It may not be official, but it's semi-official: Elaine Merriweather has unseated incumbent Audrey Miles for the third school board seat in Tuesday's election.

It was a tough race all night, as challenger Jason Freeman had a slight edge over Merriweather when the first wave of absentee ballots were cast. Merriweather, though, pulled ahead as votes from precincts were counted late into the night, ending with 17.75 percent of the vote to Freeman's 16.98 percent. Incumbent Miles trailed behind the pair with 16.24 percent.

The county still has to count the ballots that were dropped off by hand Tuesday – usually about 20 percent of the vote. And even if Freeman was able to maintain the mail-in ballot lead he had early on, it's highly unlikely he would pull ahead, said Stephen Weir, the county clerk for Contra Costa County in charge of running Tuesday's contest.

"It's not going to change," Weir said. "They were really close (early on). So it's not going to be break that hard (for Freeman)."

Freeman sent an e-mail to Patch.com Tuesday night about his loss.

"I am hopeful that my campaign helped focus the school board on what is happening in our classrooms," Freeman wrote. "We need to do more to support our school leaders and teachers and entrust them with the power to be instructional leaders."

Merriweather and Miles didn't return requests for comment before press deadline. Charles Ramsey, who with fellow incumbent Madeline Kronenberg got the largest leads with 20 percent, said he was surprised about Miles.

"I was a little surprised that Audrey Miles wasn't returned to office, but she gave it her best shot," Ramsey said. "I wasn't so surprised about Measure M (not passing). We had just passed a bond measure."

Last night, Charles Cowens, the third challenger for the school board, got off work at 6:30 p.m., voted, tweeted a picture of his name on the ballot, and spent the rest of the night watching the Bruce Willis movie Red. He didn't even check the results until the morning to find he'd come in last place with eight percent.

"It is what it is," Cowens said. "It's always hard when you're the last place person. Somebody has to be last place. ... I'm going to adopt a philosophical attitude about this. My daughter voted for me."

Cowens had a different assessment of Miles' re-election bid than Ramsey.

"She wasn't quite as into it," Cowens said. "She had the third greatest amount of money, but she never seemed to be quite as into the campaigning. I don't think she was involved when the teachers union was doing interviews for endorsements. This is my biased point of view as a challenger, but I was surprised she ran again."

Cowens ran his first campaign ever this year, and he said the experience forced him to sharpen his opinions on the school board and, more importantly, what's wrong with it. Even as a loser in the contest, he said he's going to keep working on the issues he cares about.

"As a challenger, even if you lose, you hope that you can sort of embarrass the winners into paying more attention to the issues you raise," Cowens said. "I feel like the school district was only narrowly focused on this Ivy League Connection program when, meanwhile, we have a 50 percent dropout rate or a 20 percent dropout rate, depending on how you look at the numbers.

"One of the radical ideas in the Communist Manifesto was progressive income taxation," he said. "Things that are out there get moved into the center eventually."

Ramsey, on the board since 1993, raised $103,000 for his campaign and Kronenberg raised $69,000, making them the top two spenders in the race (the rest of the candidates, including Miles, spent $12,000 or less on the race).

Here's a preliminary list of what each candidate spent per vote:
Ramsey: $6.26
Kronenberg: $4.22
Miles: $0.87
Freeman: $0.57          
Merriweather: $0.28
Cowens: $0.20