Amy Mallet of Fair Haven and John Curley of Middletown remain locked in squeaker of an election for Monmouth County Freeholder this morning.

“It’s quite a battle,” Republican Curley tells redbankgreen.

The county clerk’s website has Mallet, a Democrat, leading Curley by just 18 votes, out of more than 271,000 cast betwen them. Curley says he heard late last night that the difference was just 11 votes.

Either way, the outcome is likely to turn on the interpretation of roughly 3,000 provisional votes, and how many of them survive scrutiny, Curley says.

Curley and Mallet are vying for the second of two seats open in the election. Curley’s running mate, incumbent Freeholder Director Lillian Burry, appears to have locked up her re-election, topping the list of four candidates by a margin of about 1,200 votes out of 536,223 cast.

Mallet’s slatemate, Glenn Mason, appears to be out of contention.

Curley, a former Red Bank councilman, says he’s “just letting the process go through, and then we’ll go from there.”

In making the rounds at polling stations yesterday, redbankgreen found unusually high numbers of provisional balloting, which poll workers said resulted from late registrations and changes of address by would-be voter since the last election.

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