Voter turnout

[arethinn]

Apparently, what I thought looked like pretty decent voter turnout to judge by my precinct, namely that it was not a ghost town with just me and the poll workers (and maybe one other person) but actually had four people in the available booths and four more waiting behind us, was 34% in Santa Clara County. WHAT THE HELL ASS BALLS. Maybe it was slightly higher in my precinct than countywide, I dunno. There is a precinct-level spreadsheet, but my precinct's not in it (!!). (Maybe they're still counting the possibly massive number of mail-in ballots here? The voter roll page I signed in on had, like, 4/5 of the spaces where you normally write in your street address greyed out as mail-in.) Out of 1099 precincts listed, only 29 were 50% or higher, and some of those look like some kind of administrative fictions and not actual residential areas since they have single-digit numbers of registered voters, even as low as 1 (although maybe there are "precincts" for "that one dude living way out on his former cattle acreage in an unincorporated part of the county").

eta: I lost the tab I had the article in, but apparently more than 75 percent of voters use mail-in ballots in Santa Clara County. And this doesn't exactly translate to early voting, because you can drop them off in person or mail them as late as election day itself, and they're still counted if received within 3 days. Yikes.

Comments

[teaotter]

California will still be counting mail-in ballots all week. Possibly for more than a week. So turnout is still up in the air.

[arethinn]

They say 100% reporting in the county, but mail-in ballots are included as "reported" on 8 PM election night even if they haven't actually been opened and counted, so it's a bit confusing.

[psybelle]

I suppose there's some aspect of, "I live in a special bubble, so it's not that big a deal if I skip this one..."

I didn't notice greyed lines on the voter roll when I signed, so I have no idea what percentage of folks voted early; we had a machine that showed a page-count when you fed in your ballot sheets and I was about the 150th person to do so, around noon. I don't know if that's good or bad...

[feyandstrange]

Turnout in SF was in the around-45% range, which is about average for a midterm election (or at least matches last year's numbers).