Reported by Kurt Ludlow and John Fortney

The only major local Campaign 2006 tally still up in the air is between Representative Deborah Pryce and Mary Jo Kilroy.

Matt Damschroder of the Franklin County Board of Elections says Pryce leads Kilroy by 3,600 votes.

A confident, but contrite, Deborah Pryce on the one hand declaring a narrow victory over rival Mary Jo Kilroy, and on the other, saying she gets the message from voters and is leaving her conference chairmanship.
 
"Because of the results of the election and because of what I heard from my constituents, and because of truly personal reasons, I am not going to be in my party's leadership in the next Congress," says Pryce.

Her rival says Pryce won't be in Congress at all next year.
 
"We have only 3,600 votes behind and there's thousands of votes left unaccounted for so we think we have...this race is not decided yet," says Kilroy.

Kilroy says with 20,000 absentee ballots still out county-wide and 10,000 provisional ballots left to count, mostly from the OSU campus area, she can pick up enough votes to win. 
 
"The OSU precincts are some of the highest performing precincts for Democrats and Mary Jo did very well in those precincts and we think when all the votes are counted, we'll see Mary Jo make significant gains," says Scott Kozar.

Pryce says that's just wishful thinking.

"The numbers speak for themselves and I don't know that she's reading them correctly if she doesn't think we've won this election," says Pryce.

Kilroy says Pryce jumped the gun by not waiting until all the votes are counted.

The absentee ballots should be counted relatively quickly, but the provisional ballots, maybe 20,000 of them, will take longer. It could be as long as a week.

Pryce says if the roles were reversed, she would already have conceded.  Kilroy says she won't quit until every vote has been counted.

It is known what Pryce and Kilroy think about their battle, but they're bound to be a little biased. 10TV looked for an impartial party to weigh in on the controversy.

For Mary Jo Kilroy, it comes down to two things. One election expert says she needs to take more than 60 percent of the outstanding ballots, while another said it also depends on where those ballots come from.

Kent Markus says, "She has to make up a disproportionate number. Just splitting those outstanding votes even doesn't do her any good. She has to do a lot better than splitting them. Even so, if those are from places where there are a higher likelihood of Democratic voters, that's what she wants."
 
Terry Casey says, "There might be some in the campus area and some in the Republican areas, but in general they're fairly well dispersed and a lot of those votes, because they tend to be late absentee or provisionals, tend to reflect how the campaign was going at the end."

Even after the counting is done, the outcome will not be within the automatic one quarter of one percent that would trigger an automatic recount, but whoever loses can pay for a recount.