By Will Dickins
The Panola County vote was similar to the majority of the state Tuesday as Donald Trump (2,272 votes) won the Republican primary and Hillary Clinton (3,061 votes) won the Democratic primary for Mississippi.  
On a night that seemed like it would never end, the last of the county’s ballots made it to the Batesville Courthouse at 9:15. Before then the building had lines of poll workers from each precinct bringing in ballot boxes, but only the election night employees remained after 9:30.
It was then time to tally the votes and the results were not clear until 12:45 a.m. after all of Democratic absentees were finally tallied by hand due to Willie Wilson’s name being a late addition to ballots.  
(Wilson’s name was erroneously left off of the ballot due to a mistake by the State Democratic Party. Although the court ruled in his favor, absentee and overseas ballots had already been printed and distributed with too little time left to replace them.)
The Republican race was essentially  between two candidates: Trump with 2,272 votes and Ted Cruz with 1,406.  Following the two leaders were: Marco Rubio, 206 votes; John Kasich, 193 votes; Ben Carson, 57 votes; Jeb Bush, 15 votes; Mike Huckabee, 12 votes; Chris Christie, six votes; Carly Fiorina, five votes; Rand Paul, five votes; Rick Santorum, two votes; and Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, zero votes.  
The only Republican candidates still in the race for president are Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich.  All other candidates have been eliminated or have dropped out.  
Trump won Panola County convincingly with over half of the votes (54.3 percent) meaning that votes taken away by Cruz (33.6 percent) did not matter in the end.   
The Democratic race only has two candidates left in Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  Clinton dominated with 3,061 votes to Sanders’ 479 votes.  Other candidates’ vote totals were Roque De La Fuente with seven votes, Martin O’Malley with six, and Willie Wilson with 16.  
Clinton received 85.5 percent of the county’s votes compared to Sanders’ 13.38 percent.  
The final results included absentees and affidavits as well as electronic votes.  
According to the Panola County Election Summary Report, Panola County has 24,352 registered voters. Only 7,812 of them voted Tuesday— roughly 32 percent of registered voters.  
Presidential election day is Tuesday, November 8 when several local, district and state positions will be decided.