So far … not as expected!
Well … this wasn’t supposed to happen! After the first day of counting late absentees and such, Andrew Do’s lead over Lou Correa has climbed from a modest 2 — “Do by Dos,” get it? — to a not particularly funny 239.
We’d better start keeping track of the other statistics as well:
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Time to visit the “What’s Left to Count?” pages on the OCROV site!
Here’s the total counted and known to be remaining after Election Day:
Total estimated number of ballots to count (after Election Day): 6817
Total estimated number of ballots counted (after Election Day): 4916
Total estimated number of ballots left to count: 1901
Looking at the individual categories shows that this does NOT include later-arriving Vote By Mail ballots, perhaps because under a law authored by a fellow named Lou Correa they have 72 hours to arrive. (I’m wondering whether Neal Kelley will have people stay late on Friday night, open on Saturday, or wait until Monday.) This category currently contains as-yet-uncounted 562 ballots.
Where did Do get his edge, then?
A little bit of it may have been from paper ballots: 141 were turned in, 136 counted, meaning 5 left.
Was it provisional ballots? No — none of the 1264 provisionals present have yet been counted.
That leaves one source: absentee ballots returned at the polls. (This is different from “surrendered ballots” that convert into physical day-of-election voters. Think of it as “people who want to save on a stamp.” Under “Lou’s Law,” there’s really no longer a reason to do this unless one fears one’s ballot getting lost in the mail.) And here, we hit the jackpot for Do:
Total estimated number of vote-by-mail ballots returned at the polls to count: 4850
Total vote-by-mail ballots returned at the polls counted: 4780
Total estimated number of vote-by-mail ballots returned at the polls left to count: 70
Correa, if standard rules of thumb apply — and they often don’t, once one enters Little Saigon — should get a disproportionate number of the provisionals. But those later (and now “even-later”) absentees would probably be pretty similar to those turned in at the polls — the group that just put Do ahead.
If all of the provisionals count, I’d still think that things look good for Correa. But … chances are good that they won’t. And this time, if the provisionals were to be what put Correa over the top, I would absolutely expect to see ballot challenges from Do — and perhaps a court challenge as well. I would expect tomorrow to be mostly a provisionals day, as they allow the mail-in-votes to continue to roll in and build that 562-ballot figure into something larger.
Wednesday morning a number of my VN coworkers reported that VN news and radio was already reporting that Do was up by 200 votes… I showed ppl the OC Registrars web site showing only 2 votes difference, so where did VN news get their accurate count before it was released to the public?
Of course I think that Correa and Solorio deserved to lose, centrist crap spouters that they are, but given the OCR’s history of partisanship and incompetency, is there a Red under the wire? A hidden plant in our revered institution?
Interesting question. I don’t suspect foul play from the OCROV’s office (although if Correa does, he can certainly pursue it.) My guesses are that either (1) it was a wild-ass guess, (2) it was an informed projection based on the number and type of uncounted ballots remaining, or (3) they knew that at least 200 ballots for Do had been postmarked and shoved into a mailbox the previous evening. If they had said 239 ballots exactly, I would feel differently about it.
2 votes? Nah, they must have meant 200.
*Two things: (1) Will be interesting to see WHO gets the phone call. (2) Lou has the money to do a Recall……Do – not so much. We still want Lou to win, since Janet is supporting Do. The Honeysuckle doesn’t fall far from the tree they say in the Far East.