Anthony D. Galluccio, a 27-year-old legislative aide, will succeed convicted felon William H. Walsh on the Cambridge City Council, unofficial vote counts indicated late last night.

But the surprise discovery that 19 ballots are missing prevented the city's Board of Election Commissions from declaring a victor in the special count.

"There is no official winner at this moment," Teresa S. Neighbor, the board's executive director, said last night. "We can't certify the results because they are incomplete without those 19 ballots."

Galluccio is an aide to state Sen. Robert D. Wetmore (D-Barre) and a Suffolk Law School night student. Efforts to reach him last night were unsuccessful.

The election board yesterday held a day-long recount of ballots from last year's city council election, in the wake of Walsh's sentencing on 41 federal charges of bank fraud and conspiracy last month and his removal from office, as mandated by state law.

Of the 2,182 ballots that originally belonged to Walsh and were redistributed to losing candidates, Galluccio--who came in 12th in the original election--received 868 votes, and James J. McSweeney got 779, according to Neighbor. The "exhausted" pile--ballots with neither McSweeney nor Galluccio's name on them--constituted 516 votes.

It appears that the absence of the 19 ballots is not enough to sway the results of the recount. But Neighbor said the board cannot certify the results until they account for the discrepancy.

The four-member board will meet at 10 a.m. today in an attempt to reconstruct the 2182 ballots and determine, if possible, where the 19 ballots are, Neighbor said.

The recount coincided with a last-ditch effort by McSweeney--who had come in 10th in the original election--to challenge the constitutionality of the city's voting system, called proportional representation, in court.

McSweeney had obtained a restraining order from Middlesex County Superior Court blocking the recount earlier this month. But the court later allowed the recount to take place, and a Thursday appeal by McSweeney was unsuccessful at delaying the recount.

McSweeney took the case to the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) yesterday, but Associate Justice Herbert P. Wilkins '51 did not appear in court. The hearing was postponed until Monday, according to Dennis Newman '72, McSweeney's attorney.

'A Matter of Principle'

The missing ballots threaten to start a new controversy over proportional representation, the complicated voting system that Cambridge has used since 1941 to elect the nine city council and six school committee positions.

Under proportional representation, voters do not choose only one candidate. Rather, they mark their numerical preferences next to a candidate's name.

A candidate must receive a certain quota of votes to win. After a winner is declared, his or her surplus votes are redistributed to the runners-up.

The votes of the losing candidates, starting from the bottom, are also redistributed until only the winners are left.