* Counting in Cook County provided Democrat Mike Frerichs with 2,029 net votes late today. As you can see by the chart on the upper right hand side of the blog, Republican Tom Cross now leads Frerichs by just 9,214 votes - a margin of just 0.27 percent.

Chicago still has at least 24,000 votes to count, and suburban Cook has about 5,500.

My intern Marc Reiter called over 20 of the largest election authorities outside the biggest ones this afternoon, and wasn’t able to find any new votes counted, or totals released. Rockford counted about 400 votes later on and Frerichs picked up 164 net votes.

*** UPDATE *** From the Cook County Clerk’s office…

We have about 1,300 mail ballots in hand, which will be counted Monday. We’ll probably have 500-1,000 trickle in over the next week.

Bulk of provisionals will be added Monday - estimate is 6,000/8,000 will be verified and count.

So universe for suburban Cook is likely in the 7,800-8,300 range.

That’s a lot more than Kennedy and I thought were out in Cook. Also, the spokesperson’s math is off. I put the range at 7,800 to 10,300.

…Adding… As mentioned above, Frerichs’ net gain in suburban Cook on Friday was 2,029 votes. That’s out of a counted universe of 7,454 votes. If that ratio holds up, and being conservative here by using the low end of the range, he can expect to get another 2,000 or so net votes out of suburban Cook.

Cross received 19.47 percent in Chicago. Let’s make it 20 percent, and he’d expect to receive 4,800 votes from what we know is left to count there (which could be more, as suburban Cook clearly shows). Frerichs would emerge with a net gain of, conservatively, 14,000 votes.

Adding Chicago and Cook together, we get a conservative net gain of about 16,000 votes. That would put Frerichs ahead by about 6,500 votes. Again, I’m rounding down and being conservative here.

The question now is, how many more votes are left to be counted outside Cook County? And the answer is we just don’t know.

…Adding More… I’m told Lake County has almost 2,000 mail-ins and 1300 provisionals to count. Of the 1,300 provisionals there are 1,018 where voters said they never received a mail ballot so those will have to wait the full 14 days of the vote by mail process to figure out.

The Frerichs people claim late mail-ins are usually Democrats. We’ll have to wait and see, however.