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(Trends Wide) — Why is it taking so long to determine which party is in control of the US House and Senate? Blame California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington and the entire West Coast for voting by mail.
Actually, they are not to blame. This is how elections work in 2022.
Blame an evenly divided electorate
If the elections weren’t so close, it wouldn’t take so long to find out who won.
At the time of this writing, Trends Wide still had no projections on who will control the House or Senate, largely due to close races on the West Coast.
Read this more detailed report from Trends Wide’s Jeremy Herb on the state of play for this game.
West Coast Tension
The two Senate races for which there are no projections are in Arizona and Nevada. There is no winner in the Georgia Senate race, but Trends Wide has projected that there will be a December runoff.
Here’s a look at the 34 House races for which there are no projections at the time of this writing. There is a western bias:
- California-16
- Arizona-3
- Nevada-3
- Oregon – 2
- Washington – 2
- Colorado-2
- Montana – 1
- New Mexico – 1
There are two other House races that stand out, in the states of Alaska and Maine, where determining the winner in a first-choice voting system takes longer. In addition, there remains a House race in both New York and Maryland.
That means we know the results of the vast majority of the elections that concluded on Tuesday.
It’s probably worth the wait
Arguably, the benefit of knowing who won on election day is outweighed by the possibility of more people having access to the vote and the cost savings of not having to staff as many polling places.
Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, told Trends Wide’s Sara Sidner on Thursday why it takes longer to count mail-in ballots and ballots put in the polls in the days immediately before the election. and on election day itself. Maricopa is the most populous county in Arizona that includes Phoenix.
Signature Verification
As election officials scrambled behind him at the Maricopa County Elections and Tabulation Center, Gates said those mail-in ballots delivered just before this Tuesday don’t begin the all-important signature verification process until the Wednesday after election day.
“We have experts here that compare the signature on the outside of the ballot envelope to the signature that we have on our voter registration file,” Gates said. “That takes a while because we have to get it right.”
Most states have some sort of signature verification system for their absentee and mail-in ballots, according to a tally by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“This is how we run elections in Arizona,” Gates told Sidner. “If people don’t like that, they can go to the legislature and have them pass new laws.”
It’s a process that has been in place in Maricopa County since the 1990s, he said. It is also overseen by Republican and Democratic Party officials.
Some California races could take weeks
While Arizona still has many votes cast in person on Election Day, other states have moved toward a mail-in voting system. For years, the West Coast has taken a long time to count those votes, but the process gets extra scrutiny this year because those unprojected contests will determine who controls the chambers of Congress.
Trends Wide’s Eric Bradner spoke with California’s top election official in 2018, when ballots were still being counted and it was unclear who would win a contest, more than three weeks after Election Day.
The official count isn’t due until a month after Election Day in California because the state wants to make sure every vote is counted.
In 2018, Trends Wide projected that Democrats would take control of the House at 11 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day. This year, with Republicans on track for a razor-thin majority, that process could still take days.
An unknown number of votes
Trends Wide’s Gary Tuchman is in Las Vegas and he did a good job Thursday explaining why it’s taking so long for Nevada, where it transitioned to a mail-in system in 2022.
Nevada ballots that were postmarked Tuesday may be received by election officials as late as Saturday and still be counted. In reality, there is no telling how many ballots will arrive because every registered voter in Nevada received a ballot in the mail.
Votes keep coming to Nevada
Tuchman pointed to data from officials in Clark County, Nevada: On Thursday, they were preparing to count more than 12,000 ballots that were delivered by mail this Wednesday and nearly 57,000 ballots that were placed in roughly 300 drop boxes on Election Day.
There were still thousands of ballots arriving in Nevada’s second-largest county, Washoe, which includes Reno.
Trends Wide estimates that there are about 120,000 pending ballots in Nevada.
In Nevada, voters who made a technical error on their mail-in ballot will have the opportunity to “remediate” it, that is, correct it, until November 15, a week after Election Day.
Hundreds of Thousands of Arizona Votes to Count
In Arizona, where the gubernatorial race is particularly close, Trends Wide estimates there are about 665,000 ballots left to count. Unlike in Nevada, where ballots postmarked by Tuesday are still arriving, in Arizona election officials must receive mail-in ballots by 7 pm on Election Day.
Officials processing those hundreds of thousands of mail-in and absentee ballots that came in on Monday and Election Day originally intended to count almost all of them by Friday or Saturday, according to Sidner, but Gates told him, “I think we will be able to conclude only at the beginning of next week”.
There is an additional problem in Maricopa County with the estimated 17,000 ballots cast in person on Election Day that would not make it through the tabulators at the polls due to a misprint. Those are also being counted.
The voters have spoken. This is just the count
In the meantime, watch for bins with additional votes that could turn the tide of these extremely close races.
If the races weren’t so close, there might not be enough mail-in votes to make a difference in the final count. But the news networks will not project a winner unless there is a certainty of victory.
Historical fact: do you think it takes a long time now?
It used to take a year to install a new Congress.
So many elected congressmen died between election day 1930 and the start of the next Congress (14 elected members died!) that subsequent special elections shifted the balance of power before the new Congress began in 1931.
One of the elected members who died was then-Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, also known as the husband of Alice, the daughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt.
Longworth was expected to be leader again, but after his death from pneumonia, the Republicans lost control of the chamber and a special election was held to fill the 14 vacancies.
Ultimately, it was Democrat John Nance Garner who became president. Democrats would remain in control, with some hiccups for two-year terms, until 1994. Garner became President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president two years after he became speaker of the House.
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