Nineteen US House Races Remain Uncalled, Under Recount Rules Ranging From Automatic to Court-Only

Nineteen of the 435 House seats had no declared winner a week after the 3 November election, and the recount rules for the closest of them range from automatic in Florida to court-ordered only in Tennessee.

Democrats had won 254 seats and Republicans 162 by Monday 9 November, according to Congress Countdown’s tally; the two figures and the 19 uncalled seats add up to 435. The majority was settled days ago. What remains is its size, and in a handful of districts the gap is a few hundred votes, about the size of the swings in the rare recounts that have reversed a result.

A list of the uncalled races published by Yahoo News early on Tuesday names 20 districts, but one of them, Florida’s 26th, is described in the same entry as a win for Representative Mario Díaz-Balart by about 1,700 votes. Setting it aside leaves 19, which matches the count above. That reconciliation is ours.

Which races are still open, and under which rules?

The table sets each remaining district against its state’s recount rule and canvass deadline. Leaders and margins are as Yahoo News and, for South Carolina, WEAR-TV reported them. Recount rules and canvass periods are from the National Association of Secretaries of State’s October 2024 summary, except where a statute is linked below; the dates are this publication’s arithmetic from the statutory day counts.

How close is close enough?

It depends entirely on the state, and the same margin can mean opposite things. Minnesota’s publicly funded recount for a congressional seat is available only if the gap is under one-quarter of one per cent of the votes counted for the office, and only on a candidate’s written request, under section 204C.35. North Carolina’s threshold for a district race is four times wider: a candidate may demand a recount when the margin is within “one percent (1%) of the total votes cast in the ballot item,” under G.S. 163-182.7, and the demand must reach the State Board by noon on the second business day after the county canvass.

Run the reported numbers through those lines and the picture sharpens. A 300-vote margin falls inside Minnesota’s 0.25 per cent wherever more than 120,000 votes were cast, and inside North Carolina’s 1 per cent wherever more than 30,000 were. Colorado works the other way: its automatic recount is measured against the leader’s own vote, so a 3,000-vote lead would trigger one only if the leader had more than 600,000 votes. Those are this publication’s calculations; Yahoo’s list put the Colorado lead outside the automatic range, and said a recount was likely in Minnesota.

Tennessee is the outlier among the states with a district still in doubt. In three states, Illinois, Mississippi and Tennessee, “a recount may only be conducted by court order,” the National Conference of State Legislatures wrote in a 2020 survey of recount law. The trailing candidate in the 4th District would have to persuade a judge before anyone counted again. Mississippi’s uncalled Senate race faces the same constraint.

Do recounts change results?

Rarely, and only at the smallest margins. The same NCSL survey cited FairVote’s count of 31 recounts in 5,778 statewide elections from 2000 to 2019. Three reversed the result, and FairVote noted that “in all three, the original margin of victory was less than 0.05%.” The shifts in those three were 390 votes in Washington in 2004, 239 in Vermont in 2006 and 440 in Minnesota in 2008. Those are statewide contests, larger than any House district, but they set the scale: recounts move hundreds of votes, not thousands. On that record Florida’s 27th, at 0.44 points, is close enough to recount and nearly nine times wider than the reversals FairVote found. A Minnesota or North Carolina race decided by a hundred votes is not.

Two of the open seats cannot change party at all. California’s top-two system put two Democrats on the ballot in the 4th and 7th Districts, so those seats raise the Democratic total to at least 256 whatever the count shows. If every current leader holds, by this publication’s count of the table, Democrats finish with 261 seats and Republicans with 172, with Louisiana’s two runoffs deciding the last pair on 12 December. Mail ballots in Washington and California, where the state canvasses run into December, are where those projections are most likely to move.

What comes first?

South Carolina. Representative Wilson’s challenger said, “This election is not over. Every vote matters, and every vote deserves to be counted accurately,” WEAR-TV reported, and the state Democratic chair, Christale Spain, said the party would be “closely monitoring all three recounts,” the congressional seat and two state House races. Florida’s state canvass follows on 17 November. The provisional ballots counted in the meantime are handled under rules that vary as much as the recount laws do.