News

Why is the race for California’s 45th congressional district so close?

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Created four years ago to solidify the political clout of Little Saigon’s Vietnamese American community, California’s 45th congressional district has become one of the nation’s most narrowly contested House seats.

And with votes still being counted in a race that’s still too close to call, experts say the presence of a Vietnamese American on the general election ballot — a first for CA-45 — is a possible tipping point in a contest that could come down to a handful of votes.

‘Why do we need to rush?’ California’s Lake County may have the nation’s slowest elections department

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Every election, the prickly Lake County registrar follows California’s litany of voting laws and certifies thousands of ballots by the time she is required to. And every year, people still complain.

“The state gave us a deadline; we meet the deadline,” an exasperated Valadez said from her small office in Lakeport as several staffers sat at computers verifying signatures more than two weeks after election day, when they had tallied fewer than half of the votes. “I just don’t understand— why do we need to rush?” 

Christine Pelosi is part of a small army of ballot ‘curers’ in wildly close California House race

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Christine Pelosi is one of many Bay Area volunteers who have headed to the Central Valley to “cure” ballots in an incredibly tight House race. On Wednesday afternoon, after a few days of volunteering in the Merced area, she was “staking out” a Modesto home with a colleague, hoping to connect with a voter whose ballot was rejected over a signature problem, she told the Chronicle.

CA vote count

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The Close Count Transparency Project: is a tracker created by the California Voter Foundation that provides daily updates on the results of 11 competitive U.S. House races and seven state legislative races, as well as the statewide vote count status. The tool tracks candidates’ vote share, votes counted and the number of unprocessed ballots in each county the districts cover. 

California’s slow vote count sows doubt. Here’s how one group is trying to fix that

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California has a notoriously slow ballot counting process — one that Kim Alexander describes as “a pig in the python.”

“This giant wad of ballots that all arrive at once, that all have to move through the process, and you can’t speed it up,” said Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. “You have to do every single step, otherwise you lose the integrity of the process.”

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