As of 7:25 p.m. Tuesday, November 9, the California Secretary of State is showing Steve Cooley 43,212 votes ahead in a 7.7 million vote race for Attorney General. As of 5:00 p.m. the same evening, there were 1.3 million unprocessed ballots remaining.  The unprocessed ballots are now about evenly divided between mail-in ballots and provisional ballots.  The mail-ins have tended to slightly favor Cooley, who has generally been inching up since election night, but the provisional ballots may well be different as a group.  In addition, we don't know how many of the provisional ballots will actually end up being counted.  By definition, a provisional ballot is one cast by a person who did not appear to be properly registered according to the records at the polling place.  Update Wed. 2:15:  Looks like a batch of ballots from Raider Nation have trimmed Cooley's lead to 9,555.

Meanwhile, two states north, Supreme Court Justice Richard "The Heckler" Sanders may not have been reelected after all.  Steve Miletich has this story in the Seattle Times.  (Thanks to notablogger for the tip.)

Update (and slightly off-topic): Even further north, the outcome of a US Senate race may depend on how picky the Alaska courts are about write-in voters' spelling, Sandhya Somashekhar reports for the WaPo.  We at CJLF have no position on this race, but as a member of long standing of the hard-to-spell fraternity, I have to sympathize with Sen. Murkowski. I suspect reporter Somashekhar does, too.