The contest between Representative Michelle Steel, Republican of California, and her Democratic challenger, Derek Tran, has become the tightest House race in the country, with margins hovering for days in the dozens of votes.
After Ms. Steel took a sizable lead of thousands of votes in the initial Election Day count two weeks ago, her advantage in the 45th Congressional District kept dwindling considerably as more ballots were tallied, until the race flipped.
Late last week, Ms. Steel led by 58 votes. Over the weekend, Mr. Tran went ahead by 36 votes. And on Monday, he extended his lead to 102 votes. More than 307,000 ballots have been cast overall.
While Republicans have already secured control of the House, the race will determine just how slim the party’s majority will be come January, when the new class of lawmakers is sworn in. If Mr. Tran wins, it would be the second California seat picked up this election by Democrats, a small victory amid a sea of national losses.
California is notoriously slow at counting because the vast majority of voters submit mail-in ballots and the state has a lengthy verification process along with laws that afford various protections to residents.
With an estimated 10,000 ballots still to be counted in the district, both campaigns are focusing their efforts to “cure” ballots, or to fix rejected submissions on which a voter’s signature is missing or does not match the one on file.
Tamara Melzer Levenson, the executive director of the nonprofit Grassroots Democrats HQ, said that since Election Day, her group had recruited hundreds of volunteers to make phone calls and knock on doors in an effort to reach more than 1,000 likely Democratic voters whose ballots had been rejected.
The issue of mismatched signatures has been a particular problem among younger voters, who are not as accustomed to having to sign paper checks or forms, Ms. Levenson said. Some ballots cast by older people had also been rejected because of shaky penmanship, she said.
In California, voters can fix their uncounted ballots until Dec. 1, when counties in the state are required to finalize their tallies. In California, recounts can be requested within five days of an election being certified.
“Elections do not end on Election Day,” Ms. Levenson said. “They end when we finish the election curing process.”
While leaders in California have been defending their deliberate methods as critical to ensuring accuracy and inclusivity, the delays have also made the process vulnerable to disinformation. When Mr. Tran took the lead last weekend, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia accused Democrats on X of “stealing a House seat right out from under us” without providing evidence.
Republicans in California, however, said they had prepared for such delays and had their own network of volunteers working in the 45th District until the count becomes final.
Jessica Millan Patterson, chairwoman of the California Republican Party, said in a statement last week that her organization had “the largest Republican ballot curing operation underway in state history as we work to pull several too-close-to-call races over the finish line for our candidates.”
She added later that the 45th District remained a “primary focus” for the party.
“This race is still far too close to call,” Ms. Patterson said, vowing to keep pressing on until the “last legal vote is cured and counted.”
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