About 13,000 absentee ballots have yet to be counted in T.O.

That's a rough estimate given by Gene Browning, the assistant registrar of voters of Ventura County, whose calculation was based on the approximately 71,000 absentee and provisional ballots yet to be counted in the county against the number of registered voters in Thousand Oaks.

"An election is not officially over until all the ballots are counted," Browning said, noting that absentee ballots often repre

sent the same ratio of votes for candidates as the ballots counted from the polls.

The legal deadline to certify the elections is Dec. 5, he said. There are 24 election workers working on the count, which requires a lot of manual effort, Browning said.

There will be an update at the end of the week and the bulk will probably be counted by Fri., Nov. 17. This is the same procedure used during every other election, he said.