The winner in the race for New York's 22nd Congressional District remains unknown.

According to the latest vote tallies, Republican Brandon Williams is leading Democrat Francis Conole 50.7% to 49.3% with 95% of the vote reported.

Williams has declared victory, while Conole is holding out while vote counts are finalized.

About 3,220 votes separate the two at this point.

So where could the deciding votes come from?

The Oneida County Board of Elections said they have 446 absentee ballots on hand to be canvassed.

In Onondaga County, the latest numbers from the Board of Elections show the number of absentees still to be scanned at 1,712 countywide, 839 Democrat and 430 Republican, while 443 are designated other.

Spectrum News 1 has not heard from the Madison County Board of Elections, but as of Friday, Madison County had 603 outstanding absentee ballots.

In the days leading up to Election Day, this was anticipated to be a close race. Both of our exclusive Spectrum News 1/Siena College polls showed the race as a statistical tie, both within the margin of error and about a month apart. 

Republican Brandon Williams declared victory in the race just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, with Francis Conole saying he would wait until each and every vote was counted before making a decision.

It wasn’t the smoothest of nights for either candidate. For much of the evening, Conole had a significant lead, then counting stopped. That was because of a technical glitch in Oneida County, and by the time it was settled around 1:30 a.m., it was Williams who was in the lead.

On Wednesday, the Oneida County Board of Elections clarified that their computerized systems “did not perform as they had in prior elections and in testing performed days before the General Election.”

They stressed that despite those problems, the issue was with uploading and reporting, and that all registered voters were able to cast votes and they were ultimately able to count and report them.

They also drove home the point that this was strictly an issue with uploading the data and had nothing to do with election integrity, stressing that the vote was secure.

Williams told supporters that he expected to win by about 4,000 votes, the final total remains to be seen.