AGAIN: Democrat Who Trailed by 6,200 Votes on Election Night WINS in California

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Nov 16, 2018

A Democrat from California who trailed by just over 6,200 votes after election night tallying has now overtaken Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Calif.), and will win yet another Congressional seat.

“On Thursday, the Associated Press projected that Democrat Katie Porter has defeated two-term GOP. Rep. Mimi Walters in the race to represent the county’s inland 45th Congressional District,” according to The Orange County Register. 

Officially, Porter is now winning the race by 6,203 votes after trailing by 6,233 when votes were originally counted. Porter reportedly won 58 percent of votes that have been counted since the night of the election.

Once a red hotbed in blue California, Orange County has turned decidedly blue in just two years. All four Congressional seats in the county held by Republicans have been flipped to Democrats. According to the California GOP’s calculations, none of those seats were in jeopardy heading into the midterm elections.

Absentee ballots, which were still being counted in the district as of Thursday, put Porter over the edge.

Big League Politics spoke with a U.S. Senate Candidate from California this week who explained that the laws surrounding mail-in ballots in the state have been changed to make the counting process much less rigorous.

James Bradley told Big League Politics that the state has passed a law allowing for mail-in and provisional ballots to be machine counted. Previously, the signatures on such ballots had to be individually verified in order for the ballots to be counted. Since the safeguard of signature verification was nullified, Democratic mail-ins and provisionals have vastly increased, according to Bradley.

There appears to be a pattern of mail-in ballot counting swinging districts from red to blue in several places races, including in California and New Mexico.

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