In Overtime, Close Senate Election Shifts to the Vote Counters The drama of a contentious Brooklyn special election for a State Senate seat moved into an unmarked warehouse on Wednesday, and as officials began reviewing votes, uncertainty increased alongside absurdity. Because the longer the contest drags on, the shorter the time the winner will serve the 27th District, which will cease to exist in its current form in 2013. The candidates each held ebullient, and premature, victory parties late Tuesday, but as of Wednesday night, there was still no winner. And there may not be for at least another week, if not two, or three, though each candidate continued to assert he had won. On election night, the upstart Republican candidate, David Storobin, rattled the Democratic establishment by taking a 120-vote lead over Lewis A. Fidler, a three-term city councilman, with more than 21,000 votes cast. On Wednesday night, Mr. Storobin increased his lead to 143 votes, according to the New York City Board of Elections - a number that will continue to change. There are at least 757 paper ballots waiting to be counted, and perhaps as many as 1,000 more expected, since, if postmarked by Monday, they can continue to arrive until next Tuesday. Officials will start counting the paper ballots the following morning. "You're laughing in the Twilight Zone because you don't really know if it's funny or not," said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College. It's funny because of the bizarreness of it. He added, "It's Ionesco and Pirandello, too much theater of the absurd." The winner of the special election in southern Brooklyn will replace Carl Kruger, who resigned and pleaded guilty to corruption charges. The last day of the legislative session of 2012 is June 21. A redrawn district will be represented in the new legislative session, which opens in 2013. On the first floor of the warehouse in Sunset Park, officials for the Board of Elections, accompanied by a bipartisan observation panel, spent Wednesday reviewing most of the data recorded by the voting machines. By nightfall, four expected machines still had not arrived at the warehouse. "We are confident beyond any doubt that David Storobin is the next state senator," said David Simpson, spokesman for Mr. Storobin. There are more than three times as many Democrats as Republicans in the district. Mr. Fidler, 55, competed with Mr. Storobin, 33, the vice president of the Brooklyn Republican Party and a lawyer born in the former Soviet Union. He ran an unabashedly negative campaign, to which Mr. Fidler heartily responded. "I call it the limbo race," Professor Muzzio said. How low could you go? "There was a singular lack of a meaningful message to the electorate in this election," he added. "There was a sub rosa message: "Let's not behave like civilized people." " Alec Brook-Krasny, 54, a state assemblyman from the former Soviet Union who was elected from Brooklyn in 2006, said he was struck by the tone of Mr. Storobin's campaign, which roundly criticized Mr. Fidler's character. "He was extrapolating the Soviet style of propaganda to Brooklyn," Mr. Brook-Krasny said. Even without an official victory, Mr. Storobin's close race with Mr. Fidler amounted to a success for his campaign and for Republican leaders. He took advantage of two growing and politically conservative communities in Brooklyn - Orthodox Jews, who related to Mr. Storobin's position against same-sex marriage, and Russians, who were eager to elect a young candidate who spoke their language. "Mr. Storobin, he was a great candidate, and the campaign committee ran a very aggressive absentee ballot campaign, so I think we're going to be successful," Dean G. Skelos, the State Senate majority leader and a Long Island Republican, said in Albany. Our message is resonating in a district that's five-to-one Democrat. Senator Skelos added that the party was reaching new audiences, including ethnic communities in Brooklyn and Latinos across the state. State Senator Michael N. Gianaris, Democrat of Queens and the chairman of the Senate Democrats" campaign committee, disagreed. "What we saw was a very unique election with a very small electorate that was more about the dynamics of that particular district than anything broader than that," he said, also from Albany. Mr. Gianaris added that the "ethnic dynamic" had shown itself in a couple of races consecutively. Orthodox Jews helped elect Bob Turner, a Republican, over David I. Weprin, a Democrat, in the Ninth Congressional District in September. But while that was a landslide, this race, which featured mudslinging from the start, is now mired in a legal process that could still be contested. Mr. Fidler's campaign insisted that the large majority of the absentee ballots belonged to Democratic voters, said Kalman Yeger, his campaign manager. "Momentum is on our side," he said. The information on the disk drives from the four remaining machines will be counted on Thursday. Not included in the machine tally, however, were six emergency ballots that could not be scanned on Tuesday. These were counted on Wednesday, according to elections officials, and, typically for this race, evenly split between the candidates.