The recount for the 16th Congressional District Race wrapped up for the day Friday at the Santa Clara County voting center.
There’s a small number of ballots left to be examined and the process will continue into next week.
The question is, will any of those remaining ballots break the tie?
“Our team’s working hard, and we’re definitely at the tail end,” said Michael Borga of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.
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Some of the final votes in the race are being re-tallied as new details have surfaced.
Santa Clara officials say seven challenged ballots – that were not included in the original results – have now been counted.
Officials won’t say which candidate those ballots may favor, until the recount is over.
Late Friday, they said they still don’t have an exact number of votes left to recount.
“A handful of votes that need to be recounted in order to complete these precinct batches,” Borja said.
While election officials initially expected to be done by Friday, they say the challenging and verification process can be painstakingly slow, and they will not rush it.
Former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo will move on to the November election. The recount of nearly 180,000 ballots could break the tie for second between Joe Simitian and Evan Low.
The district spans two counties, with San Mateo finishing its recount Wednesday.
Officials there say there was no change to their results. But there are 16 ballots that were previously rejected, now being challenged.
Voting officials say they are still in the envelopes and were rejected in the first count.
“The challenge really is to the vote-by-mail envelope and was it received on time. Was it postmarked accurately?” said Jim Irizarry, San Mateo County assistant chief elections officer. “So those details are being reviewed at this juncture to make sure there was an accurate determination for the rejection of that ballot.”
Voting officials are even checking with the postal service to see when those ballots were scanned and delivered.
Those talks – and conversations with attorneys on all sides -- are ongoing.
As for when this will all end, the state will not finalize the results until all of those remaining challenges are resolved.
