CNN –
New ballots were reported late Thursday in Arizona and Nevada, states with key races that will determine control of the Senate, but it remains unclear when enough of the hundreds of thousands of pending ballots will be counted to call the Senate and governor. contests in these states.
Control of the House also remains in the balance as ballots are counted in states like California. Republicans appear to be closing in on a majority, though they have not yet won enough to take control, as more than two dozen congressional races remain uncalled. The closer-than-expected House contest has added serious complications to GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be the next speaker.
Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, is expected to begin reporting votes from the critical batch of roughly 290,000 early ballots cast on Election Day, and the partisan makeup of those votes could determine who wins the Senate and the state governor’s races.
More votes are expected to be reported on Friday as counting continues. Here’s what you need to know about where things stand:
The main reason it takes so long to count votes is the way each state handles ballots other than those cast to polling places on Election Day, including both early voting and mail-in ballots.
When races are within a percentage point or two, those pending ballots are enough to prevent the election from being tipped. Of course, the delay was anticipated: It took news organizations until the Saturday after Election Day 2020 to declare Joe Biden the winner of the presidential race, after a massive surge in mail-in voting amid of the pandemic
In Arizona, CNN and other news networks have yet to call the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters, or the governor’s race between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake.
CNN’s decision desk estimates that roughly 540,000 ballots remain to be counted as of late Thursday evening. Most of those, about 350,000 ballots, are in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.
The largest portion of uncounted ballots, about 290,000, are votes that were delivered to polling stations on Election Day. A senior official told CNN late Thursday that Maricopa County expects to begin releasing the first results of those pending ballots by Friday evening.
“I think we should start seeing them tomorrow; we’re going to start seeing them come in,” said Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
These ballots could be key in determining who will win the state races for governor and Senate. Mail-in ballots reported so far in Arizona are heavily Democratic, while Election Day ballots strongly favor Republicans, but it’s too early to tell which way mail-in ballots will fall on Election Day. elections
In addition, Maricopa County has about 17,000 ballots that were not read by the tabulator on Election Day due to a printer error, and those ballots have yet to be counted as well.
Maricopa County updated an additional section of just over 78,000 ballots Thursday night.
In Pima County, Arizona’s second most populous and home to Tucson, a new batch of 20,000 ballots was reported Thursday evening. Elections Director Constance Hargrove told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and John King that the county has been able to report batches of roughly 20,000 ballots a day, and she predicted another 20,000 drop on Friday.
“We’re going to work through the weekend and get through most of those ballots, not all of them, probably before Monday morning,” Hargrove said.
The delay in calling the races in Arizona has sparked criticism and conspiracies, some of which are reminiscent of the wild and baseless allegations made in the state after the 2020 election, including false claims about Sharpies.
Maricopa County election officials have debunked false claims circulating on right-wing social media suggesting a woman wearing glasses at the county’s live count facility was Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and incumbent secretary of state
“Not every woman with glasses is Katie Hobbs,” the official Maricopa County Twitter account tweeted in response Thursday evening. “We can confirm that he was a match watcher. Please refrain from making assumptions about workers wearing glasses.”
Lake, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who has bought into former President Donald Trump’s lies about stealing the 2020 election, told Charlie Kirk’s right-wing talk show Thursday: “I hate that they’re rolling and dragging feet and delaying the inevitable.. They don’t want to expose the truth, which is that we won.” There is no evidence that election officials were deliberately delaying the communication of results.
At a news conference Thursday, Gates said, “Frankly, it’s offensive to Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are doing it slowly when they’re working 14-18 hours.”
Gates explained why Arizona is taking longer to count ballots than states like Florida, which reported most of its results on election night. He noted that Florida does not allow mail-in ballots to be dropped off on Election Day, while Arizona does. This slows down the process because the hundreds of thousands of ballots must be processed and go through signature verification before they can be counted.
Florida also closes early voting on the Sunday before Election Day, while ballots can be delivered until Election Day in Arizona.
“We have so many narrow races that everybody is still paying attention to Maricopa County. Those other states like Florida, those races were blown out. Nobody’s paying attention anymore,” Gates said.
In Nevada, the CNN Decision Desk estimated there were about 95,000 pending votes as of Thursday evening.
In Clark County, the state’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, more than 50,000 ballots remain to be counted, Clark County Recorder Joe Gloria said Thursday.
Nevada state law allows ballots to be mailed in until Saturday as long as they were postmarked on Election Day, meaning counties are still receiving ballots to count. But many ballots arriving now are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.
Washoe County Acting Registrar of Votes Jamie Rodriguez said the county disqualified 400 mail-in ballots Thursday, about two-thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received, because they were late.
Washoe County, which includes Reno, still has about 22,000 ballots to count, Rodriguez said, and the county hopes to go through most of them Friday.
Clark County added about 12,000 votes Thursday night. The county says it will provide an update Friday on its remaining ballots to be counted.
Key races in the Silver State, including the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt and the governor’s race between Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and Republican Joe Lombardo, have not been called until Friday morning.
Control of the Senate, which comes down to Nevada, Arizona and possibly a December runoff in Georgia, was expected to be a toss-up heading into Election Day. Republicans, however, were expected to win the House, although the tighter-than-expected contest for control of the chamber has made McCarthy’s quest for the presidency more difficult, even if Republicans end up winning the majority.
Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withdrawing their support for McCarthy’s bid for president and have begun laying out their list of demands, CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju report, putting the California Republican’s way to get 218 votes if the party. ultimately, it takes the House with a narrow majority.
McCarthy and his team are confident he will get the votes to be speaker. But hard-liners are emboldened by the prospect of a slim GOP majority in the House and are threatening to force him to make deals to weaken the presidency, which he has long resisted.
The final composition of the House is important to McCarthy because of the way the chamber chooses a speaker: it requires a majority of the full House, or 218 votes, not just a majority of the party it controls. If Republicans take power with a double-digit majority, McCarthy could afford to lose a few defectors. But a small majority gives single members, and the Freedom Caucus, more power to make demands and threaten to withhold support.
Many key House races have yet to be called, and some remain slim and could head to recounts. One such race is in Colorado, where Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert was ahead by just 1,122 votes as of 9 a.m. Friday. Votes are still being counted in the district.