The highly contentious race for Cook County State's Attorney grew even tighter on Sunday as election officials in both Chicago and suburban Cook County processed additional mail-in ballots.
As of 6:50 p.m., Eileen O'Neill Burke maintained a slim lead of 2,015 votes over Clayton Harris.
Updated totals showed O'Neill Burke with 259,445 votes and 50.20% of ballots cast compared to Harris' 257,430 votes and 49.80%. However, a total of 3,500 mail-in ballots still had yet to be counted - 2,500 in the city and 1,000 in suburban Cook County, officials said.
A day earlier, O'Neill Burke held a greater edge over Harris, with an additional 4,771 votes. At that point, O'Neill was up 50.47% - with 255,010 votes - compared to Harris' 49.5% and 250,239 votes.
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A Chicago Board of Elections spokesperson provided an update on vote-by-mail processing efforts Sunday evening, saying 13,107 more votes had been added to the unofficial count throughout the day. As a result, the number of ballots cast rose to 382,097, equaling a 25.31% turnout citywide.
Questions have arisen during the counting process amid changing numbers of outstanding and included ballots. In a news release, a spokesperson for the CBOE explained that while adding up vote-by-mail ballots, he accidentally left out additional ballots that had been delivered by the U.S. Postal Service on Monday.
The spokesperson said that a total of 7,009 ballots had been received back via the U.S. Postal Service on Monday ahead of Election Day. Another 9,143 ballots should have been included in that number, officials said.
