Incumbent Carol Mills has expanded her lead even further in her bid for re-election to the Fresno Unified School District's board of trustees, the Fresno County Elections Office reported Friday.
Mills now has a 425-vote lead over challenger Natalie Clark, the latest election results show. On Election Night, Mills led Clark by 294 votes, but that lead dropped to 132 votes the Friday after the election.
The elections office also announced that President-elect Barack Obama has regained the lead in Fresno County in a see-saw battle with Republican John McCain.
Initial returns from the election showed McCain with a 26-vote lead in Fresno County. Obama then was up by 360 votes before falling behind McCain by 411 votes. Obama now leads by 877 votes.
Since the election, officials have been tabulating some of the 40,000-50,000 absentee and provisional ballots that couldn't be counted on Election Day, Fresno County Clerk Victor Salazar said.
Still to be counted are about 18,000 provisional ballots and 3,000 that were somehow damaged -- torn or smudged, for instance -- and couldn't be read by the county's scanning machine. Those ballots must be reconstructed, Salazar said.
The deadline to certify the election is Dec. 2.
With Friday's update, the Fresno County turnout is now 65.87%. Salazar said the next update will be Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Danny Gilmore's lead over Fran Florez has shrunk -- but there might not be enough ballots left for Florez to catch up in the race for the Assembly District 30 seat.
A week ago Gilmore, a Republican, held a 2,419-vote lead over Florez, a Democrat. The spread is now 1,555.
But almost all the absentee ballots are counted. Florez's only hope is that thousands of provisional ballots are deemed good and that a majority go her way.
"We're just going to let this process play out," said her campaign manager, Bob Sanders. "The fact that Gilmore's lead has been chopped virtually in half is encouraging."
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