Why its taking so long to count midterm Election Day results and when we should know 16 uncalled races
A week after the polls closed, 16 US congressional races remain without a winner — held up by recounts, late-arriving mail, ranked-choice arithmetic and several thousand provisional ballots of the kind that seldom matter and this year do.Whatever the stragglers yield, the matter of who runs Congress is closed.Democrats have already secured 254 House seats to Republicans’ 163 and at least 54 seats in the Senate, according to the Associated Press.What remains to be settled as of Tuesday afternoon are 14 House races and two US Senate races that will decide the size of those majorities — and the fate of several of the best-known Republicans in Washington.Rep.
Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) trails Democrat Eileen Laubacher, a retired Navy admiral, by just over 3,000 votes in a district she carried by about 11 points two years ago.Rep.Virginia Foxx (R-NC), 83 and a member of the House since 2005, is 99 votes behind her Democratic challenger.Rep.
Joe Wilson (R-SC), in Congress since 2001, leads his challenger by fewer than 3,000.In the Senate, Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) trails her Democratic opponent by less than half a point, and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) by about one.Below is what’s holding up each count, and when the states expect to finish.Democrat Mary Peltola, the state’s former congresswoman, leads Sullivan by just over 600 votes, with roughly a quarter of the ballots still to be tallied.Neither has a majority, and under Alaska’s ranked-choice system, that sends the race to a second round.State law forbids that round from starting until the last ballots are in, on the 15th day after the election.This year that is Nov.
18.The delay is built into Alaska’s calendar — a ballot mailed from within the country may come in as late as Friday, and one from abroad as late as Nov.18, provided it was postmarked by Election Day.And much of the vote must arrive by plane or boat, from villages with no road access, entirely at the mercy of the weather.
Once tabulation b...