cbone@gilroydispatch.com

GILROY

The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters has finished counting last-minute absentee ballots that voters dropped off at polls throughout the county Tuesday, and it will begin certifying the results during the next two weeks, a registrar spokesman said.

Gilroyans contributed 878 11th-hour ballots to the pile of about 11,000 absentee ballots that voters did not mail, according to the SCCRV's Web site. Cupertino, Los Altos, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale also had council elections.

"All that's left for us to do now is ... to reconcile the paperwork," said Registrar spokesman Matt Moreles. "Counting the ballots is really only the first step, and we still have the auditing to do to make sure everything's OK, but the important thing is that we were able to count the outstanding ballots, so now it's just a matter of cleaning everything up."

Cleaning up means the results won't change significantly, maybe by a 1/10 or 1/100 of a percentage point, Moreles said.

As of 5 p.m. Friday, Mayor Al Pinheiro retained his lead over Councilman Craig Gartman by 448 votes, or 7.5 percent of the vote. Council members-elect Perry Woodward, Cat Tucker and Bob Dillon held on to their leads, with Dillon leading fourth-place Councilman Roland Velasco by 335 votes.

The registrar counted about 6,300 of the last-minute votes Tuesday night and Wednesday afternoon, and between Wednesday and Friday afternoons, the registrar counted about 4,700 votes, Moreles said.