When will we know who wins Colorado's 8th Congressional District seat?

DENVER (KDVR) -- The eyes of the nation are still honed in on the race for Colorado's 8th Congressional District seat as the election continues to keep almost a razor-thin margin.

At last check, Republican Gabe Evans and Democratic Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo were separated by 0.6%, with Evans in the lead.

"It was a close race last time and it was a close race this time," said Philip Chen, assistant professor of political science at Denver University.

Coloradans will remember when the district was drawn in 2020, which was to make the 8th District more competitive.

"It follows what a lot of what we see in redistricting is frequently redistricting ends up protecting incumbents," Chen said. "You draw districts so that an incumbent doesn’t have to go up against a fellow incumbent or those who have been in Congress a while get to stay in Congress a while, because it’s in the best interest of your state to have that seniority in Congress and this kind of reflects that."

The closeness of the race highlights a number of things about ballot counting in general, particularly the many things that slow it down, including the recent weather.

"There’s any number of reasons that the weather could impact it. Mostly it’s about transportation and getting to the places where ballots can be counted," Chen said.

The DU assistant professor added ballots must be counted in a secure environment, and if workers can't get to the location to count the ballots, it has to be postponed until they can get there to count them.

"If there’s bad weather, they don’t want to bring people in," Chen said. "You can’t send ballots home with someone, you have to do it in, you know, the secure location where they are counting ballots."

But, Chen added, a slow election is a positive thing, and happens more often than most people think.

"This process of counting ballots for several days happens in hundreds of races across the country. But we only think about it in close races," he said.

The race is close, but the margin is still just over the minimum percentage, which would trigger an automatic recount.

"We trigger recounts mostly because we want to make sure that the vote count is correct," Chen said.

A recount does not guarantee it will affect the outcome of an election, in fact, it usually never does.

"Not saying it’s impossible but unlikely that it would change the results," Chen said. "Point-five percent in a race like this could be thousands of votes, you know. Not quite 2,000. It’s about 1,500-1,600 votes I believe. In that case, yeah absolutely that would be unusual to have a recount overturn that amount."

Chen referenced three instances where a recount did affect the outcome, but the margins were separated by only a couple hundred votes.

Lastly, ballot curing can also impact when we learn who wins in this election. This can happen after all the votes are counted and it means a ballot was rejected after two election judges of different political party affiliations agreed that the signature on the ballot envelope was either missing or did not match the signature on file. The voter usually has until the eighth day after the election to get it resolved.

Chen said it could be by the middle of next week, on Wednesday or Thursday, before we officially know who has won the 8th Congressional District seat.