CLEVELAND — Republicans in Washington won control of the Senate in last week's election and are likely to hold onto the House as well as they wait for a handful of races to be called across the country, and a week after Election Day remains extremely close.
One such race involves Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur's bid for a record 22nd term against Republican State Rep. Derek Merrin. Election night vote totals left Kaptur with a narrow 1,200 vote lead or just 0.3 percent.
Decision Desk HQ called the race for Kaptur, who put out a news release shortly after that to celebrate her win. However, other outlets like AP, ABC, and CNN have yet to make a call, and Merrin has yet to concede, citing the number of provisional and vote-by-mail ballots still to be counted. But the deadline for absentees to be received and provisionals to be reconciled was this past Saturday at 5 p.m., so why haven't the numbers been updated?
Nothing nefarious, says Ohio's chief elections officer; it's just the process.
"To be clear, there's only two times that under Ohio law we can tabulate and release the results of an election," said Secretary of State Frank LaRose. One is election night, and the other is when all of the provisional ballots are "cured," or the voter's information verified and the outstanding vote by mail ballots returned. In Ohio this year, they numbered around 220,000.
"Normally that's not enough to really change the results of many races but for example in a really close race it could be and that's why we'll be watching now for the Boards of Elections to certify their final results and that'll be the next you're able to find out the results."
Another extremely close race can be found for Cuyahoga County Council in District 6, where longtime Republican Incumbent Jack Schron trails Democratic challenger Robert Schleper after the election night tally by just 17 votes or a 0.02 percent margin. A quick tally of the provisionals cast in the communities that comprise the district along the county's eastern and southern border shows more than 1,100.
Wednesday at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, teams of Republicans and Democrats continued the process of going over each of the roughly 14,200 provisionals cast in the election.
"They're getting ready to do their final certified results and so that is checking, double checking and triple checking all of the work that they did to make sure that everything reconciles out," LaRose said. "They will report those results no later than Nov. 20."
If that total is within a half percent in a local or district race or a quarter percent statewide, it will trigger an automatic recount, and every year in Ohio, a handful of races inevitably end up in a tie.
"So when anyone says one vote doesn't make a difference this is proof positive that it does," he said. "Elections can come down to very small numbers and every vote matters."
In addition to a recount, if needed, the final results in Ohio are always audited, which is required by the state in every election.
"This is when they county the hard copy paper by hand, and 100% of Ohio's ballots are on paper. They count the paper and compare it to the electronic result, and the two have to reconcile," he said. "We've had an accuracy rate above 99.9% during the time I've been in this office, and I anticipate that's what we'll find over the next couple of weeks as we once again conduct that post election audit."
