BUFFALO, N.Y. — On Election Night, voting machines tallied nearly 60,000 votes for Buffalo mayor.

The only name on the ballot, Democratic nominee India Walton, pulled about 41% of those votes. The rest were cast for a write-in candidate.

On Wednesday, the board of elections will finally see whose names were in that column.

"At that point, while it's presumed that the mayor received the vast majority of them, that will be the start of actually confirming whether the suspicions of everybody is accurate," Republican Elections Commissioner Ralph Mohr said.

He said while many people are anticipating incumbent Byron Brown, who staged an expensive write-in campaign, will win, the board may not actually be able to confirm that until sometime next week.

"It's very doubtful that we would be able to get them done in a day or two," Mohr said. "It will probably take a few days to go through all the city of Buffalo but you'll get a general sense, I believe, after a day or so of the counting in the mayor's race."

He said the board may have as many as 10 teams of one Republican and one Democrat counting ballots for the mayor's race. Commissioners will meet with the campaigns Tuesday to finalize plans.

"It depends how many teams of observers the candidates can have together," Mohr said. "We're going to try to accommodate that and have a very transparent process."

Even before it takes on the write-ins, the board has the more traditional task of counting absentee and affidavit ballots. Monday was the last day the board could receive absentees that were mailed by Election Day and staff spent the day inspecting those ballots in preparation for Tuesday.

"They'll be run through a high-speed scanner and we'll expect to see some races that are close now perhaps not get too close and races that may have had a comfortable lead may get tighter," Mohr said.

He said he expects the process of counting write-ins to go more slowly at the beginning and speed up as staff and observers become more familiar with the process. All ballots must be certified by Nov. 27.