Several races in Santa Clara County were still neck-and-neck Wednesday, with just a handful of votes making a difference, bringing up the question: Will there be recounts?
Recounts are rare but they do happen, especially with really close and high-stake races. With races so close and more than 240,000 ballots left to count in Santa Clara County, they may take days to resolve.
“In particularly tight races, two, three, four, five points, even with half the votes or close to it out. You better believe it. There could be changes,” said NBC Bay Area political analyst Larry Gerston.
As of Wednesday night, a mayoral race for the city of Santa Clara showed a one-point difference between incumbent Lisa Gillmor and challenger Anthony Becker.
Gerston calls it a "virtual tie" and a race where an automatic recount is possible.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen over the next few days because there is just so many votes, and again, we don’t know from where. A candidate can choose to pay for a recount, but it's quite expensive,” he said.
Santa Clara County’s Registrar of Voters said automatic recounts happen only when the margin of victory is less than a quarter of 1%.
“I think it's rare because there's a lot of people that vote. So, 25, or 0.0025, is a really tight race. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, were prepared for it,” said Evelyn Mendez, Public and Legislative Affairs Manager for the Registrar of Voters.
If the race is countywide or citywide then the recount is conducted by a tabulation machine. Otherwise, it's done manually and can take anywhere from two to four weeks.
“They’ll pull the ballots for that contest, and there’s four people that sit together. They don’t tell them what the results are. So we say 'so, precinct 10.' Two people will count literally say 'one for you, one for this person' and someone will literally tally it. It has to match the other person and the results,” Mendez said.
And if they don’t match, that process starts all over again.
But experts told NBC Bay Area Wednesday that they really don’t expect to see a recount this election.
