Democrat Derek Tran’s lead over Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in the race for the 45th Congressional District inched upward to 519 votes Friday night as ballot tallies neared the finish line.
Just under 2% of the estimated vote total remains to be counted in one of three remaining House races that have yet to be called.
Tran has 157,075 votes to Steel’s 156,556, according to the latest vote count released from Orange County, where the majority of the district is. L.A. County did not release a new vote tally.
Tran’s ballot tally Friday represented a smaller jump than seen over the last week.
How we got here
The Democrat led by 36 votes last Friday, 102 votes Monday, 314 votes Tuesday, 397 votes Wednesday and 480 votes Thursday.
The two other undecided races are Iowa’s 1st Congressional District and California’s 13th House district in the San Joaquin Valley. In both contests, the Republican incumbents are ahead by razor-thin margins.
Steel was beating Tran the day after the election, leading by more than 5 percentage points. But her lead steadily declined as more ballots were counted.
The shift has prompted some people to claim voter fraud. Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed Democrats were “stealing a House seat right from under us.” Elon Musk reshared a tweet that said California was “corrupt as hell.”
Experts said shifts during the counting process are normal.
“This is a process that happens every election cycle,” said Paul Mitchell, whose firm, Political Data Inc., tracks vote trends. “We’ve had elections that haven’t been called for an entire month after the election because they were so…
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