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After one full day of vote-counting, Democratic Congressman Ron Barber’s lead over Republican challenger Martha McSally increased by just 55 votes.
Although McSally could definitely pull out a victory, she’s running out of uncounted ballots that could potentially help her nix Barber’s lead of 709 votes.
See also:
–Ron Barber Currently Leading Martha McSally by a Grand Total of 654 Votes
–Ron Barber Now Leads Martha McSally
–Ken Bennett Says 192,337 Ballots Left
–Gabrielle Giffords’ Aide Ron Barber Elected to Fill Former Congresswoman’s Seat
McSally was pretty heavily favored by voters in Cochise County, but there are two problems with that, from McSally’s side: less than 20 percent of CD-2 voters live in Cochise County, and the county has also counted every ballot.
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Thus, McSally’s done landing votes from a county where she landed nearly six-in-10.
That leaves the rest in Pima County, and Secretary of State Ken Bennett reported yesterday that 1,550 early ballots remained to be counted there, along with 27,000 provisional ballots.
With that, it looks like Barber may have the advantage here, with Cochise County done. Barber’s scored about 9,300 more votes in Pima County than McSally has.
Obviously, no one knows what’s sitting in those remaining 28,550 uncounted votes at this point, but remember that a decent amount of Pima County voters are in CD-1 and CD-3, so a chunk of those votes will go to races that have been called for Democrats Ann Kirkpatrick and Congressman Raul Grijalva.
The deadline to finish the counts is on Friday — which is pretty much a soft deadline — so we might be able to wrap this thing up tomorrow.
As we’ve mentioned before, whether Arizona sends more Democrats or Republicans to the House of Representatives depends on the winner of this race.
You can stare at people counting ballots in Pima County by clicking on the live video feed here.
