In a race that could take several more weeks to resolve, challenger Patty Lopez leads incumbent Raul Bocanegra in California Assembly District 39. Both are Democrats, a result of California’s Top-Two system. Consequently, the result will not effect the partisan make-up of the state assembly.

Until last night, Lopez had been leading by 7 votes for the past week. Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan said today there is still about 113,000 votes county-wide to be counted, so there could be enough in that district to shift that race’s outcome. The next results will be announced on Tuesday, Logan says.

The closeness of the race was a surprise to politicos, since Lopez spent very little money and didn’t have significant name recognition. Bocanegra has accused Lopez of using a GOP political operative to engineer the upset, a charge Lopez has denied.

New totals expected to be released Tuesday. You can keep up with the latest count here.

Washington state started using the top-two system in 2008, but only this year was there any U.S. House race in that state between two members of the same party. In this year’s election, the 4th district incumbent, Doc Rogers, retired, and two Republicans who wanted to replace him placed first and second in the August 2014 primary. The only two candidates in November were Dan Newhouse and Clint Didier. The 4th district is centered on Yakima and Kennewick.

Although Washington election officials are still counting ballots, as of the evening of November 13 the state was reporting 1,974,940 votes (not counting write-in votes) in the ten U.S. House districts combined. In 2012, the vote for U.S. House in the same ten districts had been 3,006,266.

Proponents of the top-two system frequently say that general election races between two members of the same party are better for general election voters, because most districts are safe for one major party or the other, but at least when there are two candidates from the same party, the race has the potential to be unpredictable and exciting.

However, the total vote cast in the Fourth District this year for U.S. House dropped by 35.5%. For all ten races in the state combined, it dropped by a smaller amount, 34.3%. Although political junkies may enjoy congressional races in which only one party has candidates, it seems the voting public as a whole is slightly less interested in voting in such an election as in a normal election.

Between March and October 2014, Libertarian voter registration rose 8.3%. Voter registration as a whole rose 1.4% during the same period. Independent and miscellaneous rose 2.7%. Democratic registration rose .7%. Republican registration rose 1.0%. Green Party registration rose 2.1%.

The Constitution Party new total is still not known, because the Pennsylvania figure is still unavailable.

All data above only refers to states that have registration by party. The December 1, 2014 printed Ballot Access News will have a chart showing the vote by party, for each state.