McClintock for Congress Blog

The latest batch from Nevada County dropped us by 60 votes, partially offset by a 30-vote gain out of El Dorado County, leaving us with a lead of 592 today.  Nevada County is rapidly running out of ballots – we estimate it has roughly 1,000 yet to count.  Everything else – approximately 25,000 more ballots — are from counties that we are carrying.

Butte and Placer counties comprise 23,000 of those ballots and are expected to release their numbers in a single batch when they complete their full counts later this week or early next.  In short, the fat lady hasn’t begun singing yet, but she’s on stage and appears to be wearing a McClintock button.

We start this week with a lead of 622 votes out of 339,292 total cast, or 0.18 percent.  The good news is that there are less than 1,500 ballots to tally in the only county that Brown won and over 25,000 ballots to process in the counties that I carried.

We expect final Nevada County numbers to come in by the middle of this week. Once they have been reported, our lead should steadily grow as the remaining ballots from Placer, Sacramento, Butte and El Dorado counties are tallied.

Nevada County has completed 85 percent of its uncounted ballots and the three days of tallies have cost us 1,350 votes of the 1,500 loss that we expected.  However, El Dorado and Sacramento returns have been much higher than expected, so it now seems unlikely that we will dip into negative territory any time during the counting of the remaining ballots.

As of tonight, our lead has narrowed to 691 out of 338,307 ballots counted, or 0.20 percent.  But there are only 1,792 ballots left to be counted in Nevada County, and Nevada County is the only county remaining that Brown carried.  Meanwhile, there are still 29,500 unprocessed ballots from counties that we are carrying. After the final Nevada county votes are reported, our lead should steadily increase from there.

In a nutshell, we are currently receiving 50.1 percent of the vote and need 48.9 percent of the remaining votes.  Of the counties still outstanding, we are carrying Butte county with 52.2 percent; El Dorado by 50.81; Placer by 50.72 and Sacramento by 53.29.  Indeed, we carried 64.75 percent of today’s batch from Sacramento and 56.21 percent of the batch from El Dorado.

Again, my sincere thanks to the volunteers and donors who have worked so hard to assure a fair and accurate count.

Our lead has held steady at 1,248 votes out of 334,320 now counted, or 0.37 percent.  This gives us 50.19 percent of the counted vote and means that we need 48.18 of the remaining 34,000 uncounted ballots.

We lost 468 votes from Nevada County today while gaining 80 from Sacramento County and 353 from El Dorado County for a net loss of 35.  We continue to run stronger in the late vote than the election day vote in ALL counties.   We estimate that there are now fewer than 5,000 ballots remaining to be counted in counties that Brown carried and 29,000 remaining to be counted in counties that we carried.

Many thanks once again to all those who have volunteered their time to serve as election observers and who have contributed to support our legal team.  The growing sense of confidence in the outcome of this count is directly because of your help.

Our lead has now widened to 1,283 votes out of 326,395 counted, or 0.39 percent.  We are now taking 50.20 percent of the votes counted and need 48.49 percent of the remaining 42,500 ballots.

Nevada County reported 1,950 additional votes today, of which we received 45.79 percent – well above the 42.52 we had on Election Day.  This loss was more than offset when Sacramento County reported 491 additional ballots counted, of which we received 54.17 percent of the vote (up from 53.10 on election day); and El Dorado County processed an additional 5,573 ballots, of which we received 52.79 percent (up from 50.34 on election day).

These results comport with our field observations that the bulk of the uncounted votes are from our stronghold precincts.

We estimate that there are still 8,600 ballots from counties where Brown has the lead and 33,900 ballots from counties where I have the lead yet to be counted.

As of late afternoon there have been no changes in the reported count – we are still ahead by 1,092 votes, or 0.34 percent out of 313,384 votes counted.

We expect the bulk of Nevada County’s votes to be reported tomorrow, where we could lose as many as 1,500 votes.  Nevertheless, we are seeing better performance with the late absentees than we saw on election night in every county – including Nevada – and if that keeps up, our numbers should bounce back fairly rapidly.  Based on the precincts yet to be counted, chances are very good that our lead should start widening from our low point when Nevada comes in.  If we stay out of negative territory with that vote, victory should be within sight.

My sincere thanks to everyone who has stepped forward to help.  Stay tuned for tomorrow…

Our lead has increased from 889 votes on Saturday to 1,092 votes Monday evening out of 318,384 counted, boosting our margin from 0.28 percent to 0.34 percent.  We are receiving 50.17 percent of the votes counted and need 48.95 percent of the remaining 52,000 uncounted ballots.  Better still, in every county our proportion of the vote is greater than election night, increasing our percentage margin by nearly 2 ½ fold.

Despite the promising trend, our lead is still razor-thin and the race could still flip on us.  I’m told that the bulk of the absentee ballots should be finished by the end of the week and at that point, we should have a clearer picture.

I want again to thank all the volunteer observers and our donors who have supported our legal team to assure that this count is fair and accurate.  We also are blessed with highly professional election divisions in the nine counties that comprise the district.

Our lead has again increased slightly today to 889 votes out of 313,609 now counted, giving us a margin of 28/100ths of one percent.  There are now an estimated 57,000 votes yet to be processed.  We are currently receiving 50.14 percent of the votes counted and need 49.22 percent of the remaining vote.  In short, this is still too close to call, but I’d rather be me than the other guy.

The only wrinkle in the count is that we still could lose as many as 1,500 votes out of Nevada County, but we are confident that this will be more than made up from the larger counties that I carried.  If Nevada’s numbers are reported first next week, don’t be surprised if we temporarily slip into negative territory until the much larger counties of El Dorado and Placer report.

My sincere thanks to all of you who have contributed to help us maintain a legal presence as the ballots are being processed, and to all of you who volunteered their time to help as election observers.

Your support and your prayers mean everything.  THANK YOU.

Here’s the latest on the vote count.  Today our lead increased slightly to 827 votes out of 312,693 cast.  Our best estimate is that there are just under 55,000 votes remaining to be counted.  We currently have 50.13 percent of the vote; we will need 49.25 percent of the remaining ballots to win the election.  The good news is that a precinct-by-precinct analysis of the remaining ballots leads us to believe that the overwhelming majority is from Republican strongholds, but as they say, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Tom McClintock issued the following statement:

November 5, 2008

I wish to thank everyone who voted in the Fourth Congressional District. I am gratified and thankful that my campaign emerged after election night with the lead. I have full confidence in the hard-working and dedicated election officials who are counting the remaining absentee and provisional votes.  I am confident that once the process is completed I will be the Representative for the Fourth Congressional District.