June 13 Update of the CA 48th Congressional District
Orange County had 517,875 votes cast in the primary, which is 34.9% of the registered voters in the county.
Of the 210,107 post election day ballots to count, 148,653 have now been counted, or 70.8%. 61,454 are left to count. Last night, the number counted was 60%. If the 10% gain in counted ballots continue, it will take three more days, and could mainly end Monday night.
Update: 45,500 of the ballots left to count, or three quarters, are Provisional Ballots. These are probably mostly voters who signed up to submit mail-in ballots, but decided to vote at the polls instead. After the registrar verifies that they have not sent in ballots, their votes will be accepted. It also includes those who showed up at a different polling place, or did not have identification.
The leading four candidates in the CA 48th now have the following number of votes:
Republican Dana Rohrabacher has 44,356 or 30.6%.
Democrat Hans Keirstead has 25,052 or 17.3%.
Democrat Harley Rouda has 24,682 or 17.1%.
Republican Scott Baugh has 23,359 or 16.1%.
The crucial Keirstead lead over Rouda is now reduced to 370 votes. On June 12 it was 456 votes, or 86 votes more. On June 11 it was almost the same as today, namely 372. This is to be expected if they are fluctuating or random walking around a mean.
Democrat Hans Keirstead lead over Republican runner-up Scott Baugh is now 1,693. This has grown from last night’s lead of 1,594.
Today’s party count in the CA 48 is: Republican 77,344; Democrat 66,103; and total 144,726. Last night’s total was 138,420. So there was a gain of 6,306 votes today. Yesterday, there were 5,238 votes added.
You can play a lot of “What If” games if there had not been so many candidates, and if their votes went to the second place finisher in each party in the count so far. I will just indicate the possibilities.
The two leading and almost tied Democrats have 49,734 vote between them. Yet the total Democratic vote was 66,103 votes. That means 16,369 votes went to other Democrats. They could have dramatically changed the leading Democrats’ votes who had around 25,000 votes each.
The total of the two leading Republicans is 67,715. The total of Republican votes is 77,344, so 9,629 went to down ballot Republicans. While that would not have put Baugh ahead of Rohrabacher, it would have put him over any Democrat, and led to a Top Two Republican November ballot.
Food for thoughts.
