Brown up, Pier down, at the moment

Sonoma County Supervisor District 1 – an important job for the residents of Sonoma Valley, and a well-paying job for the successful candidate. Watching the election returns Tuesday evening, while her lead hovered at 1,000 votes and her share never dipped below 51 percent, incumbent Valerie Brown claimed victory on Wednesday morning.
Challenger Will Pier has not been so eager to concede, commenting as the last precinct’s votes were announced about 5 hours after the polls had closed that he still believed he would win, once the additional ballots were counted. The County Registrar of Voters reports there are some 30,000 of these additional ballots still be counted: absentee ballots that were dropped off at polling places on Election Day, and provisional ballots, from voters not appearing on the rolls at the polling place they visited.
How many of those affect the District 1 voting? They won’t know that till they count them.
But some indication comes from the fact that the total of the votes cast last Tuesday in this race, plus the absentee ballots sent in by the mail deadline, totaled 40,817, which is about 20 percent of the 197,824 votes cast countywide. So of the 30,000 to be counted in the whole county, perhaps 6,000 would be for District 1. And of those, Pier would need to have over 59 percent voting for him, in order to overcome the 1,105-vote deficit.
Possible? Certainly. Probable? The registrar’s office has 30 days to complete its work, but expects to have the final tally in half that time.