It took a matter of hours after the polls closed Tuesday to know that former President Donald J. Trump had won the presidency and Republicans had seized control of the Senate.
So why does it take so long to call the House of Representatives?
There’s a long answer and a short answer.
The long answer is about the volume of races and the number of competitive seats. With 435 House races across the country, a party needs to win 218 of them to capture the chamber. Dozens are in competitive districts, meaning there are many possibilities for races to be too close to call for days as elections officials count absentee and provisional ballots. One recent House campaign in Iowa came down to just a six-vote difference.
Currently, there are too-close-to-call races in more than a dozen states from Alaska to Maine. And some races whose outcome appear to be clear remain officially uncalled, even though both sides can see where they are headed, as happened on Wednesday in Pennsylvania, where Representatives Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright conceded defeat before the results were finalized.
The New York Times relies largely on The Associated Press to call House races. The A.P. employs a team of analysts, researchers and race callers who have a deep understanding of the states where they declare winners. In some tightly contested races, The Times independently evaluates A.P. race calls before declaring a winner. That all takes time.
But there’s an even shorter and simpler answer for why it takes so long to know who won the House: California.
The battle for control of the House runs through this large, populous blue state, where there are a number of closely contested races. Ten California House races this year were featured on the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s list of competitive races.
California is famous for taking days (if not more than week) to count all its ballots. It allows mail ballots to be counted if they are received up to seven days after Election Day (provided they are postmarked by Election Day). And California sends mail ballots to all registered, active voters — meaning its volume of mail ballots is simply higher than other states.
The state currently has more than a dozen undecided House races.
California’s slow process has long frustrated House Republicans. It took more than a week in 2022 to call the House for Republicans. Former Speaker Paul Ryan in 2018 called the state’s process “bizarre.”
“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election, and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race,” he lamented at the time.
That comment prompted Senator Alex Padilla, who was then the California secretary of state, to defend the state’s vote-counting practices: “In California, we make sure every ballot is properly counted and accounted for. That’s not ‘bizarre,’ that’s DEMOCRACY.”
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