With only 11 precincts counted at deadline Tuesday night, it appears the Democrats will handily retain control of their party.

Earlier this year, longtime Republican Larry Spencer fielded 11 Republicans to run for key positions in the Democratic Party primary election.

At the time, Spencer said he planed the move to retaliate against several prominent Democrats who announced they were planning a crossover into the Republican primaries to vote.

Paula Neils, chairwoman of the Kootenai County Democratic Central Committee, said the Republican crossover forced the local Democrats to run dozensof write-in candidates to retain control of the party.

On Tuesday night, Kootenai County Clerk Jim Brannon said results were delayed because of the number of write-ins.

The vote counting machines tally the write-in ballots and kick them out of the mix to be verified after the other ballots are counted, Brannon said.

"Thank Spencer," he said.

Spencer also crossed over to run as a Democrat for county assessor.

"I can't imagine (the write-ins) slowed it up very much," Spencer said.

At press time, Spencer was losing his county assessor bid to write-in Shirley McFaddan, who appeared to be winning with 395 votes to Spencer's 342.

However, all of McFaddan's write-in votes had yet to be confirmed.

Before the primaries Neils said the party verified the true Democrats on the ballot and deemed 11 candidates "fake Democrats."

Tamara Dale, a fake Democrat, was losing her first district county commissioner race to Bruce Noble, 167 to 625 votes, respectively.

Fake Democrat Alanna Brooks was losing her race for county clerk to Democrat Larry Belmont, 205 votes to Noble's 625.

Gordy Ormesher, another fake Democrat, was losing his bid for County Treasurer to Janet Callen.

The rest of the contested Democratic races were for central committee seats. The fake Democrats were winning most of those races, with exception of precinct 27 where Tom Macy was beating his write-in opponent four votes to three.