In the 11th Congressional district … incumbent Democrat Jerry McNerney and Republican challenger David Harmer remained within barely more than 100 votes of each other. With up to 30,000 absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted, it could be weeks before a winner is declared.

The outcome of the fiercely contested 11th Congressional District race remained a nail-biter … tens of thousands of vote-by-mail and provisional ballots have yet to be counted.

County election officials were scrambling … to begin the laborious process of verifying and counting the large number of remaining vote-by-mail and provisional ballots, a task that could take a week or longer.

Contra Costa Registrar of Voters Steve Weir estimated that his office has 100,000 outstanding ballots, including at least 12,500 in the 11th District. By comparison, Contra Costa has counted roughly 227,000 ballots.

Santa Clara County reported roughly 135,000 uncounted ballots, and San Joaquin County reported 35,000 ballots to process. Alameda County was still compiling its countywide estimates.

Election officials typically stop counting vote-by-mail ballots a day or two before Election Day in order to prepare for precinct operations. When the Election Day tallies are done, they process the vote-by-mail ballots that arrived in the mail over the weekend, Monday and Tuesday plus the VBMs dropped off at the polls on Election Day.

With the growing numbers of VBM voters and their tendency to drop them off at the polls, it drives up processing time. VBM ballots must be checked for valid signatures, stripped from their envelopes, manually rolled to remove the tri-fold creases and hand-fed into scanners. It takes a lot longer to count VBM ballots than the ballots filled out at precincts, which are fed directly into optical scanners.

For McNerney, it was clear that Election Day voters broke in the Democrat’s direction. Harmer was leading by 3 or more percentage points after the first wave of early vote-by-mail ballot counts were posted.

That gap slowly closed as Election Day counts emerged. If the trend continues as election official [sic] count the remaining ballots, McNerney’s lead could expand and he could keep his seat. Democrats poured wads of cash into anti-Harmer ads in the 11th District in the final week, which probably spurred their voters to show up at the polls.

On the other hand, Harmer did well among early VBM voters, and it is possible that he could recover his equilibrium among the later VBM voters, particularly in San Joaquin County. Harmer held a 5 percentage point lead in San Joaquin, where 53.9 percent of District 11 voters live.

A third party spoiler, Tracy's David Christensen of the conservative American Independent Party, has 8,809 or 5.1% … It would appear that Harmer would have won had Christensen not been in the race.