After election night, Tuesday, Nov. 6, only 26 votes separated the two candidates in the race for Santa Cruz County Supervisors 5th District.
And on Wednesday, Nov. 7, there were at least 28,000 votes county-wide that are still to be counted the results are anything but final.
On Tuesday, with all precincts reporting, Bruce McPherson held the lead in votes over Eric Hammer for county supervisor — 8,798 to 8,772.
“I feel really good about it,” Hammer said. “We ran an amazing campaign. I kept it really clean, and the volunteers working with me worked really hard. The community stepped up. It’s anybody’s race at this point.”
County Clerk Gail Pellerin said Wednesday that 12,244 mail-in votes were delivered to the polls on Election Day and 8,092 provisional ballots were cast. All have yet to be tallied.
In addition, about 32,000 of the 40,000 mail-in ballots received by Election Day were tallied, leaving about 8,000 uncounted.
Pellerin said her department was aiming to update the vote count by the middle of the week — Nov. 14 or 15.
Pellerin said she did not yet know how many votes were left to count in the 5th District.
“In the end, we’ll probably hand-count every ballot (in the district), because it’s such a close race,” she said.
Hammer and McPherson both held campaign parties in Felton on Tuesday evening. Hammer was at Don Quixote’s until about midnight, and McPherson was at Cowboy Diner. McPherson did not return a call Wednesday seeking comment.
To comment, email editor Peter Burke at
pe***@pr*********.com
, call 438-2500 or post a comment at www.pressbanner.com.
