Latest ballot count leaves election results unchanged, with a week to go before certification of the vote.

The evening of Election Day inevitably feels like a frenzy for candidates and their supporters, awaiting initial results. But the first results that come in around 8pm from the Monterey County Elections Department represent just a partial count—those are vote-by-mail ballots returned prior to Election Day. Ballots cast at the polls day-of are then tallied in the hours after polls close at 8pm, adding to the numbers, and sometimes changing the results. 

Some elections are decided by a landslide in those initial reports, with no changes in the subsequent hours and weeks. Other outcomes change in the days ahead as elections officials count remaining ballots. There are those cast provisionally and with conditional voter registration. There are vote-by-mail ballots that arrive up until seven days after the election, and which are still counted as long as they were postmarked by Election Day. There are ballots that might've been dropped off at a ballot dropbox in another county and need to be transferred to the Salinas office of Monterey County Elections. 

As those ballots trickle in, they can change the results. Elections officials have until 30 days after an election—in this case, July 7—to certify the results. 

This year, Monterey County Elections officials are almost two weeks ahead of schedule, and announced on Friday, June 17 that they expect to certify the results by Friday, June 24. 

They've processed provisional ballots, and completed a required manual tally of 1 percent of ballots to confirm that they match the machine-tabulated results.

There are also 244 ballots remaining that were returned unsigned or with signatures that do not match the voter signature on file. Those voters have been notified, and have until Wednesday, June 22, to return a signature statement. 

Particularly critical are that 49 of those ballots with signature questions were cast in Monterey County's District 2, where the race for county supervisor is a close one. In the six-way primary, no candidate came close to clearing 50 percent needed to win outright; that means the top two will go to a runoff in November.

Glenn Church, a Christmas tree farmer, is clearly in the number-one position. Kimbley Craig, mayor of Salinas, and Regina Gage, a board member of Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System, have been in close contention for that number-two spot—the latest vote count shows Gage ahead by 21 votes (2,167 to 2,146.)

Given that close race, elections officials will do an additional manual tally of batches of ballots to confirm they do not vary from the machine-counted ballots at 10am on Tuesday, June  21.

Since a new ballot-counting system was installed in 2017, Registrar of Voters Gina Martinez says the manual count has always aligned with the machine count. The new system, for instance, automatically corrects for an overcount, a situation like a voter filling in the bubble for a candidate's name, and then doubling up and writing them in as well on the write-in line.

Because the District 2 race is so close, Martinez says she's heard talk of a possible recount request; any voter may request a recount, on the condition that they pay for the cost of a recount. The cost of a recount for District 2 is to be determined.

Voter turnout in Monterey County for the June 7 primary was 31.06 percent.