Alameda County workers are back counting absentee ballots Thursday. Wednesday, Ron Dellums held just over 50 percent of the vote for mayor.

NBC11 News has learned the Alameda County registrar of voters will not declare a winner in the Oakland mayor's race Wednesday. Ron Dellums has 50.2 percent of the vote, but thousands of votes still need to be counted. The vote count may last through the weekend. And, there is always the potential that a losing candidate will ask for a recount.

MORE: Follow The Race With Updated Results

There are as many as 60,000 absentee ballots that still need to be counted. The registrar is not sure how many of those ballots are from people living within Oakland city limits.

Representatives from both the Dellums and the Ignacio De La Fuente campaigns are currently at the Registrar office observing the vote count.

NBC11's Cheryl Hurd spoke with some at the De La Fuente campaign who did the math and said the margin of difference to get Dellums the 50 percent plus one vote he needs to win is 128 votes.

Oakland City Council President Igancio De La Fuente said Wednesday that he's not ready to concede the Oakland mayoral contest, even though the latest election results show that former congressman Ron Dellums has more than the 50 percent total needed to avoid a November runoff.

De La Fuente said he wants to "wait and see" until all the absentee ballots in the race are counted.

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De La Fuente said, "I want to wait until every vote is counted."

In the latest tally, with all 275 precincts reporting, Dellums has 30,643 votes, or 50.2 percent of the total, and De La Fuente has 20,117 votes, or 33 percent.

City Councilmember Nancy Nadel is in third place in the six-candidate race with 7,891 votes, or 12.9 percent.

De La Fuente said that if he's able to get into a runoff with Dellums in November, he's hopeful that he'll be able to make up the large difference between the two candidates in Tuesday's election.

He said if there's a runoff, "It would be a good opportunity to look at our differences one-on-one and have a healthy debate."

He said, "That's what democracy is all about."

A spokesman for De La Fuente told NBC11's Cheryl Hurd that the registrar himself is counting the ballots by hand today. The majority of counters went home after working all night counting paper ballots. It is not clear if a final vote tally will be made Tuesday.

The race remained undecided because Alameda County had to return to low-tech voting Tuesday after 4,000 state-of-the-art Diebold Election Systems touch-screen machines failed to meet federal and state standards. Alameda had a shortage of optical scanners that process the paper ballots.

During election night rallies, Dellums predicted he would win and De La Fuente said he was preparing for a race until November.

"I believe to a moral certainty that when the dust settles and the smoke clears and the last vote is counted, we will go over the top," Dellums told cheering supporters.

De La Fuente's main campaign message emphasized his experience in city government and portrayed him as the man who helped bring Mayor Jerry Brown's big ideas -- like getting more people to live downtown -- to fruition.

Dellums, who headed the powerful House Armed Services Committee during his 27 years in Congress, cast himself as a bridge-builder who would be able to unite diverse Oakland in finding solutions to its crime problems and troubled schools.

RAW VIDEO: Ron Dellums' Election Night Speech

De La Fuente was interviewed in a downtown Oakland courtroom, where his son is having a preliminary hearing on charges that he sexually assaulted four different women between 2003 and 2005.

The hearing for De La Fuente's son, Ignacio Rafael De La Fuente Jr., will start at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday and is expected to take several days, according to his attorneys.