Write-in votes delay Cambridge results
CAMBRIDGE - While most cities and towns across the state wrapped up their municipal elections Tuesday, Cambridge is still counting ballots.
The holdup, election officials say, is because of a higher-than-usual number of write-in votes this year.
Longtime Councilor Marjorie Decker waged a write-in effort after her campaign missed the deadline to submit the 50 signatures needed to be listed on the November ballot.
Decker, who has served on the council for 10 years and is fighting for her political life, said her campaign had the wrong date for filing.
Don Drisdell, the city’s solicitor, said “Because this year we had an organized write-in campaign, there are more auxiliary ballots than in prior ballots.’’ Auxiliary ballots are those the scanners cannot read, including those that are blank, those with multiple markers for one spot, and those that are part of a write-in campaign.
Drisdell said city staff and elections commission personnel spent yesterday reviewing and tabulating 3,590 auxiliary ballots, which all need to be counted by hand.
The city has been posting updates about the election on its website. At 5:30 p.m. yesterday, officials said that the next update will be this evening.
The website also listed the unofficial ranking of the 20 candidates vying for the nine at-large City Council seats, based on the ballots scanned at the precincts. The top nine were unofficially declared elected.
The nine write-in candidates, including Decker, were unofficially declared defeated on the site yesterday, with no votes tallied next to their names. But the website did say the results are not final and that “no candidate can be declared elected until all ballots have been counted and the Election Commission announces the results.’’
Official results cannot be declared until Nov. 13, when provisional ballots and overseas absentee ballots will be counted, the website said.
Cambridge has a proportional representation election system, which allows voters to rank the candidates in order of preference.
The winners are determined through a complex scoring system designed to give smaller constituencies representation at the governing table.
Meghan E. Irons can be reached at mirons@globe.com. 
