A couple of days ago I wrote a post saying that turnout in California had been lousy, probably because of our stupid jungle primary that frequently gives us uninteresting general election contests. But I based that on this data from the California Secretary of State:
Unfortunately, I didn’t know that the historical data was final while the current data was provisional, which means they weren’t even remotely comparable. In short, I totally blew it, and when I recalculated the numbers to give me turnout as a percentage of eligible voters (rather than registered voters) I was, of course, still way off. So what was the voter turnout in California? David Dayen has the approximate answer:
- Total Election Day votes in the governor’s race: 7.3 million.
- Total unprocessed votes as of today: 4.9 million.
- Total eligible voters: 25.2 million.
- There are still a few counties not reporting everything, so the total number of votes will continue to increase by maybe half a million votes. The likely final number of votes is approximately 12.7 million.
- Total turnout when everything is finally finished: probably about 50 percent.
Here is a corrected chart:
Turnout in California was almost certainly a smidge higher than the national average. Unfortunately, we won’t have a final answer for another month or so. I don’t know why, but that’s how things work here in the center of the Resistance.
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