An Associated Press analysis of uncounted votes from absentee and other ballots showed that Bill Brady, a state senator from Bloomington, has little chance to overcome the 19,400-vote lead Quinn held with 100 percent of the state's precincts reporting.

"I think the people of Illinois know I won the election," Quinn said at a Chicago deli, where he thanked voters and called his lead over Brady "insurmountable."

State officials have until Dec. 3 to certify all results.

Brady said he isn't giving up and he's not being pressured to quit the race. He said he wants to make sure all votes are tallied before making a decision. That process could take 30 days.

"We're still trying to gather information. The voters to deserve to see every voted counted," Brady told reporters as he entered the Statehouse on Thursday.

Left uncounted for now are some absentee and military ballots, which Brady hopes break in his favor. Those will be counted at county-level election offices in the coming week.

Close elections aren't new for Brady. He squeaked out a Republican primary win in February by fewer than 200 votes and was not officially declared the winner until more than a month later.

Tuesday's election was the closest governor's contest since 1982, when incumbent Republican Jim Thompson defeated Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson by 5,074 votes.

Unofficial results compiled by The Associated Press showed Brady trailing Quinn by a margin of about half a percentage point in an election in which 3.6 million ballots were cast. That's a tiny difference, but there is little chance Brady can make it up, the AP said.

Thousands of provisional ballots were cast in Tuesday's election, but experts say few of those will end up being declared valid. And if they are, most come from Cook County, a Quinn stronghold.

There also are tens of thousands of absentee ballots that were sent to voters and haven't been returned, as well as some that have been returned but not counted yet.

Republicans have said privately that Brady had only an uphill chance of prevailing when he didn't come out ahead on Election Day. Republican state Sen. Kirk Dillard, who finished second to Brady in the primary, called the 19,000-vote split a "steep hurdle."

-Contributing to this report were Kurt Erickson of The Southern Springfield Bureau and Deanna Bellandi, John O'Connor Carla K. Johnson, and Christopher Wills of the AP