All The Outstanding Races Called In The 3+ Weeks Since The Presidential Election

• Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District: In the closest race in the country, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Democrat Rita Hart by fewer than 40 votes in an open seat held by retiring Democratic Rep. Dave Loebsack. The ongoing recount has generated controversy, however, as both campaigns have expressed procedural concerns. Last week, Hart’s campaign sent a letter to the secretary of state seeking clarification about how counties should handle checking voter intent during the recount. Now Miller-Meeks’s campaign is questioning the recount procedures in some counties. At issue are differing interpretations of the secretary of state’s guidance for checking voter intent on ballots that a machine might fail to read: Some counties have taken it to mean they can only check voter intent if they conduct a full hand recount, as opposed to using machines to count most ballots and only manually reviewing ballots where there’s some question about what the voter wanted to do. If a full hand recount is required to apply the voter intent standard, it would be nigh impossible to complete for all absentee ballots, which are treated as a single precinct, by the Nov. 27-28 deadline. But without examining voter intent, especially for over- and undervoted ballots, valid votes could be missed because machines couldn’t read them. Bipartisan recount boards in the district’s three most populous counties, including Scott, have used a hybrid approach where over- and undervotes are checked by hand after the machine count. But Miller-Meeks’s campaign alleges that counties can only conduct an all-machine or an all-manual recount, not use this hybrid method. Considering the margin, how this plays out is a very big deal: Hart appears to have picked up 30 net votes in Scott County that aren’t yet reflected in the totals, with recount updates still to come from other counties in the district.
• California’s 21st District: Republican David Valadao now leads Democratic Rep. TJ Cox by 1,719 votes. Rob Pyers of California Target Book estimates that there are about 2,500 votes left to count in the district’s bluest corner (Kern County), but 1,295 ballots left in its reddest (Kings County). This is increasingly looking like a GOP pickup.
• California’s 25th District: Republican Rep. Mike Garcia holds a razor-thin 0.1-point edge (400 votes) over Democrat Christy Smith. Pyers estimates there could be up to 2,900 votes left to count here, but it is Garcia, not Smith, who has been gaining ground as more votes are counted. Garcia has declared victory as a result, but independent decision desks are so far withholding judgment.
• New York’s 22nd District: The initial trajectory of the count favored Republican Claudia Tenney, who led Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi by 28,422 votes after Election Day, but absentee ballots have almost completely erased that lead. However, because of New York’s decentralized and disorganized absentee-ballot-counting process, no one knows exactly what the current margin is: Tenney likely leads by somewhere between 100 and 300 votes. With the initial count more or less complete, attention has turned to a court hearing this week over whether thousands of disputed absentee and provisional ballots will count.

The race between Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi and Republican Claudia Tenney in New York’s 22nd District had its day in court today … and it did not reflect well on election administrators in New York. The hearing was intended to decide whether certain disputed absentee and provisional ballots would count in the closely contested race, but it was quickly discovered that Oneida County election commissioners did not even know whether some of the disputed ballots are included in the current count: Some of the color-coded sticky notes they had used to label the ballots had fallen off. (Yes, really.) The hearing will continue tomorrow, when the judge will consider whether 2,000 rejected ballots should be counted after all. Tenney currently leads the race by somewhere between 100 and 300 votes (in another indictment of New York’s vote-counting, no one knows the exact margin).

So far, Democrats have clinched 222 seats in the next House, and Republicans have clinched 209 (including Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District, which is going to a Republican-vs.-Republican runoff on Dec. 5). That leaves four House races still unresolved. Here’s a quick update on where those contests stand:

• Iowa’s 2nd District: In the closest race in the country, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Democrat Rita Hart by about 50 votes in an open seat held by retiring Democratic Rep. Dave Loebsack. But given the current margin is just 0.01 percentage points (!), Hart requested a recount, which counties in the district have now begun to conduct. On Wednesday, Hart’s campaign sent a letter to the secretary of state’s office that asked for clarification regarding recount procedures for checking voter intent on ballots that a tabulation machine might fail to read. Counties appear to have differing interpretations of the secretary’s guidance: Some have taken it to mean they can only check voter intent if a full hand recount, as opposed to a machine recount, is conducted. If a full hand recount is required to apply the voter intent standard, it would be difficult to complete for all absentee ballots, which are treated as a single precinct, by the Nov. 27-28 deadline. But without examining voter intent, especially with over- and undervotes, valid votes could be missed that the machine couldn’t read. Together, the two bluest counties in the district — Johnson (Iowa City) and Scott (Davenport) — apparently have more than 7,000 undervotes to potentially examine.
• Two California races: California often sees a large number of votes counted in the days following the election, which sometimes leads to sizable shifts in vote margins. This is due in part to California’s generous mail ballot receipt deadline (tomorrow, Nov. 20), so a few more votes may arrive that could influence the outcomes in two undecided races in the Golden State. In California’s 25th District, Republican Rep. Mike Garcia holds a razor-thin 0.1-point edge (422 votes) over Democrat Christy Smith. Garcia flipped this seat in a May 2020 special election, and Smith may be running out of runway to overtake Garcia as counties near the completion of their vote counts. The GOP also holds a narrow 1.1-point lead in California’s 21st Congressional District, but it’s unclear how that race will pan out as multiple counties in the 21st District still have more ballots to process.
• New York’s 22nd District: The initial trajectory of the count favored Republican Claudia Tenney, who led Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi by 28,422 votes after Election Day, but absentee ballots have almost completely erased that lead. Unfortunately, there is no centralized official source for results, but independent media tallies currently put Tenney’s lead somewhere between 106 and 339 votes. There may (or may not) be a few hundred ballots yet to count.