GOP’s Daucher opens 138-vote lead in race for O.C. state Senate seat

With the fight over an Orange County state Senate seat far from decided, Republican Lynn Daucher widened her lead over Democrat Lou Correa to 138 votes Wednesday as election officials continued counting ballots in one of the most expensive legislative races in the state.

The initial count early Wednesday morning showed Daucher, an assemblywoman from Brea, 13 votes ahead of Correa, a former assemblyman now serving on the county Board of Supervisors. But as absentee and provisional ballots were counted, her lead grew to 50.1% to 49.9%. Nearly 1,000 additional ballots were counted Wednesday.

Both sides appeared to be girding for a protracted fight, and it remained unclear when the count would be completed, or if the loser would demand a recount. Brett Rowley, a spokesman for the county registrar, said 160,000 absentee ballots remained uncounted countywide, as well as an additional 21,000 ballots given to people on a provisional basis until their voter status can be verified.

Both candidates offered cautious comments about the race. “I’m happy with the position I’m in, but I’ll wait till the end,” Daucher said.

Correa said: “You have to be respectful to each and every voter, so until every vote is counted, you can’t assume an election is one way or another.”

Highlighting the stakes in the central Orange County race, the state Democratic and Republican parties sent their top lawyers to oversee the count. The attorneys and campaign workers from both sides spent much of Wednesday hunched over computer screens in the county registrar’s Santa Ana warehouse monitoring signature verification on absentee ballots and any unusual markings on ballots the computers rejected.

Campaign workers from both sides were required to wear tags identifying them as monitors; the Daucher campaign tags were gold; the Correa tags were white.

In one instance, officials ruled that a vote could be tallied for Daucher even though the voter wrote the Republican’s name on the ballot rather than checking the box next to her name. In another instance, Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley ruled that a vote could be tallied for Correa even though the voter initially checked Daucher’s box but then covered it with white-out.

A wild card in the race is the impact of a last-minute Republican write-in candidate backed by Democrats. Rowley said the vote tally for Santa Ana businessman Otto Bade would not be known until all ballots were counted.

An independent expenditure committee that campaigned on behalf of Correa spent more than $90,000 on mailers and phone banks for Bade. Correa said he had no involvement in Bade’s campaign. By law, independent expenditure committees cannot coordinate with candidates they support.

The 34th state Senate District, which covers parts of Santa Ana, Anaheim and Garden Grove, has been a Democratic beachhead in Republican-dominated Orange County for a decade, since the election of Joe Dunn to the seat in 1998 over incumbent Republican Rob Hurtt. Dunn, who could not run again because of term limits, lost in the Democratic primary for controller. But Democrats’ registration advantage in the area has waned, and the GOP briefly gained an edge earlier this year after an aggressive registration drive. As of last month, Democrats had regained an advantage of less than 3%.

Democrats hold 25 of the 40 seats in the state Senate, and the loss of one caucus member will not affect the outcome of most votes. But if it changes hands, it could make it more difficult for Democrats to gather the 27 votes needed to pass spending bills, as well as give Republicans bragging rights for having picked up a Democrat-held seat.

The two sides, and independent expenditure committees backing the candidates, raised more than $6.6 million combined on the race, according to filings earlier this week.

Meanwhile, Correa supporters complained that a polling place in Democratic Santa Ana was understaffed, requiring voters to wait in line for as long as two hours to cast their ballots. Rowley acknowledged some faced a long wait but said the office hadn’t received complaints.

christian.berthelsen@

latimes.com