In San Francisco, where this year’s election could change the ideological tilt of the Board of Supervisors, the San Francisco Department of Elections said Thursday that about 61,000 votes were still uncounted.
Across the Bay, officials in Alameda County are about halfway through tabulating nearly 770,000 votes; Tim Dupuis, registrar of voters, estimates his team still needs to count about 400,000 ballots.
“I expect to be posting updates often in the next two days,” he said. “We’ll eat into that 400,000 number quickly.”
In the South Bay, Santa Clara County has worked through 67% of its 786,000 ballots, which leaves roughly 260,000 uncounted votes.
Contra Costa County officials estimated about 180,000 votes have yet to be counted as of this morning; Napa County has about 38,000 left. As of yesterday, Marin County estimated it has 52,000 votes left to tabulate and San Mateo County about 71,000.
In Sonoma County, Wendy Hudson, chief deputy registrar of voters, estimates about 62,500 ballots have yet to be counted.
John Gardner, assistant registrar of voters in Solano County, says his team might work through half of the remaining 12,000 uncounted ballots tonight.
For all the talk of surging voter turnout across the Bay Area, Gardner does not expect Solano to break any records.
“At the end of the day, this won’t be a record turnout for us,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ll beat the overall turnout from 2016.”
Officials in Contra Costa County say turnout was high, but they also don’t expect to set a new record.
Alameda’s Dupuis says his back-of-the-envelope calculations show voter turnout well above the county’s 70% average, and he’s hopeful the county could potentially surpass the modern record set during Barack Obama’s first run for president in 2008, when 80% of registered voters cast ballots.
“Rough math, we are within a couple fractions,” he said.
Mark Church, San Mateo County‘s chief election officer, says the roughly 359,000 voters who cast a ballot in the county is the most ever.
Mail-in ballots are still rolling in and will be counted — so long as they are received by Nov. 20 and postmarked on or before Election Day.
Church says in past years very few ballots have arrived in the mail beyond three or four days after an election. “I don’t anticipate getting many more ballots,” he said.
San Francisco said this afternoon that the U.S. Postal Service had delivered about 500 vote-by-mail ballots Thursday, 300 of which were postmarked on or before Election Day so are eligible to be counted.
— Kevin Stark (@kevstark)