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Election officials have announced that a House seat in Massachusetts has flipped to the Democratic candidate by a single vote following a recount.
According to a Sunday report, GOP state Rep. Lenny Mirra, the incumbent, had a lead of 10 votes over Democratic challenger Kristin Krassner following the election last month, receiving 11,754 votes to her 11,744 votes. All others in the race only received 11 votes, according to the certified results in the race posted to the state’s election website.
In addition, there were 646 blank ballots submitted out of a total of 24,155 ballots overall cast during the election.
The recount was requested by Kassner in the newly drawn district due to the razor-thin margin separating the two candidates. After the recount, the outcome of the race changed, with the Dem candidate beating out the GOP incumbent by a single vote.
🚨NEW: Democrat Kristin Kassner jumped into the lead over five-term Republican Rep. Lenny Mirra after a district-wide recount erased her narrow deficit and put her ahead by a single vote.
— Ale (@aliasvaughn) December 12, 2022
While the recount was completed on Thursday, the results have not yet been certified by the Governor’s Council, the Daily Wire reported. The new vote tally is Kassner 11,763, to Mirra 11,762.
“We are not suspicious of anything that ever happened. [The recount] was just really just to ensure that, between humans and machines, we really caught every vote that was counted,” Kassner said, according to State House News Service. “We thank the tremendous outpouring of people that really got involved and mobilized to go through this process this weekend. It’s really a true test of democracy.”
But that said, Mirra noted that he will mount a legal challenge.
“It’ll absolutely be a legal challenge,” Mirra said, State House News Service reported, adding:
If the result holds, it would reflect another blow for Republicans, who lost every Massachusetts statewide race including the corner office, and expand the gains Democrats made to their legislative supermajority this cycle.
The updated results will now go to Gov. Charlie Baker and the Governor’s Council, which does not plan to meet again until Wednesday, for recertification.
Mirra, a Georgetown Republican, said attorneys for both sides “challenged or questioned several dozen votes” during the recount. Only ballots protested at the time during a recount can then be challenged in court.
“Yesterday, in Rowley, they were able to use five spoiled ballots that all went to my opponent. In no other town did they let us use spoiled ballots,” Mirra said, noting further that there were several other mail-in votes in the city of Ipswich, which he said that signatures do not match their envelopes.
He also complained about the state’s post-2020 Census redistricting and said that definitely played a role in the tight election.
“I got totally screwed in this redistricting. I lost five of my seven towns. Usually, a rep district changes by maybe five percent or 10 percent,” he told the State House News Service. “It’s an unheard-of amount of change for my district. It was devastating because it’s like starting all over. There was no benefit to being the incumbent because we were a complete unknown in these new towns.”
Republicans have managed to flip Democratic seats in other state House races this election cycle as well.
For instance, victory for the Republican candidate in a hard-fought race for a House seat in the Iowa legislature came down to a razor-thin finish after a hand recount last week.
According to the Des Moines Register, Republican Luana Stoltenberg won election to House District 81 after receiving 5,073 votes to 5,062 for Democrat Craig Cooper, an 11-vote margin of victory.
The win was certified by a three-member board, the outlet reported.
“Thank you so much to everyone in District 81 for the honor of representing you in the Iowa House!” Stoltenberg noted in a Thursday Facebook post. “I want to hear what is important to you and how I can serve you these next couple years.”
Cooper conceded to Stoltenberg and accepted the results of the second recount, but he did voice some concerns about the process, the Des Moines outlet noted.
“A year of campaigning, walking many miles of neighborhoods and meeting residents, can be exhausting and oddly lonely but I don’t regret the experience,” Cooper noted, according to the paper.
