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Democrats Retain Control of US Senate

The Democratic Party retained control of the U.S. Senate on Saturday night with the reelection of Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, giving the Democrats 50 seats to the Republicans’ 49, so far.

Cortez Masto defeated Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general, to win.

With the victories of Cortez Masto, which The Associated Press called Saturday night, and that of Democratic Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona late Friday, Democrats now control 50 Senate seats.

One last seat has yet to be filled, Georgia’s. That race will be decided in a Dec. 6 runoff election between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, former football player Herschel Walker.

Even if Walker wins, also giving the Republicans 50 of the 100 seats in the Senate, the Democrats would control the body because Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, could cast tie-breaking votes.

The control of the House of Representatives is still being decided as final vote tallies have yet to be posted in numerous districts, mostly in Western states.

Ballots mailed on Election Day can still be counted in Nevada if received by Saturday. Officials in that state have a Thursday deadline to finish counting all the ballots.

Both Nevada and Arizona were working to count a large number of mail-in ballots, which take longer to tally because election officials need to match signatures on mail-in ballots to voter registration rolls.

Election workers in Arizona are also still counting ballots to determine the outcome of the race for governor as well as three competitive House seats.

Kari Lake, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, has accused election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous, of deliberately delaying the vote counting to make it look like Democrats are doing better than they actually are.

The Republican chair of the county board of supervisors, Bill Gates, rebuffed the charge, saying staff are working 14-18 hours a day and will continue to do so through the weekend.

“This is how things work in Arizona and have for decades,” he said, adding, “We are doing what we can and still maintaining accuracy.”

In the race for control of the House of Representatives, Republicans edged closer to winning control but have not yet reached a majority of seats.

As of Friday, Republicans appeared to have won 211 House contests in their quest to attain a 218-vote majority in the 435-member chamber. Democrats have won 200 seats, leaving 24 races undecided, according to The Associated Press, as vote counting continues.

In California, results in more than a dozen competitive House districts have yet to be announced.

Republicans say they are confident they will win the House majority even as they voice dismay that the size of their political advantage over Democrats is likely to be far smaller than pre-election predictions that forecast a “red wave” of Republican winners filling the House chamber come January, when the new Congress is sworn in.

If Republicans do take control of the House, it would give them veto power over President Joe Biden’s agenda and the ability to launch investigations into his administration.

Biden on Wednesday characterized his Democratic Party as having done better than expected against the Republicans and announced he will invite leaders of both parties to the White House after he returns from G-20 meetings in Indonesia to discuss how to work together on economic and national security priorities.

Whatever the eventual outcome, Biden said the election, carried out with only minor disputes across the country, was a good day for America.

“Our democracy has been tested in recent years, but with their votes, the American people have spoken and proven once again that democracy is who we are,” he said.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Senate Control May Come Down to Nevada

Control of the U.S. Senate may come down to Nevada, where a slow ballot count entered its final act Saturday in the nail-biter contest between Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt.

Saturday is the last day that mail ballots can arrive and be counted under the state’s new voting law. Election officials were hustling to get through a backlog of tens of thousands of ballots to determine the race’s winner.

The Nevada race took on added importance after Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly was declared the winner of his reelection campaign in Arizona Friday night, giving his party 49 seats in the chamber. Republicans also have 49.

If Cortez Masto wins, Democrats would maintain their control of the Senate given Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote. If Laxalt wins, the Georgia Senate runoff next month would determine which party has the single-vote Senate edge.

Cortez Masto was only a few hundred votes behind Laxalt, with most of the remaining uncounted ballots in heavily Democratic Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. Democrats were confident those ballots would vault their candidate into the lead.

Laxalt has said he expects to maintain his advantage and be declared the victor. But on Saturday he acknowledged in a tweet that the calculus has changed because Cortez Masto had performed better than Republicans expected in Clark County ballots counted over the past few days.

“This has narrowed our victory window,” he tweeted, acknowledging the race comes down to the final Clark ballots.

“If they are GOP precincts or slightly DEM leaning then we can still win,” Laxalt tweeted. “If they continue to trend heavy DEM then she will overtake us.”

Thousands of ballots still uncounted

If the race remains too close to call after Saturday, a few thousand more ballots could be added to the totals early next week. Mail ballots with clerical errors can be “cured” by voters until the end of the day Monday, and then added to the totals. And a few thousand provisional ballots also remain, votes that election officials must double-check are legally countable by Tuesday before they can be tallied.

“We are doing everything in our power to move ballots forward just as quickly as we can,” Joe Gloria, the registrar in Clark County, said Friday.

An estimated 23,000 ballots remain to be counted in the county. Gloria said there were also 9,600 ballots being “cured” and 5,555 provisional ballots. Clark County accounts for three-quarters of Nevada’s population.

Results of other races

In another key race, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak lost his reelection bid to his Republican challenger, sheriff Joe Lombardo, on Friday night.

Nevada, a closely divided swing state, is one of the most racially diverse in the nation, a working-class state whose residents have been especially hard hit by inflation and other economic turmoil.

Roughly three-fourths of Nevada voters said the country is headed in the wrong direction, and about 5 in 10 called the economy the most important issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of 2,100 of the state’s voters.

Voters viewed the economy negatively, with VoteCast finding nearly 8 in 10 saying economic conditions are either not so good or poor. Only about 2 in 10 called the economy excellent or good. And about a third of voters said their families are falling behind financially.

But that didn’t necessarily translate into anger at President Joe Biden or his party. About half considered inflation the most important issue facing the U.S., but they were evenly split over whether they think higher prices are due to Biden’s policies or factors outside his control.

Nevada is also a famously live-and-let-live state, and Cortez Masto and other Democrats made preserving abortion rights a centerpiece of their campaigns. According to VoteCast, 7 in 10 wanted the procedure kept legal in all or most cases.

Republicans, however, relentlessly hammered the economic argument, contending it was time for a leadership change. They also sought to capitalize on lingering frustrations about pandemic shutdowns that devastated Las Vegas’ tourist-centric economy in 2020.

On Thursday morning, The Associated Press declared Republican Stavros Anthony the winner in the lieutenant governor race, while Republican Andy Mathews was elected state controller.

The state’s lone Republican congressman, Mark Amodei, easily won reelection in his mostly rural district in northern Nevada. The state’s three Las Vegas-area Democratic members of the House were also reelected.
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Kelly Win in Arizona Puts Democrats 1 Seat From Senate Control

U.S. Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won his bid for reelection Friday in the crucial swing state of Arizona, defeating Republican venture capitalist Blake Masters to put his party one victory away from clinching control of the chamber for the next two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

With Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote, Democrats can retain control of the Senate by winning either the Nevada race, which remains too early to call, or next month’s runoff in the state of Georgia. Republicans now must win both those races to take the majority.

The Arizona race is one of a handful of contests that Republicans targeted in their bid to take control of the 50-50 Senate. It was a test of the inroads that Kelly and other Democrats have made in a state once reliably dominated by the GOP. Kelly’s victory suggests Democratic success in Arizona was not an aberration during Donald Trump’s presidency.

The closely watched race for governor between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake was too early to call Friday night. In the secretary of state’s race, Democrat Adrian Fontes defeated Republican Mark Finchem, a top 2020 election denier.

Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who’s flown in space four times, is married to former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who inspired the nation with her recovery from a gunshot wound to the head during an assassination attempt in 2011 that killed six people and injured 13. Kelly and Giffords went on to co-found a gun safety advocacy group.

Kelly and Giffords were at an Elton John concert in Phoenix on Friday night when The Associated Press called the race, campaign spokesperson Sarah Guggenheimer said. Maricopa County reported a large batch of results that increased Kelly’s lead and made clear Masters could not make up the difference with the remaining ballots.

“It’s been one of the great honors of my life to serve as Arizona’s senator,” Kelly said in a statement. “I’m humbled by the trust our state has placed in me to continue this work.”

Kelly’s victory in a 2020 special election spurred by the death of Republican Sen. John McCain gave Democrats both of Arizona’s Senate seats for the first time in 70 years. The shift was propelled by the state’s fast-changing demographics and the unpopularity of Trump.

Kelly’s 2022 campaign largely focused on his support for abortion rights, protecting Social Security, lowering drug prices and ensuring a stable water supply in the midst of a drought, which has curtailed Arizona’s cut of Colorado River water.

With President Joe Biden struggling with low approval ratings, Kelly distanced himself from the president, particularly on border security, and played down his Democratic affiliation amid angst about the state of the economy.

He also styled himself as an independent willing to buck his party, in the style of McCain.

Masters, an acolyte of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, tried to penetrate Kelly’s independent image, aligning him with Biden’s failure to secure the U.S.-Mexico border and tamp down on rampant inflation.

Masters endeared himself to many GOP primary voters with his penchant for provocation and contrarian thinking. He called for privatizing Social Security, took a hard-line stance against abortion and promoted a racist theory popular with white nationalists that Democrats are seeking to use immigration to replace white people in America.

But after emerging bruised from a contentious primary, Masters struggled to raise money and was put on the defense over his controversial positions.

He earned Trump’s endorsement after claiming “Trump won in 2020,” but under pressure during a debate last month, he acknowledged he hasn’t seen evidence the election was rigged. He later doubled down on the false claim that Trump won.

After the primary, he scrubbed some of his more controversial positions from his website, but it wasn’t enough for the moderate swing voters who decided the election.
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US Senate Race Tightens in Nevada; More Results Expected in Arizona

Control of the U.S. Senate was still undetermined late Friday, but incumbent Senator Mark Kelly’s win in Arizona tied the Republican and Democratic wins with 49 seats each.

Election officials in the Western state of Nevada said the race there tightened late Friday in favor of the Democratic candidate, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, against her Republican challenger, Adam Laxalt. If Cortez Masto wins, the Democrats will be in control of the Senate, regardless of the outcome of Georgia’s still-undecided vote, because Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris can cast tiebreaking votes in the 100-member Senate.

Days after Americans voted across the country Tuesday, control of both chambers of Congress — the Senate and the House of Representatives — is still in limbo as final vote tallies have yet to be posted in numerous districts, mostly in Western states.

The Georgia race will be decided in a December 6 runoff election between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, former football player Herschel Walker. With a third candidate in their contest winning 2% of the vote, neither Warnock nor Walker crossed the 50% threshold required to win the seat.

The latest results from Nevada on Friday evening showed the race getting close in a tight contest between Laxalt, a former state attorney general, and Cortez Masto.

Ballots mailed on Election Day can still be counted in Nevada if they are received by Saturday. Officials in that state have a Thursday deadline to finish counting all the ballots.

Both Nevada and Arizona were working to count a high number of mail-in ballots, which take longer to tally because election officials need to match signatures on mail-in ballots to voter registration rolls.

Election workers in Arizona are also still counting ballots to determine the outcome of the race for governor as well as three competitive House seats.

Kari Lake, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, has accused election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous, of deliberately delaying the vote counting to make it look like Democrats are doing better than they actually are.

The Republican chair of the county board of supervisors, Bill Gates, rebuffed the charge, saying staff are working 14-18 hours a day and will continue through the weekend.

“This is how things work in Arizona and have for decades,” he said, adding, “We are doing what we can and still maintaining accuracy.”

In the race for control of the House of Representatives, Republicans edged closer to winning control but have not yet reached a majority of seats.

As of Friday, Republicans appeared to have won 211 House contests in their quest to attain a 218-vote majority in the 435-member chamber. Democrats have won 200 seats, leaving 24 races undecided, according to The Associated Press, as vote counting continues.

In California, results in more than a dozen competitive House districts have yet to be announced.

Republicans say they are confident they will win the House majority even as they voice dismay that the size of their political advantage over Democrats is likely to be far smaller than pre-election predictions that forecast a “red wave” of Republican winners filling the House chamber come January, when the new Congress is sworn in.

If Republicans do take control of the House, it would give them veto power over President Joe Biden’s agenda and the ability to launch investigations into his administration.

Biden on Wednesday characterized his Democratic Party as having done better than expected against the Republicans and announced he will invite leaders of both parties to the White House after he returns from G-20 meetings in Indonesia to discuss how to work together on economic and national security priorities.

Whatever the eventual outcome, Biden said the election, carried out with only minor disputes across the country, was a good day for America.

“Our democracy has been tested in recent years, but with their votes, the American people have spoken and proven once again that democracy is who we are,” he said.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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A Nation Waits: US Election Workers Counting Thousands of Votes

Arizona and Nevada election workers were toiling on Friday to tally hundreds of thousands of ballots that could determine control of the U.S. Senate and the shape of President Joe Biden’s next two years in office, in a vote count that officials in the two battleground states warn could drag on for days.

Winning both contests would give either Democrats or Republicans a Senate majority, while a split would transform a December 6 runoff Senate election in Georgia into a proxy battle for the chamber.

Political analysts are anticipating a rush of campaign funds into Georgia as Republicans and Democrats gear up for the final battle of the 2022 midterm elections.

In Arizona, law enforcement officials remained on high alert for potential protests, with barricades and security fencing erected around the Maricopa County elections department, where dozens of officials are working 18-hour days to verify outstanding ballots and tabulate votes.

Kari Lake, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona, has criticized election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous, as “incompetent” and “despicable,” accusing them of deliberately delaying the vote counting.

Bill Gates, chairperson of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and a Republican, bristled at Lake’s comments.

“Everybody needs to calm down a little bit and turn down the rhetoric,” he told reporters. “That’s the problem with what’s going on with our country right now.”

Control of House, Senate still in question

In the fight for control of the House of Representatives, Republicans were inching closer to becoming the majority and ending four years of rule by Biden’s Democrats. That would give Republicans veto power over Biden’s legislative agenda and allow them to launch potentially damaging investigations into his administration.

Republicans had secured at least 211 of the 218 House seats they need for a majority, Edison Research projected late on Thursday, while Democrats had won 199. Many of the races where winners have not yet been determined are in Arizona, California and Washington state.

Despite the real possibility that they may lose the House, Democrats have still cheered their success in curbing their predicted losses after they galvanized voters angry over the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion.

The Republican House leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy, has already announced his intention to run for speaker if Republicans take over, an outcome he has described as inevitable.

It is unclear whether a challenger to McCarthy will emerge, but some of the most conservative House Republicans have expressed doubts that he has enough votes yet to become speaker, the most powerful official in the House.

Meanwhile, Republican infighting in the Senate broke into the open on Friday as senators urged the postponement of a Wednesday leadership election so that they have time to discuss why the party did not fare better on Tuesday.

Senator Mitch McConnell is hoping to continue as Republican leader, despite sniping from former President Donald Trump and other conservatives.

Counting could take until next week

Officials overseeing vote counting in the Arizona and Nevada Senate races, where Democratic incumbents are trying to fend off Republican challengers, have said it could take until next week to tally some 520,000 uncounted mail-in ballots. Most of those were in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix.

Their work is slowed by the need to match signatures on mail-in ballots to voter registration signatures after high numbers of such votes were dropped off on Election Day.

By midday on Friday, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly had extended his lead over Republican Blake Masters to 115,000 votes, with about 80% of the vote tallied, while Arizona Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs had extended her narrow lead over Trump-backed Republican Kari Lake to 27,000.

Some of Trump’s most high-profile endorsed candidates lost pivotal races on Tuesday, marring his status as Republican kingmaker and leading several Republicans to blame his divisive brand for the party’s disappointing performance.

While Trump has not officially launched a third White House campaign, the former president has strongly suggested he will do so and is planning a “special announcement” at his Florida club on Tuesday.
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Why Does US Ballot Counting Take So Long?

The balance of power in the U.S. Congress following Tuesday’s midterm elections is still up in the air, with several key races yet to be called some 48 hours after many polls closed.

A cliffhanger-style multiday wait for results is far from unusual in the United States, where it is the media that generally first calls elections, based on votes tabulated by county clerks and other officials as well as statistical analysis.

While the long delays can exasperate American voters — and raise questions from curious international observers — there are several reasons why the process can stretch out.

Patchwork of rules

For starters, U.S. elections are largely decentralized, and each of the 50 states has its own rules.

Some Americans vote by machine; others, by paper ballot. Some vote in person; others, by mail.

Some vote on Election Day. Others vote in advance. Many citizens take advantage of ballot drop boxes.

As election officials in multiple states urged patience with the vote counting, Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida aired his complaints.

“If #Florida can count 7.5 million ballots in 5 hours how can it take days for some states to count less than 2 million?” Rubio tweeted Wednesday.

Ballots, on which Americans generally vote for a variety of candidates and initiatives, can take a while to tally.

With voting by mail widely popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, things are taking even longer — the ballots can arrive at counting stations several days after the election. Ohio and Alaska count those that arrive up to 10 days later.

Compounding matters, in many states, election officials are not even allowed to begin counting mail-in votes in advance.

The extended time needed to carry out the process fuels conspiracy theories, especially after the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump falsely claimed was rigged against him.

That race between Trump and eventual winner Joe Biden was not known for four days.

Georgia nail-biter

The southeastern state of Georgia played a special role in 2020, as the balance of the U.S. Senate hung on a second-round election in the state.

This year is proving to be a case of déjà vu.

With no one candidate surpassing the 50% threshold Tuesday to prevent a second round, the two leading candidates, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker are headed to a Dec. 6 runoff.

Organizing elections in a country of some 333 million citizens is in itself a logistical challenge.

The process rarely goes off without a few small hiccups. This year, for example, the electoral machines in one Arizona county encountered operational problems, disrupting the vote.

Some Republicans — including Trump himself — pointed to it as evidence of fraud, a claim immediately dismissed by authorities.

Even without technical incident, races can simply be extremely close, as several in Tuesday’s election are turning out to be.

Twenty states have laws mandating a recount if the margin between candidates is too thin.

In one standout case in 2000, the country held its breath for 36 days with the entire election hinging on delayed results from one state, Florida, as Texas governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore vied for the White House.

At the heart of the civic imbroglio was a razor-thin vote that prompted a highly contested hand recount. In the end, the battle wound its way to the Supreme Court, which issued a decision favoring Bush that December.
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