With new vote tallies released this afternoon by Ventura, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties, Republican Tony Strickland's lead over Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson has shrunk to 903 votes.

But elections officials tell my colleagues (I'm off this week) that only a few hundred ballots remain. The race may now belong to Strickland.

It's possible he will be able to claim the seat in time to take the oath on Monday when other new members of the Legislature are sworn in. However, Democratic Party officials will have to decide whether a .02 percent margin is close enough that it's worth forking over a million bucks or so for a recount.

Meanwhile, in the Legislature's other election cliff-hanger, in an Assembly race south of Sacramento, Democrat Alyson Huber, who had trailed Republican Jack Sieglock since election night, surged to an unexpected lead and is now the apparent winner in that race. If that is the case, Democrats will hold 51 seats in the Assembly, three short of a two-thirds majority. In the Senate, the outcome of the Strickland-Jackson race will make the difference between 25 or 26 Democratic Senate seats -- either two seats or one shy of a two-thirds majority.

Camarillo businessman Jeff Gorell, who announced his intent to run for the 37th Assembly District in 2010 even while the 2008 campaign was underway, will kick off his fundraising with a holiday party in Lake Sherwood on Dec. 4.

The Republican hopeful may benefit from the fact that state Democrats made a run against incumbent Audra Strickland (who will be termed out in 2010) this fall. Although Strickland won with relative comfort (about 6 percentage points), the fact that Democrats put money into the contest makes it more likely that Republicans will start funding Gorell early.

Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson got what she needed yesterday when the first round of provisional ballots were tabulated in Santa Barbara County. She won 65 percent of those votes, carving 700 off Republican Tony Strickland's lead in the nail-biting 19th Senate District contest.

On the flip side, Jackson may be running out of ballots. There are only about 3,000 more provisionals in Santa Barbara County, meaning that if Jackson does as well in the second batch as she did the first, she could pick up another 700 votes or so.

That would still leave Strickland with a 1,000-vote lead.

Ventura County started counting the first of its 14,000 provisional ballots yesterday. Jackson would need to win those by 7 or 8 percentage points to stay in the game. In order for that to happen, a big chunk of those provisionals will have to be from first-time voters who registered late in the process -- and did so because they wanted to vote for Barack Obama.

There are still a whole lot of "if's" involved, but so far the vote-counting is playing out as Jackson consultant Parke Skelton said needed to happen for his candidate to have a chance: Strickland's lead had to be 2,500 or less (it got up to 2,400 and change) after the late vote-by-mail ballots had been tallied.

The advantage at this point is clearly Strickland's, but don't be surprised if the final margin of victory -- for either candidate -- is less than 500.

Assemblyman Pedro Nava, just re-elected to his third and last term in the Assembly, has had his sights on a campaign for attorney general in 2010. It seems a given that Jerry Brown will give up that post to run for governor, and Nava has some credentials that would make him a viable candidate: a solid reputation in the Legislature and a background as a deputy district attorney.

However, Nava's calculations might have been based on the hope that San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, one of President-elect Barack Obama's earliest and most committed California supporters, would seek a job in the Obama administration.

Instead, Harris announced last week she will be a candidate for California attorney general if Brown vacates the post. Harris may have some liabilities -- she's from San Francisco, and some in the law enforcement community will never forgive her for not seeking the death penalty in a police-officer killing -- but she also has the formidable strength of being a Friend of Barack.

There are likely only a few candidates around the country who earned enough good will in the Obama campaign to get the benefit of Obama's vast e-mail list of supporters and contributors for a 2010 campaign. But given Harris' role in the campaign, she could very well be one.

With vote count updates released by Ventura, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties today, Republican Tony Strickland has taken a lead that, while not quite decisive, is certainly commanding. Strickland is now up 2,141 votes over Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson.

Jackson's camp still believes it can make up 2,000 or more votes from the pool of about 15,000 provisional ballots, but Strickland's lead may be now pressing the outside of the envelope of what Jackson can make up.

The results so far validate a redistricting decision made in 2001. The first maps of the district, approved by the Senate Elections Committee, included the Santa Clara River Valley in Ventura County. But some GOP insiders suspected the district as it first existed wasn't quite Republican enough to ensure a GOP victory. As a result, Santa Paula and Fillmore were sliced out of and a sliver of Los Angeles County that was rich in Republican voters was pasted on.

So here's how that worked out. In 2008, Jackson is up by nearly 2,000 votes in the main portion of the district in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. But Strickland is up by more than 4,000 (out of only about 27,000 total votes) in Los Angeles County.

As most of you must have noticed by now, Ventura County voters kept up their remarkable string of being in sync with the rest of the nation in presidential voting. Unlike four years ago, however, they didn't get the percentage exactly right.

The national popular vote now stands at 53 percent for Barack Obama, 46 percent for John McCain. The Ventura County vote was close to that: 55 percent to 43 percent, or slightly more Democratic than the nation at large.

That means Ventura County has now voted for the winner in all but one presidential election over the last 68 years, so expect more media coverage of the county's bellwether status in 2012...

One more thing: I will be speaking about the election results tonight at the GOOD Club (the Greater Oxnard Organization of Democrats). The meeting begins at 7 at the Cafe at A, 438 South A Street in Downtown Oxnard. I can't promise a great speech, but I do know from past experience that the question-and-answer sessions with this group can get pretty lively.

As vote counting continued in the nerve-wracking 19th Senate District contest today (Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson retook a slight lead today, about 250 votes), issues crop up that make you realize this vote-counting business is more complicated than most of us ever imagine.

Here's a situation that Santa Barbara County Chief Deputy Registrar of Voters Billie Alvarez told me about today that has happened more than once in her county:

Every vote-by-mail ballot is individually coded when sent to voters. In some households there are multiple vote-by-mail voters, such as a husband and wife. What happens if they get their envelopes mixed up? What if he puts his ballot in her envelope and vice versa?

The first thing that happens is the clerk who intially reviews the ballot sets it aside. The code on the envelope says this should be John Jones ballot, but that's not his signature. Same thing happens with Mary Jones' ballot.

Later, when elections supervisors review all the rejected mail-in ballots, they discover the problem.

Should they count the votes? What if the two people are not husband and wife, or even related, but simply roommates? If they were your votes, would you want them to be counted?

In the end, that's why there are still some judgment calls involved. And why, it seems nearly inevitable, that some judges are going to be called upon to make some voting decisions before the final outcome is decided.

The high-priced help from the state Democratic and Republican parties -- attorneys and election-law experts -- flooded to the Ventura County Government Center today to oversee clerks as they sorted through the ballots yet to be counted in the 19th District Senate race. That's the one in which Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson and Republican Tony Strickland are separated by 108 votes, to Jackson's slight advantage.

I observed for a half-hour or so this afternoon, and it had all the excitement of watching insurance underwriters crunch actuarial tables. As the clerks went through their tedious but essential task of checking the signature on each mail-in ballot against the digitized version of the voter's signature on their computer screens, three or four people hovered just outside their cubicles. It was hard not to feel sorry for them -- who likes to work with someone looking over your shoulder?

During the time I watched, there were only two abnormal events. A junior clerk asked a more senior associate to take a second look at one signature, which was confirmed because the loops and slants of the voter's signature matched, even though the signatures were not identical. In a second instance, a ballot was set aside because it was not signed.

Deputy Registrar of Voters Tracy Saucedo told me that elections officials are careful not to play "gotcha" with voters over their signatures, since those can change as a result of aging or disability. If a signature includes similar loops, slants and other graphic qualities, Saucedo said her staff's instructions are to liberally apply the matching-standard so as not to disenfranchise a voter.

Democrats righteously -- and appropriately -- complain every election season when there are attempts by Republicans to suppress votes, typically in minority communities. This happened most famously in California in the mid-1990s when Orange County Republicans hired menacing security guards to stand outside of polling places in Latino communities.

But on Tuesday night around the state, some Democratic-leaning group, perhaps a labor union, put out thousands of automated phone calls to Republican voters in targeted legislative districts. The calls were placed about 5:30 p.m. and were designed to discourage Republicans from going out to polling places in the evening to cast a vote.

The calls were identified as "breaking news" and informed GOP voters of the election news that was coming in from the East Coast: Barack Obama was well on his way to a presidential landslide victory and Democrats were registering big gains in Congress. The implied message: It's all over, your vote won't make any difference, so why not just stay home and have a beer.

A number of these calls were placed to voters in Ventura County, designed to suppress Republican turnout in the critical 19th Senate District. GOP candidate Tony Strickland told me yesterday that his phone bankers had to work furiously to try to counteract the effect of those robo-calls.

Voter suppression can work both ways, and is just as repugnant from either side.

With 108 votes separating them out of more than 306,000 cast, obviously this 19th District Senate contest between Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson and Republican Tony Strickland is a long way from over.

There are tens of thousands of vote yet to be counted -- indeed, if turnout is to reach the 80 percent projections, there would have to be 100,000 votes outstanding.

What votes remain to be counted, when will they be counted, and will there be a recount?

Let's take the answers one at a time.

1) Elections officials have processed and counted mail-in ballots that were delivered in the mail through last Friday. All ballots that were delivered via mail on Saturday, Monday and yesterday have not been counted. To these, add all the mail-in ballots that were dropped off at voting precincts yesterday. Finally, add all provisional ballots that were cast. These are the votes that will now determine the outcome.

Provisional ballots are cast by voters who showed up at the polls and, for some reason or another, weren't on the rolls. Ventura County Clerk-Recorder Philip Schmit told me last night that there was an unusually high number of provisional ballots cast yesterday.

2) The tallying of the outstanding ballots won't begin until tomorrow or Friday at the earliest, Schmit said. The process could take two weeks.

3) California law requires an automatic recount of 10 percent of the ballots in any contest in which the outcome is within half a percentage point. If the contest remains within that margin after the first 10 percent of ballots are recounted, then another 10 percent are recounted, and so on.

It could be a long night for those watching returns in the 19th Senate District, so here are some clues on things to keep an eye out for:

SANTA BARBARA -- In recent elections, Santa Barbara County has been among the first in the state to report complete returns. So the vote tallies here should provide the first strong clues as to how the race is going.

Democrats lead Republicans in this portion of the district by 13.4 percentage points. Democrat Hannah-Beth Jackson has to run up the score in this county to hold off Republican Tony Strickland in the GOP-dominated Ventura and Los Angeles County portions of the district. Jackson needs to run better than the party registration advantage. That would mean she is getting the benefit of a Democratic voter turnout surge, and would also mean that she is winning a majority of independents, who make up 19 percent of the district's electorate in Santa Barbara County. If Jackson is winning in her home county by 15 percentage points or more, it will bode well for her.

Conversely, if Strickland trails by 13 points or less, that could be an early indicator of success for him.

VENTURA COUNTY -- Traditionally, what used to be called absentee votes (now called vote-by-mail ballots) in Ventura County have had a GOP tilt. The Republican voter registration edge in the Ventura County portion of the district is 5 percentage points. If history is to hold, Strickland needs a lead among mail-in voters of greater than that. These will be the first results released tonight, probably around 8:20 or 8:30. A Strickland lead of more than 7 points in that first batch would be good news for him.

LOS ANGELES COUNTY -- This is Strickland's secret weapon. Even though L.A. County voters account for only 7 percent of the district, Republicans hold an 11 percent voter registration edge here. If the combined effect of the Democratic edge in Santa Barbara County and the Republican edge in Ventura County is a wash, the L.A. County results could put Strickland over the top. Traditionally, L.A. County is among the last in the state to report complete results.

Coming down to Ventura County for Election Day coverage this morning, I ran into former Speaker Fabian Nunez on the plane from Sacramento. I asked him how many seats he thought Democrats would pick up in the Assembly today.

"Four to six," he said.

After I arched my eyebrows a bit, he revised the assessment.

"Realistically, three to four."

The difference between the optimistic forecast and the realistic one will make all the difference in Ventura County's contested 37th Assembly District. If incumbent Republican Audra Strickland were to lose that race to Democrat Ferial Masry, it would likely mean a turnout scenario in which Democrats pick up a half-dozen seats.

If Democratic gains are limited to three or four, a Ventura County upset would likely not be among them.

Erin Brockovich, the law clerk who gained fame and stature in the environmental community after her role in a water-pollution lawsuit against PG&E was celebrated in a movie that used her name as its title, gave Republican state Senate candidate Tony Strickland a big boost early in the campaign when she publicly endorsed him. Strickland used the Brockovich endorsement prominently in TV ads and campaign mailers.

Now, late in the campaign, Brockovich wants voters to know that she thinks highly of Demcorat Hannah-Beth Jackson, too.

I had obtained an e-mail Brockovich sent to an associate last week, but declined to use it until she verified it and gave permission to use it. Today, I heard back from her, and she consented to reporting her statement. So here's what Erin Brockovich now has to say:

"I want to make certain that people know that I have a great deal of respect for Hannah-Beth Jackson and her work in the state Legislature.

"She has been a leading champion in the fight to get toxics and carcinogens out of our air and drinking water.

"I believe that Hannah-Beth Jackson would be an outstanding state senator."

It's a little late in the game for Brockovich's statement to change anyone's thinking, but for anyone out there whose vote was going to be swayed by Brockovich's judgment ... well, know that she's at least conflicted.