Tacherra still hanging on to lead over Costa in 16th District

Johnny Tacherra added five votes to his narrow 16th Congressional District lead over Jim Costa after a wild day of ups and downs as county elections offices updated their vote counts on Friday.

The 16th Congressional District felt like a roller coaster as Madera County updated around 2 p.m., followed by Fresno at 3 and Merced a little after 5. The 16th District makes up all of Merced and parts of Madera and Fresno counties.

Madera’s update pushed Republican Tacherra’s lead – 736 on election night – to 1,775. But then Fresno, which is the heart of Democrat Costa’s power, updated its count and suddenly Tacherra’s lead had shrunk to just 78 votes. After Merced made its update, Tacherra’a lead was 741. So, at day’s end, Tacherra had picked up five votes.

“We’re still in the up column,” said Tacherra, a dairy farmer from Burrel in southern Fresno County. “We’ll have to see what happens here, but we’ve been hanging in so far.”

The key is what happens from this point forward.

Madera has 722 provisional ballots left to count, and Merced has 1,505 provisional ballots left. As before, Fresno County remains the question mark. Officials do not know how many of the 20,400 ballots to count are from the 16th District. Whatever the amount, they are sure to benefit Costa, who won close to two-thirds of the votes counted since Election Day in Fresno County. The unknown is if there are enough to erase Tacherra’s lead.

Costa, who has been a state and federal elected official for 34 years and is seeking his sixth congressional term, said he expected the race to tighten after Fresno County updated its vote count. It is a trend he expects to continue.

“We look forward to counting all the votes next week and we expect that we will be going back to Washington,” Costa said.

This story was originally published November 9, 2014 at 4:29 PM with the headline "Tacherra still hanging on to lead over Costa in 16th District."