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One of the most closely contested statewide races in years hangs in the balance this afternoon.
State Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton) leads his colleague state Sen. Shemia Fagan (D-Portland) by 2,109 votes out of 518,707 votes cast in the race so far. That's a difference of just 0.44 percentage points.
That margin narrowed overnight. The race remains too close to call as there are still a substantial number of ballots to be counted.
WW contacted the elections offices in Oregon's largest five counties to ask how many ballots remain. The answers are not precise, but as of 2:30 pm Wednesday, here are their responses:
Clackamas County, 30,000; Washington County, 20,000; Marion County, 16,000; Multnomah County, 15,000; Lane County, 10,000. Unofficial total for those five counties: 91,000 ballots. Some of those will be added to the existing tallies at 5 or 6 pm today.
Elections workers are having to comply with social distancing requirements, which makes their jobs more difficult.
Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess adds that ballots remain outstanding because some were delivered to the wrong counties and must be transferred and some are unsigned or have non-matching signatures.
"We end up with hundreds of ballots that won't be counted because people forgot to sign the envelope," Burgess says. "We send them a letter after the election to get them to respond to have them counted. They have 14 days to do that."
Statewide and local elections results can be found here.