Democratic Congressman Scott Peters grabbed the lead over Republican Carl DeMaio in new vote totals just posted online by the San Diego County registrar of voters. The candidates are fighting for San Diego's 52nd Congressional District seat, but their race is still too close to call.
UPDATE - there are roughly 28,000 absentee ballots left to count. If we win by same margin as AV votes, we retake the lead.
— Carl DeMaio (@carldemaio) November 7, 2014
Peters is now up by 861 votes. On election night, DeMaio was up by 752 votes.
Registrar of Voters Michael Vu estimated Thursday that about 39,000 ballots from the 52nd District are still to be counted.
The update posted on Thursday includes the count of mail-in ballots received Monday night and Tuesday morning, as well as some mail-in ballots that were dropped off at polling places on Tuesday, Vu said. The registrar also needs to count provisional ballots and the remainder of mail-in ballots dropped off at polling places.
Vu said he hopes to be finished with all ballots from the 52nd District by Saturday and will likely post updates from those counts online at 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
MaryAnne Pintar, Peters' campaign manager, said Thursday that the campaign expected DeMaio to maintain his lead over Peters in Thursday's update, because its count includes mail-in ballots, and she said more Republicans vote by mail.
She said she expected Peters to take the lead over DeMaio only once provisional ballots were counted.
When asked what he expected to see in Thursday's vote update, DeMaio campaign spokesman Dave McCulloch wrote in an email: "More results."
In an email to supporters after Thursday's update, DeMaio wrote: "Today 12703 more votes were counted. We do NOT know which zip codes and areas these votes came from, but we believe they were not friendly areas since we now trail by 861 votes."
He wrote that if he won the absentee ballots counted on Friday "by the same margin we won the other absentee ballots (51.8%), we retake the lead to win."
