Malinowski vs. Kean won’t be settled today — and maybe not until the weekend

With somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 uncounted votes in New Jersey’s 7th district congressional race, the final results are unlikely to be known until this weekend at the earliest.

Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) leads Republican Tom Kean, Jr. by 14,221 votes, 52%-48%.

Election officials in Union and Morris counties – two of the slowest-counting parts of the state – are expected to release some addition tallies today.

Neither of those counties are expected to come close to completing their counts this week.

Morris has scanned all of their ballots and nearly 30,000 of them remain uncounted in the 7th district portion of the county.  Union does not yet have a handle on how many ballots they have.

Hunterdon and Warren are not expected to release any new vote tallies until Thursday, and Somerset won’t have updated numbers until Friday, the New Jersey Globe has learned.

Essex County has mostly completed counting mail-in ballots and are set to county provisional ballots on Wednesday.  It’s not clear when Millburn, which is the only Essex town in the 7th, will be counted.

Malinowski remains favored to win re-election to a second term – he leads 186,715 to 172,494 – but his election night lead of more than 28,412 has now been split in half.

The deadline for VBM ballots postmarked on or before November 3 to arrive at county election offices and still be counted is close of business today.

State law does not permit the counting of provisional ballots to begin until at least Wednesday, and not until all mail-in ballots are scanned in to obviate any possibility that a voter cast more than one vote.

Some New Jersey voters who returned their ballots, either through the U.S. Postal Service, or secure ballot drop-boxes might have voted provisionally since they were unable to confirm that their votes were received by election officials.