It’s an Historic Election: Don’t Expect Quick Results
Registrars of Voters across the state are preparing for a record turnout on Election Day Nov. 4, drawn by an historic Presidential race.
With the Secretary of State’s de-certification of electronic voting machines, the record turnout means a massive amount of paper ballots that will take quite some time to count. In fact—even in this high-tech age—counting ballots threaten to delay a vote count much longer than in years past. Don’t count on waiting up until midnight to see final results… unless, maybe, you’re thinking midnight Wednesday.
Riverside County Registrar of Voters Barbara Dunmore says they expect an unprecedented turnout of 80 percent of registered voters . . . which translates to 650,000 ballots. Consider also that the ballot is two pages long, so you have to feed twice as many of pieces of paper into the counting machines.
Consider also: there are 115 contests, 353 candidates, and 313 different ballot types for this county alone, and you’ve got the making of a perfect storm.
“With hundreds of thousands of ballots traveling up to 165 miles on Election Day . . . and each of our scanners being able to count approximately 2,500 ballot cards an hour, we estimate it will take approximately 36 hours to finish tallying all of the results,” Dunmore said. “It is important to note that our early voting efforts will allow us to count some ballots ahead of that time.”
ROV staff will be working 12-hour alternating shifts, meaning the counting will continue unabated, until all ballots are counted. If Dunmore’s estimate is correct, then a final count won’t be available until 36 hours after the last vote has been cast, which, with the expected long lines, could be well after 8 p.m. Tuesday. That would put us at sometime after 8 a.m. Thursday, if things go well.
“To help ease the crowds on Election Day and improve reporting for this election, my office has been proactively promoting early voting through one of our remote early voting mall sites, our mobile voting unit ROVER, and voting by mail.
“I am pleased that so far over 150,000 voters have chosen one of these easy and convenient options, which will help us speed up the counting process on Election Day.”
The ROV has also recruited a record 4,300 poll workers for this election (1,500 more than in June) which should help moving things along at the polls.
“Ideally, the best course of action would be for the Secretary of State to re-certify electronic voting,” Dunmore said. “This method allowed us to tally ballots in just a few hours.”