No, this is not an alarmist rant. This is a very optimistic and uplifting diary simply pointing out that Obama is going to CRUSH Romney in the final popular vote tally!
Because California has become primarily a vote-by-mail state (a majority of voters voted by mail this year for the first time in a California election), this means that the actual counting of votes takes a long time. As long as your envelope is received by the end of election day, your vote will be counted.
Here is a link to the report of outstanding ballots: http://www.sos.ca.gov/...
The great thing is that there are actually a lot more outstanding ballots than this because some counties haven't even revealed how many uncounted ballots remain. But for the counties that have reported, there are 3,084,142 ballots that have yet to be added to the state totals.
Here is the breakdown:
Provisionals - 858,510
Mail-in ballots - 2,135,913
Other - 89,719
The CA SOS site refers to "other" as, "ballots that are damaged or ballots that could not be machine read and need to be remade, and ballots diverted by optical scanners for further review."
I think it's awesome that the state of California goes to such great lengths to make sure our votes our counted.
In any case, there are a whole lot more votes that will be added to the popular vote total, once these ballots are in. They are also still counting votes across the country in the form of overseas/military ballots, absentee ballots, and provisional ballots. Just in Ohio alone, there are over 200,000 provisional ballots waiting to be counted. I believe that by the time all these millions of ballots are counted, President Obama will increase in the popular vote to more than 4 million and more than three percentage points.