When will the election be over? When all the votes are counted...

Isn't democracy great?  Americans made a resounding statement last Tuesday but there are still several campaigns for public office that will hang in the balance until every vote is counted.

Chuck Shultz at the Santa Maria Times reports that 20,000 votes were counted between Wednesday and Friday of last week. Some 85,000 are still left to be counted in the three county region that includes the 19th Senate District. Even though Los Angeles County only represents a small part of the district -- that is a lot of votes to count before we know who the winner is.

If that wasn't enough a "manual tally" of 10% of the vote is required by state law when there is a State Senate race that is this close.  here's what Schultz wrote in the Santa Maria Times:

The see-saw battle between Jackson and Strickland could stretch into late November or early December before election officials declare an official winner. That is due to a state regulation requiring a “manual tally” of each ballot cast in a randomly selected 10 percent of all precincts, for any race where the semi-official results on election night showed the top two candidates within a half-percent of each other.

I've heard from a reliable source that there are 4,000 vote-by-mail ballots and 6,000 provisional ballots left to be counted in Santa Barbara County.  Although there is no way of knowing where exactly these votes are from -- they could have a direct impact on the school board race where Ed Heron has extended his lead to 320 votes for the third seat and in Carpinteria where Kathleen Reddington is only 17 votes ahead of Steve McWhirter.

We'll stay on top of it here at BlogaBarbara but we may be still waiting for some of these results as we approach the later part of the holidays....