Chancery Court judge of the 19th Chancery Court District of Mississippi.
In the special election, Saul led a field of four candidates with 34% of the vote, with Rogers trailing at almost 30%.
Saul served for 25 years with the Mississippi Highway Patrol and totaled over 30 years in law enforcement experience.