The last of the votes to be tallied in Virginia, prior to the certification deadline at 11:59pm ET tonight is done. With the Fairfax County provisional ballots optically-scanned and added to the totals, it appears that the Democratic candidate Mark Herring will be declared the “winner” for now, by just 163 votes — out of more than 2.2 million cast — over Republican Mark Obenshain. If Herring can maintain his extraordinarily slim lead throughout the almost-certain “recount”, he will become Virginia’s first Democratic Attorney General in twenty years, and his party will have swept all three top-ticket races in the state this year — Governor, Lt. Governor and AG. The final provisional tallies in Democratic-leaning Fairfax County resulted in 160 votes for Herring and 103 for Obenshain, a net 57 vote pickup. Barring any surprises in the next hour (there have been plenty of twists and turns in this nail-biter over the past week since the election – see related coverage below), the final tally before the full state certification process begins as of Midnight Tuesday night will be Herring: 1,103,778 – Obenshain: 1,103,615.
Herring and state Democrats are now declaring themselves the winner of the contest. For his part, the Obenshain campaign has issued the following statement…
“At this stage, we are in the closest statewide election in Virginia history. The State Board of Elections currently estimates a difference of fewer than 200 votes out of more than 2 million cast. That’s less than 1/100th of a percent difference. With the completion of the canvass of local boards, we have finished two of the three automatic steps of vote counting. The State Board of Elections will now conduct its own review, scheduled to be complete November 25th. We owe it to the people of Virginia to make sure we get it right, and that every legitimate vote is counted and subject to uniform rules. We have seen significant swings in the vote count over the last several days as errors are corrected as a part of the regular canvass process. The State Board of Elections will not conduct its own review and we will await their results. I thank our dedicated election officials who have put in long hours and given great care to their duty. We will make further announcements in the days ahead.”