Ballot counting takes patience, and not just at the presidential level.

Ballot counting takes patience, and not just at the presidential level. 

Good afternoon. 

Sara Rubin here, waiting like all of you for some clarity—about who the next president of the United States will be, about voter turnout in this unprecedented year, and about many other local nail-biter races at the local level. 

As of 11:54pm on Nov. 3 (the most recent time that Monterey County Elections officials updated their reporting), a city council race in Seaside is on a razor-thin margin of five votes. A city council race in Del Rey Oaks is on an even thinner margin of one vote. 

There will be no update until tomorrow, leaving most candidates uncertain of whether they won or lost—even for those with substantial leads, there are roughly 41,600 uncounted ballots. 

I think the wait feels more acute this year because we are waiting for swing states to deliver a count and determine a winner in the presidential election, so every hour or day that passes feels like a burden. But this kind of wait in Monterey County is normal, and just like every other year. 

“Historically, the first Friday after the election is always when we do that first report,” says Ayna Gutierrez of Monterey County Elections. "We're valuing accuracy over speed. So we just ask that voters have patience and trust that the system is working."

The results we have so far represent some 115,501 vote-by-mail ballots received on Nov. 2 or earlier, a 55.8-percent turnout. They also represent 2,527 votes cast in-person on Election Day, a 1.2-percent turnout—a tiny number in this pandemic election year. 

What’s left to come, in reporting batches beginning tomorrow, are roughly 32,000 vote-by-mail ballots received on Election Day (or after—as long as they’re postmarked by Nov. 3, they count if they are received until Nov. 20). There are also about 9,600 other in-person ballots that were cast at polling places but the reporting is slower because those votes were cast provisionally, in most cases because the voter didn’t bring their vote-by-mail ballot with them—election officials have to confirm the voter didn’t attempt to vote twice in their weird year in which every voter in California received an absentee ballot, even if they didn’t want one. 

The delay might make us anxious and it might be annoying. But counting ballots and confirming provisional ballots are legit takes time—and for accuracy over speed, it’s well worth the wait. 

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com