The latest on the 2022 midterm election

As Clark County, Nevada, continued to count votes on Thursday, the county registrar rejected former President Donald Trump’s latest effort to raise suspicions about its elections — saying Trump is obviously “misinformed.”

Trump falsely claimed on his social media platform on Thursday that Clark County “has a corrupt voting system,” warning Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt to “be careful.”

There is simply no basis for Trump’s claim. And the claim followed Trump’s numerous false allegations about the 2020 election in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold that is home to Las Vegas.

Gloria explained that state law requires counties to receive mail-in ballots until Saturday (if they were postmarked by Election Day) and gives voters until Monday to fix issues with their signatures. He also noted that the county isn’t yet allowed to process provisional ballots.

“My staff has been working very diligently, we’ve been here from early in the morning until late at night, we’ve been fully staffed, we’re working as hard as we possibly can in order to get the ballots counted,” Gloria said. “But whether we like it or not, there’s no way that we can move any faster than we’re currently moving.”

Nevada has tight races for the US Senate, governor and other offices.

In remarks Thursday at a DNC event, President Joe Biden reiterated that Election Day was a "good day for America" and "a strong night for Democrats."

“Tuesday was a good day for America, a good day for democracy. And it was a strong night for Democrats,” Biden said, speaking to a room of DNC campaign workers and volunteers in Washington, DC. He thanked them for believing in the country and for fighting to make sure there was a “free and fair election."

CNN is yet to project which party will win the House and the Senate as several key races are too early to call.

The president noted polls predicting big losses for his party before the election, saying, “folks that didn’t happen," touting the success of Democrats holding on to House seats and winning governorships across the country.

“It was the first national election since Jan. 6 and there were a lot of concerns about if democracy would meet the test — it did, it did, it did," he said referring to the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. The future of democracy itself was a common message for Biden on the campaign trail ahead of Election Day.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who was also speaking at the event, echoed the president's message, saying "as we gather here votes are still being counted, but it is clear your work sent a message to the entire world: democracy is intact."

She said some Democrats and some Republicans won and “that’s what happens” when millions of people vote in “free and fair elections”

The vice president said voters across our country knew what they stood for, so they knew what to fight for, pointing to states where voters approved ballot measures aimed at protecting abortion.

Harris argued that people do not need to abandon their beliefs to agree that “the government should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said.

“This president understands democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it,” Harris said, adding that what they saw this week is that “when we fight, we win.”

Coconino County, Arizona, has about 14,896 ballots left to process and count, county recorder Patty Hansen told CNN Thursday. Coconino is in the north-central part of Arizona.

Here's how that breaks down:

Why Arizona is key: The race between Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly an Republican nominee Blake Masters — which could help determine the balance of the Senate — is yet to be called in Arizona. It is also too early to call the gubernatorial race between Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs and Republican nominee Kari Lake.

Rep. Bob Good, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters that House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy “has not done anything to earn my vote” for speaker.

The Virginia Republican also predicted that “there will be a challenge to (McCarthy) as a speaker candidate,” a possibility that CNN first reported was under consideration by the group.

Such a challenge would be more of a protest candidate than a serious one. It would be an attempt to show McCarthy during next week’s internal GOP leadership elections that he doesn’t have the floor votes for speaker, in hopes of forcing him to the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told reporters that “no one currently has 218” votes for speaker, which is the magic number McCarthy would need to secure the speaker’s gavel on the House floor in January.

The House Freedom Caucus has been meeting all day for its new member orientation, where their strategy in the leadership fight has come up, according to a source familiar with the conversations.

McCarthy has spent the last two days working the phones and has been hearing out potential holdouts and critics, but so far not making promises or caving into their hardline demands, sources said.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger picked his own race as the focus of a required statewide audit for 2022 election results.

Raffensperger, a Republican who refused former President Donald Trump's request to "find" votes needed to overturn his 2020 loss in the Peach State, defeated the Democratic nominee this week.

A Georgia law passed in 2019 requires the secretary of state to choose one race every two years to conduct a risk-limiting audit of the results. 

Georgia election officials estimate that 5 to 7% of ballots from the secretary of state race will be recounted for the audit. They say the results will prove “statistical confidence” that the election's outcome is correct.  

How the audit works: Georgia’s 159 counties will be required to conduct a hand recount of a batch of results from the race.

On Nov. 16, election officials will roll a twenty-sided dice to determine which random batches of ballots will be counted and then each county election office will start their hand-counting on Nov. 17. They are expected to share the results by the following day.     

Blake Evans, the elections director with the secretary of state's office, will spearhead the audit.

State leaders said they also chose the race to try to ease the burden on busy county election workers: The large margin of victory for Raffensperger makes the audit easier to conduct. That's important, given the impending Senate runoff that will keep them busy.

Raffensperger’s only function in the audit is to select the race which will be examined, according to his office.

Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock kicked off his runoff campaign against Republican Herschel Walker on Thursday in Atlanta, arguing his second runoff Senate election in as many years is about “competence and character.”

Remember: CNN projected on Wednesday that the hotly contested Senate contest in Georgia will advance to a runoff between Warnock and Walker on Dec. 6. Depending on how Senate races in Arizona and Nevada are decided, the race could be determinative in control of the currently evenly divided Senate.

Warnock looked to avoid this scenario in the final weeks of the campaign, running ads warning Georgians that all the attack ads they have seen for months would continue through Thanksgiving if the state had a runoff.

“Now, you have to admit that I did warn you all that we might be spending Thanksgiving together,” Warnock said. “And here we are. So, I am going to need you to stick with me for four more weeks. Can we do that? Because we’ve got some unfinished business.”

Warnock only glancingly acknowledged the potential national ramifications of the race -- “I need you to fight like the future of Georgia and the future of America depends on it, because it does,” he said -- and instead used his speech to speak directly to the Georgians who didn’t vote for him on Tuesday night.

“For those of you who made a different choice this time, whether for Herschel Walker or someone else, I want to speak directly to you: Over the next four weeks, I hope you will give me the opportunity to earn your vote,” the Democratic senator said. “Every day I have served in the Senate, I have been thinking about the people of Georgia and that is what I will do the next six years.”

Arizona's Maricopa County has not started counting 290,000 ballots that were dropped off at voting sites on election day — a critical batch of ballots that could help determine who wins the uncalled Senate and governor’s races in the state, Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors, told CNN Thursday.

Maricopa County has about 400,000 ballots left to count, and 290,000 of those are early ballots that were dropped off at voting sites Tuesday, Gates told CNN’s Sara Sidner.

The 290,000 ballots that were dropped off on election day “was a record,” he said.

About 70% more people chose to vote by dropping off their early ballots on election day than they have at any point in the past, breaking the previous record, Gates said. 

Those ballots must have signature verification review before they can be counted he told CNN.

“If you drop off an early ballot, it means it has to come in on Wednesday and start the process of being signature verified,” Gates said, which is a process that takes longer than voting in person on election day and having your vote counted through the tabulator immediately.

Maricopa County had “big voter turnout” throughout the whole election, with about 230,000 people voting in person on election day, in addition to the ballots that were dropped off, Bill Gates, Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors said. 

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is moving swiftly to lock down the votes to claim the speaker’s gavel as a hard-right faction of his conference discusses whether to mount a long-shot challenge to complicate his bid and force concessions in the process, according to multiple GOP sources.

McCarthy privately spoke to his closest advisers and confidantes in a Wednesday morning phone call just hours after his party appeared on track to take the House but fell short of their bullish expectations of a massive GOP landslide. The California Republican tapped a group of members to be on his whip team that will help him secure the 218 votes in order to win the speakership in January, with GOP lawmakers on the call promising to “work hard to get him elected,” according to a source familiar with the matter. And several allies were seen popping in and out of McCarthy’s office on Wednesday as they started to hash out and execute their game plan.

“Yes,” McCarthy said confidently Wednesday night as he left the Capitol and was asked if he had the votes to assume the speakership.

McCarthy, who sent a letter to the conference Wednesday afternoon officially declaring his bid for the speakership and asking members for their support, spoke with some potential GOP holdouts behind closed doors throughout the day, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial conservative who was booted from her committee assignments by Democrats – and a number of Republicans – over her past incendiary rhetoric. Greene has pushed for a spot on the powerful House Oversight Committee in a GOP majority.

Leaving McCarthy’s office, Greene would not say if she’d get what she’s been seeking.

Next week’s leadership election is just the first step in the process. McCarthy would need to win a majority of his conference’s support next week to be nominated for speaker before a January vote when he would need 218 votes of the full House to win the gavel.

Key races to determine control of the Senate in Arizona and Nevada have yet to be called as both states race to count hundreds of thousands of ballots that have yet to be processed.

It still may be hours – or days – before enough ballots are counted in those states to determine who won the Senate. There are also many uncalled congressional races that will determine what the House looks like when the new Congress is seated.

The unofficial results – and lingering uncertainty about who will control Congress next year – hasn’t prevented Republican apprehension about the election results, where an expected Republican wave never materialized. 

Here’s what you should know as the counting continues:

Where things stand in Arizona and Nevada — and why it's taking so long to count ballots: The biggest reason for the delay is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.

In Arizona, for instance, there are still roughly 600,000 ballots to be counted. The majority of those, about 400,000 ballots, are in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county that includes Phoenix.

Of those ballots, about 290,000 were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day, Bill Gates, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman, said on CNN Thursday. Those ballots have to be processed before they can be counted, leading to a lag time in tabulating.

In addition, the county has about 17,000 ballots that were attempted to be counted on Election Day but were not read by the tabulator because of a printer error, and those ballots still need to be counted, too.

In Nevada, state law allows mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. That means counties are still receiving ballots to be counted.

Clark County, the state’s largest that includes Las Vegas, received more than 12,000 postmarked ballots from the post office on Wednesday, Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said.

In addition, counties in Nevada have tens of thousands of mail-in ballots that were dropped off on Election Day in drop boxes located at polling places. Clark County said that its Election Day drop boxes contained nearly 57,000 mail ballots.

Trump vs. DeSantis: The lackluster performance of several candidates endorsed by former President Donald Trump has cast new doubts on his expected 2024 campaign.

At the same time, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ resounding reelection victory is fueling calls for him to capitalize on his momentum and challenge Trump for the 2024 nomination.

The Trump-DeSantis showdown has been simmering for months now, but it could burst into the open as the primary season officially gets underway.

After "red wave" washes out, McCarthy faces tougher path: Republicans are still closing in on a majority in the House, even after Democrats had a better-than-expected night Tuesday.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is moving swiftly to lock down votes needed to claim the speaker’s gavel in the next Congress. CNN has not yet projected a Republican takeover of the chamber.

But the ultimate size of a Republican majority could determine how difficult it will be for McCarty to become speaker, as a narrow majority could prompt the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus to stand in the way of McCarthy’s leadership ambitions.

A source familiar with the House Freedom Caucus’ deliberations told CNN on Wednesday morning there are around two dozen current and incoming members willing to vote against McCarthy if he doesn’t offer them concessions.

CNN’s Ellie Kaufmann, Bob Ortega, Gary Tuchman, Paul Vercammen, Kristen Holmes, Gabby Orr, Manu Raju and Melanie Zanona contributed to this report.