California 11th CD: Harmer sues, race still undecided

The hotly contested race for California’s 11th congressional district is up for grabs, and Republican David Harmer is suing Contra Costa County over its method of verifying ballots. McNerney has widened his lead from an election night margin of 121 votes.

****Emergency Need for Registered Republicans: Help in the Recount Effort and make sure that the Harmer Election is not stolen.****

Your help is needed to monitor the Election Ballot Recount effort by Election Department workers, for the Harmer-McNerney CD11 Congressional Race. This effort starts tomorrow, Thursday November 4, and continues every day for as long as it takes to recount some 50,000 Absentee Ballots; at the Registrar of Voters offices in Santa Clara County, Alameda County, San Joaquin County, and Contra Costa County. You will watch the workers to insure that fraud does not take place.

Schedule which county, days, and times that you can work. Contact Chris Del Beccaro at Harmer HQ by calling 925-415-1178, and leave a message if need be. Harmer staff will monitor this phone number between 9 am and 9 pm every day. You may also email to chris@harmerforcongress.com.

The most important need is to staff the Santa Clara County and Alameda County offices, where we need to schedule 10 to 15 people for each office. We need ten people at the San Joaquin County office and ten at the Contra Costa County office. The San Joaquin County recount effort does not start until next Monday, November 8.

These offices are located at:
Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, 1555 Berger Drive, Building 2, San Jose
Alameda County Registrar of Voters, 1225 Fallon Street, Oakland
San Joaquin Registrar of Voters, 44 N San Joaquin Street, Suite 350, Stockton
Contra Costa Registrar of Voters, 555 Escobar Street, Martinez

Text of Harmer’s latest email update-he sounds pretty optimistic:

Nationwide, ten elections for the U.S. House of Representatives remain unresolved. Ours is one of them. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online identifies the margins in all ten.

When will we know the outcome? ABC News 10 reports:

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.

Lisa Vorderbrueggen of the Contra Costa Times provides more detail:

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.

In a blog post, Vorderbrueggen explains why so many uncounted ballots remain:

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.

She also outlines why both campaigns express optimism:

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.

As an aside, Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle notes that the anti-incumbent vote was split:

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.

Don’t be unduly concerned by short-term fluctuations in the vote totals. At this point, it appears that counting will proceed more rapidly in the counties where McNerney was stronger. We expect to more than make up the difference as counting proceeds in our strongholds.

I’ll keep you posted as developments occur. Our objective remains to ensure that every legitimate vote is accurately counted. Thank you for your continued encouragement and support.

Yours truly,

David Harmer

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