Republican Mia Love has taken the lead over Democrat Ben McAdams in Utah’s 4th Congressional District by 419 votes. The ultimate winner will come down to which way the thousands of provisional ballots left to count break.
There are about 17,000 provisional ballots left to be counted in Salt Lake County and approximately 16,000 in Utah County, although not all of those are in the 4th District. Usually, the vote count following election night favors Democrats, a concept called the “blue shift.” Voters who cast a provisional ballot tend to be younger and members of racial minority groups, two factors that typically lean toward Democratic candidates.
Utah law allows for a recount if the margin is within 0.25% of the votes cast. That number should be somewhere in the neighborhood of a 675-vote margin. However, recounts rarely reverse election results. According to FairVote, there have been 4,687 statewide general elections between 2000 and 2015. 27 of those elections went to a recount, and just three of those reversed the original outcome.
Both Utah and Salt Lake County are expected to release updated vote numbers on Monday.
Prop. 4, which establishes an independent commission for Utah’s once-a-decade redistricting process, is currently passing by just 2927 votes, down from the 4,200 vote margin it was passing by on Thursday.
