John McCann leads Steve Padilla by two votes in Chula Vista's City Council Seat 1 race.
San Diego County Registrar of Voters Michael Vu said all ballots in the race have now been rescanned and checked, but stressed that election results will not be certified until Dec. 2.
After all votes were counted last week, the two candidates were tied. Then the San Diego County Registrar of Voters began manually counting ballots.
Vu said the update came after double-checking the number of ballots counted.
"There were discrepancies from what we scanned versus what was issued," he said. "When we looked at it, we said the only way we'd be able to get an accurate count is to back up those precincts and rerun the ballots through the system to get to the accurate count."
Vu said the same ballots may have been scanned more than once, or some ballots may not have been scanned. He said scanning all of the ballots again creates the updated count.
Vu said Tuesday's update included all ballots cast at polling places, including provisional ballots, and Wednesday's update included mail-in ballots. He said there were four mail-in ballots from Chula Vista that were counted twice, so Wednesday's count included the correct number of ballots.
"When we initially scanned, we scanned in too many," he said. "There were four situations where we scanned in the same ballot more than once, so we have to back out those ballots and rerun the whole box to get to that correct number."
In a statement sent out after the vote update, Padilla wrote, "If this race does in fact come down to a handful of votes, I believe a recount will be necessary to determine the outcome."
