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The new political dawn for California is yet to fully emerge more than two days from the polls closing Tuesday.
However, Thursday’s sluggish ballot update did yielded modest jumps for candidates in both California’s governor’s race and the Los Angeles mayoral contest.
The slow-moving count is beginning to tighten California’s gubernatorial primary, where former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra slightly chipped away at frontrunner Steve Hilton’s lead.
He’s in second place with 26% of the vote, or 1,444,257 votes, trailing former Fox News host Steve Hilton, who leads the field with 27.2% of the vote, or 1,511,792 votes.
Billionaire liberal Tom Steyer remained in third place with 20.2% of the vote, or 1,122,789 votes, gaining about 65,000 votes in the latest count.
The picture was similarly static in Los Angeles, where another slow ballot drop brought only minor shifts in the mayoral race.
Spencer Pratt lost ground to Nithya Raman for second position and November runoff against Karen Bass from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, included 81,486 additional ballots.
That brings the total number counted to 1,477,473.
Pratt’s share of the vote fell from 29.91% to 29.35%, a decline of 0.56 percentage points.
Raman gained 0.61 percentage points, rising from 22.81% to 23.42%.
Bass also increased her share of the vote, climbing from 34.97% to 35.08%, a gain of 0.11 percentage points.
With hundreds of thousands of ballots still awaiting processing,The California Post visited the county’s 144,000-square-foot ballot processing facility Thursday and observed large sections of the operation sitting unused despite the sizable backlog.
Rows of workstations sat empty as election workers continued processing ballots.
More than 632,000 ballots remain to be counted, according to county estimates.
Over the past two days, Los Angeles County has only processed 159,007 ballots, a small fraction of the outstanding total.
Election officials have said ballot counting is expected to continue for days even weeks as workers verify signatures, review vote-by-mail ballots and process provisional and conditional voter registration ballots.
Additional ballot count updates are expected most week days around 4 p.m. until all eligible ballots have been processed and counted.
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