Seven high-profile races where voters are still waiting on results

Election Day has passed, but many voters are still waiting to see who will win a number of high-profile races.

Control of both the House and Senate remains up for grabs, and election officials in critical counties in uncalled races have indicated vote counting will continue throughout the week.

As results keep trickling in, here’s the latest on seven high-profile races where voters are still waiting to hear the winner:

Nevada Senate

Incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D) is in a tight race against Republican challenger Adam Laxalt in Nevada’s Senate race, which is crucial for determining who will win control of the upper chamber.

Laxalt leads Cortez Masto by 2.7 percentage points, or about 22,500 raw votes, as of Wednesday afternoon, with roughly 23 percent of the estimated vote yet to be counted.

A significant proportion of the remaining votes will come from mail-in ballots in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold that comprises nearly three-quarters of the state population and includes Las Vegas.

Joe Gloria, Clark County’s registrar of voters, on Wednesday afternoon announced the county later in the day will report 14,718 ballots that arrived in the mail on Tuesday and were left at drop boxes on Monday.

A “considerable amount of ballots” were left in drop boxes on Tuesday and have yet to be counted, he added, also stressing that mail ballots postmarked by Election Day will be counted as long as they arrive by Saturday.

County data indicates tens of thousands of mail-in ballots also have yet to be counted in battleground Washoe County, where President Biden garnered 51 percent of the vote in 2020.

Arizona Senate

In another critical contest for control of the Senate, the victor remains unclear in the race between incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Republican Blake Masters.

Kelly leads Masters by 5 percentage points, or roughly 90,000 raw votes, with about one-third of the estimated vote yet to be counted.

In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and comprises about 60 percent of the state’s population, election officials say about 400,000 votes have yet to be counted.

Bill Gates, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that he expects between 95 percent and 99 percent of the vote to be reported by Friday evening.

Democrats will take control of the Senate if they win both Nevada and Arizona.

Georgia Senate

Incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) is projected to head to a runoff, as he did in 2020.

If Democrats and Republicans each win one of the Senate contests in Nevada and Arizona, control of the upper chamber would once again come down to the Peach State.

Warnock will face Republican and former NFL star Herschel Walker again on Dec. 6, meaning nearly a month of campaigning lies ahead before voters head to the polls.

The Georgia Democrat won his runoff in 2020 by just 2 percentage points. As of Wednesday, he was leading Walker by less than 1 percentage point, or roughly 32,000 votes, in the latest election.

Alaska Senate

Alaska’s Senate seat is poised to remain red, but the state’s use of ranked-choice voting could prevent the declaration of a winner for another two weeks.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is trailing Trump-backed Republican Kelly Tshibaka by about 3,500 votes as of Wednesday in the first round.

But under Alaska’s new system, voters could rank multiple candidates. Officials will eliminate the candidate with the least amount of votes one at a time and retabulate the votes until two candidates remain.

That means the nearly 13 percent of votes cast for other candidates, including Democrat Pat Chesbro, could ultimately be reassigned to Murkowski or Tshibaka in subsequent rounds.

Election officials in the state indicate ranked-choice voting results will not be available until Nov. 23.

Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District

Perhaps one of the most surprising House races took place in Colorado, where conservative firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert (R) is in a tight race with Democratic opponent Adam Frisch.

The candidates are separated by just 0.8 percentage points as of Wednesday afternoon, with an estimated 95 percent of the votes counted.

Nonpartisan political handicappers had largely seen Boebert as likely to win reelection. 

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rated the race “solid Republican.” The district is one of two in that category that has yet to be called as of Wednesday, although the other, California’s 23rd Congressional District, is up in the air largely because the vast majority of votes have yet to be counted there.

“We are still waiting for every vote to be counted, but the lead we hold this morning is because of the support of each and every one of you,” Frisch tweeted Wednesday afternoon.

Arizona governor

Like the state’s Senate race, Arizona’s hotly contested gubernatorial race remains too close to call.

Democrat Katie Hobbs leads Republican Kari Lake by 0.7 percentage points, or roughly 12,000 votes.

But one-third of the estimated vote has yet to be counted, including roughly 400,000 ballots in Maricopa County.

Lake railed against election officials while speaking to supporters early Wednesday morning, repeatedly calling them “incompetent” and referencing ballot tabulation malfunctions early on Election Day in Maricopa County.

“If we have to fight through the BS and the garbage, then we will fight through the BS and the garbage,” Lake said.

During an appearance on CNN, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates pushed back on Lake’s criticisms, saying that “we have not” heard proof of any fraud and that the issues didn’t prevent people from voting.

“I do not believe that what happened yesterday can be fairly called incompetence or corruption in any way,” Gates told Blitzer. 

Los Angeles mayor

Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) is slightly trailing Democratic billionaire Rick Caruso in Los Angeles’s mayoral race, although just over half of the estimated votes have yet to be reported.

Caruso, who founded a massive real estate company, garnered about 51 percent of the reported vote as of Wednesday afternoon, compared to Bass’s 49 percent. The gap is roughly 12,000 votes.

The two candidates also faced off in June in a nonpartisan primary, but neither received an outright majority, sending the race to a runoff this week.

In the primary, Bass led the field of candidates with about 43 percent of the vote, compared to Caruso’s 36 percent.