(From the diaries - promoted by James L.)
Tom "The Carpetbagger" McClintock's lead is down to 359 votes, down from a lead that was once over 1,000 votes. The gap closed with the addition of provisional and absentee ballots from Nevada County (Brown's strong area in the district). There are now 2 counties left to report (El Dorado and Placer), which happen to be two of the closer counties. McClintock right now has slight leads in both of them, but provisionals are expected to favor Brown at a higher rate than normal ballots.
According to this post at edhtelegraph, Brown has a decent chance of winning:
Results today from Nevada County indicate Brown is getting 6 percentage points more of the provisional votes than Tom McClintock compared to the proportion of regular and mail-in ballots.
If the remaining uncounted ballots in Placer and El Dorado Counties follow the same pattern where the uncounted mail-in ballots match the proportions from November 4 while Brown gets a 6% edge of the provisional ballots then Brown will squeak out a win. This assumes that 10% of the provisional ballots are no good.
Let's hope these remaining ballots come out this way. I think the big question mark will be who the absentee ballots favor, while provisionals should definitely favor Brown.
UPDATE (DavidNYC): Apparently, Placer County has finished counting and Brown is now 1,793 votes back.
LATE UPDATE (DavidNYC): The Sacramento Bee says that only 4,500 ballots are left to be counted in the whole district. Brown would need 70% of those to pull even.
ANOTHER UPDATE (DavidNYC): This piece says that only 4,100 votes are uncounted and that McClintock has all but declared victory. However, in another twist, the Brown camp says that there were some 10,000 undervotes district-wide. The issue, of course, is what percentage of these were intentional undervotes.
The problem for Brown, though, is that right now, the margin stands at 0.6%, just outside the 0.5% threshhold which would mandate a hand-recount of 10% of the ballots. So we might not get to find out if there were systemic machine problems that produced false undervotes. No matter what, this one is looking extremely tough right now. |
