Kamala Harris and Steve Cooley, the major party candidates seeking election as the next Attorney General of the State of California, await the count of more than 2.3 million unprocessed ballots, including over 1.7 million absentee / vote-by-mail ballots, more than 500,000 provisional ballots, as well as damaged and other ballots to determine the outcome of the November 2, 2010 election.
Democrat Harris, the District Attorney of San Francisco, surprised many political insiders by holding a lead of 14,838 votes after 100% of precincts had reported the day after the election. Polls which had shown a significant lead for Cooley in September had tightened as the election drew near. The L.A. Times / U.S.C. poll, taken in mid-October, showed Republican Cooley with a five-point lead statewide, and a nine-point lead in traditionally-Democratic L.A. County, where Cooley is in his third term as District Attorney. A Field Poll taken later in October showed a dead heat -- with Cooley ahead among "likely voters" by one percent. By election day, Democrat Harris had made up her deficit in Los Angeles County, and currently holds a nearly 14 percentage-point lead over the local D.A.
Los Angeles County had reported over 400,000 unprocessed votes after the initial count from precincts had been completed; just over 100,000 of those ballots have been processed; between Harris and Cooley, Harris received 44,623 of those votes (51.48%), while Cooley received 42,053 (48.52%). Harris is likely disappointed in this breakdown; with close to 240,000 votes initially uncounted ballots in conservative Orange and San Diego Counties, where Cooley did extremely well on election night, Harris needs a boast from the L.A. County's uncounted votes to have a good chance of prevailing in the final vote count. (While there are significant numbers of uncounted ballots in Harris strongholds in the San Francisco Bay area where she ran extremely well, their numbers could be dwarfed by the larger Southern California counties.)
Over 500,000 of the 2.3 million previously uncounted votes have now been counted, and Steve Cooley has a 24,276 vote lead over Kamala Harris (46% to 45.7%). From watching county reporting status updates, it appears that a disproportionate percentage of the ballots counted have come from conservative counties -- Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, where Cooley is expected to do very well.
The Kamala Harris campaign has put out a call for volunteers (and particularly lawyers and law students) to observe the counting of the outstanding ballots. The Cooley campaign also states that they are monitoring the vote count, and have legal counsel on standby to respond to developments.
This race looks likely to take weeks or longer to reach resolution. We'll try to keep you updated here.
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