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The Orange County legislative race, the closest in the nation, is currently so close to victory that it feels more like a small-town city council race than a House race.
On Thursday, Republican Rep. Michelle Steele led the race by 58 votes. Her challenger, Democrat Derek Tran, led by 36 votes on Friday and expanded his lead to 102 votes on Monday as vote counting continued.
“Those who are closely following the campaign and who feel it is in jeopardy are anxious for this election to be called,” said Political Data, a firm that tracks voter trends. says Paul Mitchell.
The earliest vote counts in the 45th Congressional District showed Mr. Steele leading by more than five points, but that lead disappeared when election officials counted the votes deposited in drop boxes and sent by mail. California law states that ballots can be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive at the registrar’s office within one week after the election.
Its transition from a pleasant red on election night to an unpleasant purple two weeks later has been claimed by right-wing agitators as evidence of voter fraud. Elon Musk reshared a post on X claiming Tran’s lead was because California was “corrupt as hell” 11 days after the election, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie -Taylor Greene said Democrats are “taking House seats out from under us.”
Experts say there are no problems in the area other than California’s erratic counting rate and a phenomenon known as a “red mirage” or “blue shift.” This phenomenon occurs in districts where in-person voting on Election Day skews Republican, and mail-in ballots counted later skew Democratic.
Mr. Tran, a first-time candidate, hopes to become the first Vietnamese-American candidate to represent the Congressional district that includes Little Saigon.
Mr. Tran’s campaign manager, Gori Budiga, said Monday that voters need patience, but that the campaign is “confident that Derek Tran will win as the remaining mail-in ballots, provisional ballots, and conditional votes are counted.” “I’m working on it,” he said. Steele’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The Tran campaign thanked county election workers who “continue to do their important work in the face of lies, hostility and bomb threats.”
Republicans won 218 seats, enough seats to control the House. Whether that will be a whispering majority or a more comfortable majority is still up in the air. Five seats have not yet been called, two of which are in California.
Election officials will verify the signature on the ballot at the Orange County Voter Registration Office.
(Allen J. Scherben/Los Angeles Times)
The 45th District is one of the most expensive races in the country and was a key target for Democrats. Although Steele is a Republican, voters in his district supported President Biden in 2020. Former President Clinton visited Orange County to campaign for Mr. Tran, an indication of how popular Mr. Tran is. The Democratic Party prioritized the election campaign.
Both Steele and Tran will focus on reaching out to Asian American voters, who make up multiple districts across 17 cities, including Garden Grove, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Buena Park and Cerritos. are.
Steele, who was born to Korean parents and raised in Japan, broke through barriers in 2020 to become one of three Korean-American women elected to the House of Representatives. She focused heavily on anti-communist messages to reach older voters who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
Mr. Tran, who was born in the United States to Vietnamese refugee parents, also focused on Vietnamese Americans in the hope that his family’s stories would help him win over voters once loyal to the Republican Party. Ta.
Mitchell said an analysis of the 45th District shows the district still has about 13,000 ballots that need to be counted. He said Democrats had a 5.1% advantage in votes cast before Election Day, Republicans had a 15% advantage in in-person voting on Election Day, and 18.5% in favor of Blue after Election Day.
Mitchell said this pattern is driven by younger voters, who “end up voting later than others” and tend to lean more liberal.
Mitchell said the 45th District has more than 4,600 ballots that were initially not counted due to administrative issues, including ballots that were unsigned or had signatures that did not match registered voter information. said.
Voters whose ballots were not initially counted received notifications from county election officials with instructions on how to have their ballots counted. So far, 1,170 of those votes have been counted through a process called “curing,” which allows voters to correct errors and verify that the defective ballot is really theirs, Mitchell said. They say they can prove it to election authorities.
Steele and Tran volunteers are running a labor-intensive campaign to find these voters and get them to turn in their forms. Voters will not be able to change their votes during the remediation process and will have until Dec. 1 to fix any technical issues.
There is no automatic recount in California. Voters and campaigns can request a recount within five days of the election certification, but they must incur costs that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a congressional election. If the recount changes the results, election officials will refund the money.
California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan-Patterson said last week that her party is deploying thousands of volunteers to monitor the state’s vote-counting process and contact voters whose ballots were flagged due to technical errors. He said he had recruited and trained them.
“I know how frustrating it is to wait for results during this long process,” she said in a public video. “But please know that the California Republican Party and our partners are committed to ensuring our elections are fair and your vote is safe. Every last legal vote We will not rest until the numbers are counted.”
She added: “We knew this was coming, as we have experienced before.”
Two years ago, it took nearly a month for the chaos in California’s legislative elections to settle down. The race between Democrat Adam Gray and current Congressman Adam Gray. Central Valley’s John Duarte was decided with 564 votes, but the Associated Press did not call until Dec. 2.
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