cast in more than 30 states.
According to the California Secretary of Sate, as of 11/7/2008 at about 4:00pm there are still 2,738,695 unprocessed votes including 1,864,216 Mail-In Ballots. Of the latter, it is my understanding that this is Mail-In ballots received on election day...all mail-in ballots received prior to election day have been processed. That's more votes remaining to be processed than cast in over 30 other states
Here's a link to the numbers:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/...
There are a lot of round numbers here so there may be some differences and or overlaps with actual reported votes so far, but obviously the number is large. For some perspective, there are more unprocessed provisional ballots in Los Angeles county than there are total votes cast in the state of Alaska...kind of makes you want to rethink the electoral college, huh?
While it is almost certainly too few to change the results of Prop 8 (which trails by about 400,000) it will be interesting to see which way these votes trend. I'm guessing that it will lean No but we'll see. There County election officials have 28 days after the election to finalize the numbers so it may be a while before we find out.
Looking at votes counted to date, it's clear that the margin of difference for Prop 8 was LA county, where there was almost a 20 point difference between the number of votes cast for Obama and the number of No votes on 8
Obama: 1,938,744 - 68.8% vs. McCain 826,512 - 29.4%
No on 8: 1,370,322 - 49.5% vs. Yes: 1,396,206 - 50.5%
There's been a lot of anger directed at the Mormon church and a lot of mis-information about the African American vote impact on 8 but when all numbers are said and done, I would bet it was the hispanic vote that shows the biggest split. There are far more Catholics than Mormons in the state, and from my perspective the Catholic church in CA got off easy in all of this, hiding behind the LDS while very actively supporting the measure.
Note on Alpine County: Most CA counties have 100,000+ voters, but one little county, Alpine, in the Sierras has 816 registered voters. Rural CA generally votes conservative but this county had an 85% turn out and voted strongly for Obama and No on 8. Go figure! (As an aside there were actually 11,000 people living there in 1854 when there was a silver rush.) What's kind of funny is they still have 5 uncounted mail-ins to process...how long can that take?