The state will help determine just how slim of a majority Republicans will take in the House. The party has 218 members, but with the Democrats hanging behind by six seats, there’s room for Republicans to expand their margins.

The two races that have the potential to flip red seats blue are between Democrat Derek Tran and Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA) in Southern California’s 45th Congressional District and Rep. John Duarte (R-CA) and Democratic challenger Adam Gray in Central California’s 13th District.

After trailing Steel for a majority of the vote count, Tran has evened out with Steel, bringing both candidates to 50% each with about 9% of the district’s votes left to be counted. The count is close — Tran leads Steel by just 36 votes.

Steel is leading Tran in the Orange County portion of the district, 50.8%-49.2%, but she is trailing Tran by about 13% in Los Angeles County, 56.3%-43.7%.

In California’s 13th District, Gray is 1 percentage point behind incumbent Duarte, who now sits with 50.6% of the vote. Only 2,000 votes are separating the two competitors, and about 28,000 votes are waiting to be counted.

The counties of Fresno and Madera are pushing for Duarte by margins of over 11 points each, but Merced, San Joaquin, and Stanislaus counties show Gray in the lead by 7 points or less.

Part of the reason for the slow counting is California’s policy to send every resident a mail-in ballot to increase voter turnout and accessibility. The state has broad deadlines for mail-in votes, giving voters days for their ballot to show up as long as the envelope has a postmark of Election Day, Nov. 5.

The switch toward mail-in voting began in 2016 when California lawmakers passed a bill allowing counties to choose all-mail elections. Mail-in ballots were temporarily implemented statewide during the 2020 election, but they were made permanent in 2021 in preparation for the 2022 midterm elections.

Democratic Assemblyman Marc Berman, the author of 2021’s permanent mail-in elections bill, said: “Our priority is trying to maximize participation of actively registered voters. What that means is things are a little slower. But in a society that wants immediate gratification, I think our democracy is worth taking a little time to get it right and to create a system where everyone can participate.”

California has had trouble counting all the mailed votes quickly in the past as the rush of people dropping off their ballots in the mail on Election Day created an influx on election night. Half of the state’s votes were counted after Election Day for the 2022 elections.

Even with mail-in voting options, in-person voting systems were nonetheless massively overwhelmed in Los Angeles County, with some residents saying they had to wait over four hours in line just to cast their ballot.

Dean Logan, Los Angeles County’s registrar-recorder, told ABC7: “The places where we saw the bulk of lines in L.A. County were at colleges and universities, where we also saw students who were registering to vote and voting for the first time. And that takes longer and certainly makes the lines longer.”

“We received election night, when the polls closed, 1 million ballots that still needed to go through verification, signature verification, extraction. They need the same security and quality review as any of the ballots that were cast before the election,” Logan said.

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Even with the considerable number of votes left, Logan says everyone has been working around the clock to get votes counted.

“We have a day shift, and then we have a night shift that works from 7:30 at night till 7:30 in the morning. So we have kept that going daily,” the registrar-recorder said.