CA-45 |
Porter (D) |
Walters |
Margin |
6-Nov |
88765 |
94998 |
-6233 |
8-Nov |
101955 |
103975 |
-2020 |
13-Nov |
116732 |
116471 |
261 |
Notes: Welcome to the plus column, CA-45!! As expected, late count ballots are proving more favorable to Dems and we now lead. Orange County offers really detailed reports...they had 441,011 ballots to count after Election Day, and after today’s update they still have 261,600 to go. But here’s more good news — they’re almost done with mail ballots and about to move into provisional ballots. Provisionals skew younger, more minority, etc. We are looking good to flip this district, but it ain’t over until every ballot is counted.*
*counting ballot offer void in states with Republican governors.
GOP Leads
CA-39 |
Cisneros (D) |
Kim |
Margin |
6-Nov |
73077 |
76956 |
-3879 |
8-Nov |
80539 |
83211 |
-2672 |
13-Nov |
92741 |
93452 |
-711 |
Notes: As a reminder, 50% of the district is in Orange County, 35% in Los Angeles, and 15% in San Bernardino. (It may actually be the most racially diverse district in America.)
Cisneros is leading strong in LA, while behind in the others. Thus far, these counts are looking good for us. Orange and San Bernardino have about 400k votes to count, while L.A. has 688k. I’m expecting two things to happen as we proceed: 1.) the provisionals will skew more Dem than election day counts in all three counties and, 2.) the GOP counties will run out of votes long before L.A.
Honestly, even though the margin is worse, I think this one is looking even stronger than CA-45. Porter looks fine, but seriously...the L.A. County portion of this district has to be 80%+ minority. I’m going to guess that L.A. steps in eventually with some counts that blow this out for Cisneros.
On a side note, I don’t compliment the GOP often. But in this race, I will say that they had a good nominee (for them) in Kim. I don’t agree with her, but nominating more moderate minority women is a step in the right direction for their broken party.
CA-50 |
Campa-Najjar (D) |
Hunter |
Margin |
6-Nov |
71834 |
84777 |
-12943 |
8-Nov |
77334 |
89829 |
-12495 |
13-Nov |
89333 |
100892 |
-11,559 |
Notes: I don’t know, guys...yeah, I see the margin is improving. But that’s a LOT of ground to pick up. I don’t know if there’s a path to victory, but the path to the best possible margin in the race is going to be hoping that as San Diego and San Bernardino get into provisionals they skew hard left. The counties do all the mail ballots first, then the provisionals...so that’s our Hail Mary in this one.
NEW TO THE WATCH LIST!
CA-21 |
Cox (D) |
Valadao |
Margin |
6-Nov |
33844 |
39475 |
-5631 |
8-Nov |
33844 |
39475 |
-5631 |
13-Nov |
41739 |
44138 |
-2,399 |
Thanks to Kossack Docmidwest, who brought some changes in this district to my attention and did some nice analytics in his diary and subsequent discussion on this race.
First things first: Everybody take a deep breath. The vote margin dropped significantly, but what is going on in this race is complicated.
The bottom line is that this still looks like a GOP hold, but count update this weekend has made that less certain, and some experts (Nate Silver) suggest that the AP call may have been premature. It’s worth watching - so what’s going on?
The district sits in four counties. Here they are in order of largest vote total for the district to smallest, with the percent of the 2016 vote that came from each county:
Kern (37%)
Fresno (34.5%)
Kings/Tulare (28.5%)
The Kern portion of this district is VERY Democratic. Fresno is split — they voted for Clinton, but historically support the current GOP Rep, Valadao. Kings and Tulare are very Republican, and I’m lumping them together because they’re essentially the same area of the district, with a tiny number of votes coming from Tulare.
The reason that the margin dropped so much is that Kern blew through 2/3rds of their uncounted ballots — they had 68k last Friday, and now show 22k left. Kings also worked through a lot, and have about 7k left. We do not know how many of the remaining ballots will have CA21 on them, nor do we know how different the margins might be as these counties move to provisionals (which are now the majority of what’s left.)
But the big wild card is Fresno, which has not updated their counts since last Friday. Fresno has 77k uncounted ballots, and based on 2016 figures we would expect about 15k more votes in this district. The current margin in Fresno is 54/46 in favor of the GOP. Clinton won the Fresno portion of the 21st with 56% of the vote.
So...there is probably an 80%+ chance this district will go GOP. But the Kern count opened a narrow path for a Cox victory. What needs to happen? The provisionals need to skew a little left….maybe by five points...in all four counties, which is possible. But the most important thing is that we need to see an improvement in Fresno. Those late count ballots need to get Cox to a majority in the Fresno portion of the count, I think.
Docmidwest did some data digging and says that in 2016 the last half of the counting did in fact skew left for Dems in all four counties. We know young voters and hispanic voters surged...if those provisionals are really young and hispanic, then maybe this race gets exciting?
So this district earned a place on the watch list, and we can all cross fingers for an upset.
Update on uncounted ballots:
Statewide, there are still about 3.3 million outstanding ballots to count. I know...it’s slow. In 2020, the major counties will roll out the new system from the 2016 Voter’s Choice Act, and part of that is a statewide verification process that is supposed to speed things up. Registrars say it can take 2-10 minutes per provisional ballot to verify them. The new system is said to double check this info in seconds.
Los Angeles
Affected races: CA-25 (Hill), CA-39 (Cisneros)
Uncounted ballots: 688,000
Ventura
Affected races: CA-25 (Hill)
Uncounted ballots: 97,327
Orange
Affected races: CA-39 (Cisneros), CA-45 (Porter), CA-48 (Rouda), CA-49 (Levin)
Uncounted ballots: 261,600
San Bernardino
Affected Races: CA-39 (Cisneros)
Uncounted ballots: 173,300
Stanislaus & San Joaquin Counties
Affected Race: CA-10 (Harder)
Uncounted ballots: Stanislaus 17,860, San Joaquin 83,271
San Diego & Riverside
Affected Races: CA-49 (Levin), CA-50 (Campa-Najjar)???
Uncounted ballots: San Diego 326,000, Riverside 209,000
CA-21 Counties
Kern 22,072, Kings 6,751, Tulare 49,794, Fresno 77,000
Notes on uncounted ballots: Is everyone enjoying election month? IT’S NOT NEARLY OVER YET!!! Ha.
Statewide the remaining ballots skew about 2/3rds mail and 1/3 provisional. But in our “important” counties with contested races the remaining ballots are about 40% mail, and about 60% provisional. Expect one or two more big ballot dumps in the next week as counties wrap up their remaining mail ballots.
Then things will sloooooooooooow down as counties start working on those darn provisionals. In the past couple of elections, my experience is that the counts will look like they’ve reached a standstill, and then all of a sudden a ton of counts come in. I think counties verify provisionals each day, and then set the verified ballots aside to run all at once when there’s a stockpile. The point being that just because we got a third of the uncounted ballots done this past week, don’t expect the pace to be sustained. We are all going to be xmas shopping before this is done.
GOP Groups Planning Canvas Disruptions?
As Orange County races have flipped one after the other in our favor, we’ve seen GOP groups start to mobilize to stop/slow vote counting in a way that benefits them. Let’s talk California law and what the likely outcome of these efforts will be.
What they’re up to:
- Business Insider reports that the Kim (R) campaign in CA-39 has accused the Cisneros campaign of possible election fraud, ballot tampering, obstructing vote counting and intimidating the registrars. The Los Angeles registrar officially responded to the press and confirmed that absolutely none of that is true. (Come on, Kim...I complimented you like three paragraphs ago. Lose with dignity.)
Kim is basing her allegations on the swing in the margins from the Election Day tallies to the new counts, and contends that the margins should be the same. We have very good community colleges here….they aren’t free, but they offer math classes at a very reasonable rate per unit. Perhaps Kim and her staffers can take some refresher courses during their unemployment.
- Likewise, the Walters (R) campaign in CA-45 has started sending fundraising emails suggesting that the undergoing count is a “recount” and that Dems are trying to steal the seat through ballot tampering.
This is the first count, Rep. Walters. It’s not going your way...deal.
- There are some reports that conservative groups are sending emails attempting to rouse opposition to the ballot counting. I can’t find any evidence of any protests at registrar offices as of yet.
- In CA, both parties can put observers in the ballot counting locations. There are some Dem observers saying that the GOP observers in Orange County are contesting EVERY Democratic ballot in an attempt to reject as many as possible.
The state law and practices
Our canvassing is pretty organized and very deeply regulated by state law. There’s not a lot that these groups can do to swing these elections, but their actions are still deeply troubling.
Stopping the counts?
The registrars are given 30 days by law to finalize their counts. There’s no stopping this through the courts...I suspect the saber rattling is about fundraising to retire campaign debt, honestly. The registrars don’t have a lot of leeway in choosing which ballots they count and which they do not...and as I said, there are party observers to protest any decisions they don’t like.
Rejecting ballots over signatures?
The strategy of protesting every Dem vote is concerning. Here’s how state law works. On mail ballots, the voter signs the envelope. By state law, this is supposed to match the signature on file. As we all know by now, sometimes signatures don’t match for various reasons.
The partisan poll observers may call into question any ballot. That ballot then needs to get pulled and put in a pile for supervisor review. Fortunately, we have a nifty new law in place that seeks to protect voters. The registrar has to inspect the ballot, and either push it forward for counting or set it aside. If it’s set aside, it goes through an elaborate process of secondary registrar inspection, then notifying the individual voter...then they can cure the ballot via in-person means, email, internet response, mail, etc.
The law also sets some other standards...like a voter can use an initial for their first or middle name. It also asks the registrar to verify that the signature is substantially different. It sets a high bar for ballot rejections...and generally registrars don’t like creating mounds of paperwork by illegitimately questioning hundreds of ballots.
The unconfirmed Dem poll observer tweets I’ve seen seems to back this up. They say that Republicans have contested hundreds of ballots, but the registrar only pushed two to the curing process. But we will have to keep an eye on this.
RECOUNT! RECOUNT! RECOUNT!
We might as well cover this now, lol.
In California, there is no automatic recount. We won’t recount the races just because they fall under 1% or anything like that.
Instead, all CA elections are audited through a complex and thorough process. This starts by computer-selecting ballot shoes and polling places at random and auditing a small sample (either 0.5% or 1% of the ballots). If the samples fail the audit this triggers a deeper audit in that district. I have not seen any audits fail in the 20 years I’ve been watching CA elections.
We do offer a recount option for any voter who had a stake in the race. Not just the campaigns, but individual voters. And here’s how that works:
Say I am feeling a little suspicious of Gavin Newsom’s win. He’s only up...hmm...2.1 million votes. A recount could flip this race, baby! As a resident of Los Angeles County who voted in this election, I can request a recount. I can request either specific counties, or the entire state. So maybe I feel that just Los Angeles County was fraudulent (Trump’s tweets said so...I see no reason to doubt that information).
The only catch is...I have to pay for it. D’oh!
So sure, the campaigns or special interest groups could ask for a recount in any race...they just have to find their voting sponsor to get that going, and then foot the bill. I have not seen a recount request processed...ever. But a few years ago there was some grumbling, and I remember that the L.A. registrar told a campaign they could put together a cost estimate, but thought that a recount in just L.A. County would cost $700,000+. That math makes sense to me (because I am a nerd, and just calculated out that at 1-2 min per ballot, the 3.2 million L.A. ballots would take 50,000-100,000 paid hours to count, and at $15/hr that’s $750k — $1.5 million.)
Feel free to ask for a recount, GOP former House members. If you’re buying, we’re flying. In the meantime...try to lose with dignity. Trumpism won’t be forever, but how you react to losing these races will follow you for the rest of your careers.