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Oakland Mayor Vote Count To Drag On For Days

OAKLAND (KCBS) - Elections officials in Alameda County began their day early again Tuesday, tasked with counting several thousand more provisional ballots. Oakland's mayoral race was still considered too close to call. But, that didn't stop one candidate from talking about a possible transition of power.

KCBS' Chris Filippi Reports:

Elections officials had to validate the provisional ballots, which meant checking the names and addresses on each one. That was a task that could take days.

"Most of my staff has not had a day off in probably four weeks and we've been working 10 or 12 hours a day simply because there are so many ballots to process," said Alameda County registrar of voters Dave McDonald. "I'm anticipating that we'll process every single ballot in the next few days. So I don't want to give an exact date but certainly for the mayor's race, that won't be much longer."

Unofficial ranked choice totals, not including provisional ballot results, gave city councilwoman Jean Quan a 2 point lead over former state senate president pro tem, Don Perata.

"If I win, I'll have less than two months to build a new administration and get going on day one. The longer we wait, the less time I have to work to do that," she said. "I think we're going to have to look at what the budget looks like, what the state finally does, what the recession continues to do. But it's pretty clear that we won't have to lay off any more (police) officers."

A Perata spokesperson said there would be no comment until the final results were announced.

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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