GOP challenger Martha McSally has once again taken the lead over Congressman Ron Barber—this time, by 36 votes. McSally has 125,223; Barber has 125,187. That’s McSally with 49.92 percent of the vote and Barber with 49.90 percent.
A congressional election doesn’t get much closer than this, folks. Every time Pima County runs through a batch of ballots, Barber takes the lead; every time Cochise County counts a batch of ballots, McSally takes the lead. It’s kind of like watching a football game at this point. Or maybe a football game with a really long overtime.
At any rate, we think the race will come down to Pima County’s provisional ballots—and those are a real mystery because so many people were mysteriously missing from the voter rolls that there’s no good model to work from with the provisionals.
We don’t have a firm number of how many ballots are left to count, but we’ll continue to post updates as they become available.
(BTW, we’re sorry we didn’t post this last night, but we were at the Loft Film Festival for most of the night. Be sure to check out a film there today or tomorrow—the line-up is diverse and spectacular, and the new theater is fantatic!)
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2012.
We still have our fingers and toes crossed for Barber. I understand that the remaining votes to be counted tend toward Barber. Long live Gabby’s legacy in Barber.
True, Barber has carried the early vote by a good margin. The only problem for him though, at this point, is that most of the early ballots have been counted, and he’s still neck and neck with McSally. That leaves the provisional ballots, which really are in the same category as polling-place ballots on election day. McSally easily carried those. The real point here though is that Barber should be ahead right now with his supposed early vote strength. He isn’t, however. The fact that Cochise county still has roughly 8,000 ballots to report doesn’t bode well for Barber either. We’ll just have to wait and see.
its time to get an intelligent forward looking individual to represent us not a recycled staffer who could not get elected without the spectre of that horrible day.
It is time to get our gd vote count in order.
Look at todays paper. The voting roster was not in Alphabetical order ???
What are we? Flordia????
I suspect the legitimacy of this entire election process, at local, state and national level. On Tuesday morning when we went into vote our precinct was being run like a sideshow… people not even registered to vote were being handed ballots… political literature actually IN the voting booth… when confronted the stupid polling workers said that ‘everyone’ has a right to vote… weren’t they trained? didn’t they read the book? it was sitting right there at the sign in desk.
whos ahead ?