There are still several political contests in the East Bay, including the Oakland District 1 city council race, that are still too close to call, because there are still tens of thousands of ballots to count. The Alameda County Registrar of Voters Office plans to release an estimate later today on how many late absentee and provisional ballots that have not yet been tallied countywide. In 2010, the registrar had 122,000 total late absentees and provisionals that were counted after Election Day. And it’s safe to assume that there are at least that many ballots this year, since 2012 is a presidential election. As a result, we’ll be keeping a close eye on several East Bay races in the coming days.
Based on past elections, we consider any local race that is closer than 5 percentage points at this point to be still too close to call. For bigger races, such as countywide contests, anything closer than 8 percentage points is still to close to call.
Here are the following races that we think could change once all the late absentees and provisionals are counted (late absentees are those that voters dropped off at the polls yesterday and provisionals are ballots given to voters who showed up at the wrong precinct):
