November 19, 2016 - As of this morning we have approximately 92,484 ballots left to count. Here's the breakdown of those ballots:
Vote-by-mail ballots: 2,277
Vote-by-mail ballots dropped off at polls: 5,227
Provisional ballots: 83,376
Election Day paper ballots: 1,342
Late eligible ballots: 262
The vast majority of paper ballots left are in two categories:
November 19, 2016 - There are many phases to post election ballot counting - especially as you begin the process of final checks prior to certification. As races narrow, any change can be dramatically highlighted - but they can happen.
Orphan ballots are single page ballots that "might" be missing their second page. This can generally happen in one of two ways:
November 17, 2016 - It's a common question - if there's fewer ballots why can't you estimate exactly what is left? Simple answer - there's less data to rely on as the number of ballots narrow. Here's how it works:
November 16, 2016 - It has been eight days since Election Day and here's the latest on our post election operations:
November 13, 2016 - Signature checking on vote-by-mail ballots that were dropped off at polling places, or mailed on Election Day, will begin to wrap up early this coming week. We have approximately 15,000 left to process in preparation for signature review. There are about 30,000 that have been opened and are being prepared for scanning, and we have scanned an additional 46,000 ballots on Saturday.
November 12, 2016 - It's a bit more complicated than that - stop for a minute and understand what it takes to process a single ballot and it will help to shed some light:
1. Ballot dropped off on Election Day must come together with nearly 200,000 others in a massive sorting operation (so that the ballots are organized, all facing the same direction, in mail trays). Try doing that in an hour (it actually took about 30 hours to complete working overtime).
November 11, 2016 - Although we have messaged this quite a bit it's worth repeating - Election Day is actually Election Month in California. With a record 19 million voters (the most in the country) California recently extended the time required to certify an election from 28 to 30 days. Why? Because of the volume - compare us with another state, such as Hawaii, and you'll understand the differences. Hawaii has 3 days to certify compared to 30 days in California - the sheer volume of ballots makes all of the difference.
November 9, 2016 - We are in the process of sorting and preparing the record setting volume of ballots voted, dropped off, or cast as provisionals following yesterday's Presidential General Election. Over 400,000 ballots fall into this category - and it is an enormous undertaking.
November 8, 2016 - Unprecedented web traffic has slowed access to web results on ocvote.com. Traffic is beginning to stabilize - analytics indicate tens of thousands of individual hits at a single time, which lengthens the time to access results. As traffic begins to clear users are reporting seeing results - thank you for your patience.
November 8, 2016 - Two of Orange County's largest cities, Anaheim and Irvine, provide a contrast in the early returns of vote-by-mail ballots. 465,639 ballots have been received as of last evening - meaning that over 50% of the total ballots that have been mailed have already been voted. So what kind of party breakdowns have we seen in the overall returns? It depends on where you live - but here's the breakdown for these two cities that provide an interesting comparison:
Democrat:
Anaheim = 12,771
Irvine = 11,074