Incumbent Antonia Flaggs-Jones won a second term as Warren County tax collector today as the last of affidavit ballots were counted.

Flaggs-Jones received 7,630 votes to Patty Mekus’ 7574, a 56-vote difference.

In the chancery clerk’s race, Republican Donna Farris Hardy was the winner, with 46 percent of the vote to Democrat Walter Osborne’s 42 percent.

The counting of the 68 remaining affidavit ballots resumed this morning. Wednesday evening’s tallyhad shown Flaggs-Jones 62 votes ahead. The count in the tight race, and in the chancery clerk race, began Nov. 9 with a break Friday for Veterans Day.

Flaggs-Jones, 40, said the five days of counting were a drain on her staff of eight deputy collectors.

“It’s been hard on me,” she said, “and it’s been altering their lives as well.”

Heading into this morning’s count, Flaggs-Jones, a Democrat, had 7,595 votes to 7,533 for Mekus, a Republican, who closed a 101-vote deficit when polls closed last Tuesday night by winning a slight majority of absentee votes tallied in the past week — the breakdown was 358 for Mekus, 307 for Flaggs-Jones. Absentees read Wednesday were mainly from the Moose Lodge precinct, a count witnessed by two monitors with the Secretary of State’s Office.

Mekus, 45, did not attend this morning’s count, and Flaggs-Jones left about an hour before the finish to head back to work.

Mekus on Wednesday did not concede the race when officials decided to stop processing affidavits through a central processing computer. Of the 166 such ballots, 98 scanned properly when fed through a mark reader while 68 did not. However, Mekus kept a big smile, and appeared to congratulate the incumbent.

“I think she’s going to do a good job,” Mekus said. “When this many people come out and vote, it’s good.”

The Election Commission must send results to the Secretary of State’s Office by Friday, a deadline Election Commission chairman Retha Summers said the panel intends to keep. Results must be certified by Dec. 8.

Voter turnout in Warren County for last week’s election has risen 2.5 percent since the absentee and affidavit count began, to 50.2 percent. The mark is up sharply from a 36 percent turnout in 2007.

On Wednesday, Hardy, 57, wasted no time getting to work. She attended the Mississippi Chancery Clerks Association Legal Responsibilities Workshop in Hattiesburg with Chancery Clerk Dot McGee and deputy clerk Ann Tompkins — both of whom are retiring.

“It’s been a long haul,” Hardy said this morning.

Osborne, 52, Vicksburg’s city clerk since 1999, spent Wednesday back at City Hall.

“I intend to stay with the city as long as they allow me to stay,” he said.

Disparities in what was expected from the absentee tally and confusion shown over the affidavit scanner added to a vote count already drawn out because absentees were counted manually.

Reprinted absentee ballots received from the Secretary of State’s Office in October to include the economic impact of three constitutional initiatives arrived without scannable codes. During the count, one deputy clerk read voters’ choices in each of 26 races and the three initiatives aloud while three others recorded tally marks in pencil on a spreadsheet.

Some names of voters who’d voted absentee before the Nov. 8 general election and were displayed on walls inside precincts did not come up during the longhand count. The extent of it varied on each side of the tax collector’s race — Flaggs-Jones had a list of 33, Mekus had 31 and was undecided whether to question the matter.

Affidavits, with folds left from being sealed in envelopes for a week, were fed through the scanner. Election Commission adviser Donald Oakes suggested a second run-through for the 68 paper ballots that the machine spit out the first time, but commission members declined. Ballots were then sorted by precinct, and three more hours of counting began.

“We tested it before, and they’ve run perfectly,” commissioner Lonnie Wooley said. “Maybe it was just tired.”