Dem
47
GOP
53
Following up on yet another item from yesterday, we had a brief piece in which we explained that California takes a while to release final voting tallies (because they have to wait for the "any ballot mailed by Election Day, and received within the next 7 days" deadline) and we also said we did not know if state election officials would be working over the weekend to process ballots.
Reader S.C. in Mountain View, CA, knows far more about the mechanics of California elections than we do, and wrote in with some additional information we thought we'd pass along. So, we yield the floor:
(Z) wrote: "It would be helpful to know if the state will process ballots over the weekend, but there is nothing online that clarifies whether that is the case."
Election Code Section 15150 says, "The semifinal official canvass shall commence immediately upon the close of the polls and shall continue without adjournment until all precincts are accounted for." (Emphasis added.) The "semifinal official canvass" is when they count the votes. During the final official canvass they do such things as reconcile the number of ballots cast in each polling place with the number of voters who signed in at that polling place.
But tallying the ballots and posting the results online and to the Secretary of State's office are two different things. The guest speaker at the May 30th annual meeting of the League of Women Voters Los Altos—Mountain View Area was the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. He explained that the equipment that scans and tallies the ballots is not connected to the Internet; it is "air-gapped," as required by state law. To report the results they take a clean USB stick, plug it into the air-gapped tallying computer, download the results, then walk the USB stick to an Internet-connected computer in a different room, and upload the results to the website that reports the results. That USB stick is then not used again that election; it will be erased and reformatted before it is used in the next election to ensure no viruses picked up while it was in an Internet-connected machine can infect the air-gapped equipment. Presumably a similar procedure is followed by the other 57 counties.
According to a media release sent out this week, after election night Santa Clara County will report its results at 5:00 p.m. daily. On the other hand, Alameda County's website says they'll update on Friday, June 5; Monday, June 8, and Friday, June 12. Election Code Section 15306 only requires updates twice a week. The Secretary of State has a page that lists when each county has last reported results. Counties also have to report, both on their own website and to the Secretary of State, how many uncounted ballots they have left at least twice a week. The Secretary of State also has a page for that, but as I write this it has no numbers.
That each county decides how often above the minimum, and when, it reports results to the Secretary of State can affect how long it takes the media to call a contest and for a candidate to decide they are not going to make the November ballot and so publicly concede (not that conceding has any legal significance).
As for wanting to know the results the day after the election (and I am not accusing Z of this) [FLAME ON] WHO THE HELL CARES?Clearly candidates and their campaign staff would like to know, and reporters are always looking for a scoop. But the rest of us (and that includes electoral junkies like myself) can wait; knowing the winners today or next week or in 3 weeks doesn't affect our daily lives. As I heard an election official say, as she was interviewed on the radio (it might have been Secretary of State Weber, it could have been a county official), "Would you rather have the results be fast or be accurate?" I agree with her; I'll take accuracy every time. There's a reason there are several weeks between the primary and the general election, and several weeks between the general election and when the winners officially take office. In case it's not obvious, it's to make sure all the votes have been counted and that the result is correct. [FLAME OFF]
I'll now return to the persona of a mild-mannered electoral reformer.
Thanks, S.C.!