Last Uncalled House Race Lingers in California

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The Republican incumbent trails his Democratic challenger by 165 votes in the 13th Congressional District.

While Republicans are projected to hold onto control of the U.S. House of Representatives after the November general election, a single race remains uncalled by the Associated Press as of Dec. 3.

Republican incumbent Rep. John Duarte (R-Calif.) trails Democratic challenger Adam Gray by 165 votes in the 13th Congressional District, according to a Tuesday afternoon update by the California secretary of state, with the lead flipping back and forth since Election Day.

The election in California must be certified no later than Dec. 5 at the county level, and no later than Dec. 13 by the secretary of state.

In 2022, Duarte and Gray faced each other in a midterm election decided by 564 votes.

Duarte has represented the 13th Congressional District, which includes parts of Fresno, since 2023. Gray served California’s 21st Assembly District, which included all of Merced County and parts of Stanislaus County, from 2012 to 2022.

In recent weeks, volunteers for both parties had been working to help “cure ballots,” meaning resolve issues with ballot signatures to buoy their respective candidate’s chances. However, according to Melvin Levey, registrar of voters for Merced County, Dec. 1 was the last day for voters to cure their ballots.

Merced County had 1,104 ballots that needed curing, Levey told The Epoch Times via email. Between Nov. 26 and Dec. 1, the county received cure letters from 378 voters that were verified and added to the results. This left 726 ballots that were unable to be cured.

“Merced County saw higher levels of curing activity for this election than we have ever seen before,” said Levey. “With both congressional candidates, and their supporters, as well as numerous local candidates requesting challenged signature voter data, we had higher return rates from voters for cure letters than we have ever seen and more calls and inquiries regarding cures than ever before.”

Ballot Curing Process

In Merced County, Levey said the signature on a mail-in ballot envelope was scanned by machine before opening and compared with voters’ on-file signatures stored in the system. For ballots with signatures that failed the first step, election workers manually examined the signatures to either confirm or reject their validity.

A ballot that failed the manual signature verification was then set aside, and voters were notified via mail and phone or email that their signature had been challenged and they had a chance to cure it by returning a signature correction form.

Campaign volunteers were then able to reach out separately to the voter and were even able to bring signature forms back to the county registrar’s office on behalf of the voter. However, these ballot cure campaigns initiated by campaign volunteers were not affiliated with the county, according to the registrar’s office.

Campaigns for political candidates were able to apply for and pay a fee to obtain voter information from the registrar of voters and identify voters whose ballots had signatures that may have needed to be verified. It was up to the volunteers which voters they chose to visit to try to get their signatures to cure the ballots, according to the county. However, no one, including the voter, had access to the actual mailed ballots, and the ballots’ content were unable to be changed.

In the final step, after voters returned the signature verification form with their new signatures, the county registrar verified the signatures on the form to determine whether the ballots should be counted. The ballots remained unopened until the signatures were verified.

Travis Gillmore and Kimberly Hayek contributed to this report.