NATCHEZ — Adams County Election Commission officials said it is likely to be Friday or Monday before the results of Tuesday’s primary election, including absentee and affidavit ballots, are certified.

Meanwhile, candidates in a few races, including Adams County Supervisor District 1 in which Democratic challenger Wes Middleton holds a 62-vote lead in unofficial results over incumbent Mike Lazarus, anxiously await the final votes to be tallied.

“It is frustrating,” Middleton said, adding he is cautiously optimistic that some of the 180 to 200 absentee ballots left to be tallied from District 1 precincts will follow the same trend line as the unofficial results from Tuesday’s election. “I’m not going to put the cart before the horse, but I’m feeling pretty good.”

According to unofficial results from Tuesday’s primary Middleton has 855 votes to Lazarus’ 793 votes.

Lazarus said he would be OK with whatever the results turn out to be.

“I really care about the people of District 1, and if they want someone else to be their supervisor, I hope it works out,” Lazarus said.

While Lazarus said he is a bit frustrated by the wait for the absentee and affidavit ballots to be certified, he also believes low voter turnout and many people voting in the Republican primary could have affected the results of the District 1 election.

Lazarus, however, said he is keeping his eye on the certification process.

Other tight races that could be affected by the final tally include the race for Northern District Justice Court Judge in which challenger Audrey B. Minor garnered 1,836 votes, or 48.15% of the vote, to incumbent Patricia F. Dunmore’s 1,308 votes, or 34.3% of the vote, over challenger Eddie Jones’ 665 votes, or 17.4% of the vote.

No independent or Republican candidates were vying for that position.

A candidate must earn 51% of the vote or more to avoid a runoff in races with more than two candidates.

Adams County Election Commission member Larry Gardner said Adams County’s voting system that has been in place since 2005 is outdated and he advocates updating the system.

With the current voting system, the process of counting votes requires all data cards from the county’s 19 precincts to be manually inserted into a computer and downloaded to that computer before the computer can tabulate them.

The process is laborious and slow and election returns often are not available until late into the night or early the next morning on election nights such as Tuesday’s primaries in which countywide results were not available until after 11:30 p.m. even though polls closed at 7 p.m.

“It will be several days before any affidavit or absentee ballots are added because of the procedure,” Gardner said Wednesday morning. “We have to go through 38 precincts, get all of the absentees together and run them all through the (computer) at one time.”

Gardner said he advocates the county update to an optical scanning system similar to the one the county used before switching to the current system in 2005.

“When we change new systems, we’re going to recommend going back to optical scanners for each precinct,” said Gardner, who has served on the commission for 31 years, “because then I’ve got 20 pieces of equipment to take care of which gives us a spare instead of 117 of them that we are having to keep track of now. They are getting so old and they are all plastic. They’re falling apart. The plastic has gotten old. It has gotten brittle. They drop an e-coder on the floor and it breaks, so it is now starting to cost us a lot of money just to keep them going so we need to look at replacing them.”

Both Lazarus and Middleton said they would support helping fund an updated election system for the county.