By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

In the final uncalled House race of the 2008 election, Ohio Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, a county commissioner, was confirmed Sunday night as the winner of the Nov. 4 election in the Columbus-centered 15th District.

Kilroy defeated Republican state Sen. Steve Stivers by 2,311 votes out of more than 304,000 cast, a margin of about three-fourths of one percentage point.

Kilroy, who is succeeding retiring Republican Rep. Deborah Pryce , will be among the 257 Democrats who take the oath of office on Jan. 6. The next Congress will include 178 House Republicans, or 21 fewer than the GOP held on Election Day.

Kilroy “will bring the strong, bipartisan leadership necessary to address the challenges our nation faces,” said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen , who aided Kilroy’s campaign as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The count in Ohio’s 15th was delayed by wrangling in federal and state courts over the counting of some provisional ballots in Franklin County, the population center of a district that also includes Republican-leaning Madison and Union Counties outside the city.

Provisional ballots, which are cast by voters whose eligibility could not be immediately verified on Election Day, tend to lean Democratic, and Kilroy erased a Stivers lead that stood at 149 votes after the Nov. 4 count and at 594 votes after Madison and Union certified their totals late last month.

The 2,311 vote difference between Kilroy and Stivers was much smaller than the vote totals that accrued to the other two candidates in the race — Libertarian Mark Michael Noble, who received 14,061 votes (4.6 percent), and independent Don Eckhart, who received 12,915 votes (4.2 percent).

The long post-election wait was all too familiar to Kilroy, whose loss to Pryce two years ago by less than 1,100 votes wasn’t confirmed until several weeks after the election.

Kilroy shortly thereafter prepared a rematch campaign against Pryce, who announced her retirement in August 2007. Stivers, an Iraq war veteran, was a strong GOP candidate who ran in what what was a poor political environment for Republicans nationally and in Ohio. Barack Obama carried the 15th District in the Nov. 4 vote.

Kilroy was one of 12 Democrats who were elected to seats that Republicans left open after losing primary elections or announcing their retirements or candidacies for other office. Democratic challengers also unseated 14 House Republican incumbents. Five Democrats were defeated for re-election, including Louisiana Rep. William J. Jefferson , who was upset Saturday by Republican lawyer Anh “Joseph” Cao.