About 26.4 percent of all ballots cast in Santa Clara County cities that held an election Tuesday are still uncounted, according to Elma Rosas, spokesperson for the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.

The percentage is high enough that it could theoretically make a difference in some election races or outcomes -- considered unlikely in the Palo Alto City Council or Measure A ballot items, however.

Palo Alto elected five new City Council members and soundly rejected Measure A, the business-license tax Tuesday.

Those uncounted ballots include mail-in (formerly called "absentee" ballots) that were dropped off at polling stations Tuesday rather than mailed in, and provisional ballots (those cast in person at a polling place other than the voter's own).

If the 26.4 percent figure holds for Palo Alto as well as the county, then approximately 2,600 Palo Alto votes are yet to be counted -- which could be enough to affect the lower-end vote totals for the council race.

In preliminary results released Tuesday at 11 p.m., the five Palo Alto City Council candidates with the highest vote totals were Larry Klein, Gail Price, Karen Holman, Nancy Shepherd and Greg Scharff.

The top three held comfortable leads over the rest of the field of 14 candidates. The fourth-, fifth- and sixth-place vote-getters were within 1,000 votes of each other, however. Shepherd earned 466 votes more than Scharff. Scharff had 432 more votes than Leon Leong.

In a televised Election Night discussion among Mayor Peter Drekmeier, Santa Clara County Supervisor Liz Kniss and former Mayor Gary Fazzino, the officials remarked that mail-in voters in years past (then called "absentee" and designated only by special request) used to be largely Republican and conservative. Therefore, the mail-in vote could affect the results of the election.

However, with "mail-ins" now accounting for more than 70 percent of voters, that conservative tilt is no longer expected.

Early Tuesday evening, when early mail-in ballots were counted, Scharff and Leong were separated by just 242 votes. They received 9.27 percent and 8.49 percent of the votes respectively.

By the end of the night, with the additional count of walk-in votes, that difference had widened to 432 votes, or 9.58 percent and 8.52 percent.

Leong, a Realtor who ran on a platform of preserving neighborhood values, conceded defeat early Tuesday evening.

"At this point, it looks like voters have chosen their City Council," Leong said. "But I still feel good about the race I ran."

Final results may not be available until Friday, Rosas said. Updates will be posted Wednesday and Thursday on Palo Alto Online and Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.

Royston Sim contributed to this report.