Election-Campaign Law

Election Day Update From California

By Michael Alvarez

It’s a beautiful Election Day, at least here in Southern California!

A few quick morning updates.

• The California Secretary of State’s latest updates (as of 11/1/2020) notes that 11,161,493 vote-by-mail ballots have been returned (with 22,388,716 issued). They are reporting (as of 11/1/2020) 661,265 in-person votes cast. That’s a total of 11,822,758 ballots returned or cast. Note that the final totals on the number of votes cast in the 2016 presidential election statewide was 14,610,509. It’s quite likely that by the time all of the ballots are in that we’ll exceed the total number of ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election.
• San Bernardino County (one of the Southern California counties we are tracking) is reporting 463,351 ballots returned as of 11/1/2020. At a similar point in the 2016 presidential election cycle (San Bernardino County reported 221,470 ballots returned). Note that the 2020 mail ballot return numbers in San Bernardino County are currently running about twice what they were in the 2016 presidential election.
• Orange County (another of our Southern California counties we are monitoring) is now reporting 1,208,924 vote-by-mail ballots returned (of 2,024,785 issued). As of 11/02/2020 OC is reporting a total of 182,841 in-person votes cast, which if we add those to the vote-by-mail ballots returned is 1,391,765 ballots returned or cast in OC.
• Los Angeles County (yes, we are monitoring LAC as well!) last night reported 146,558 in-person votes cast, and 2,651,717 vote-by-mail ballots returned. From the data we are seeing, turnout this morning at voting centers in LA County is strong, and no doubt, there are still ballots being returned by mail, at drop boxes, and at voting centers throughout the county.

You can see our monitoring reports at Monitoring the Election.

So what are we seeing? Obviously there’s a lot of interest in this election, and so far, California’s voters have responded by returning their vote-by-mail ballots, or by voting in-person. More later today as we get additional data, and after visiting a number of in-person voting centers today.

Full post as published by Election Updates on November 03, 2020 (boomark / email).