SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The recall election is barreling toward California voters. With less than two weeks to go until Sept. 14, nearly 3.5 million mail ballots have been returned.
Polls say Gov. Gavin Newsom has a slim lead over those who want to remove him, but nothing is certain until all the votes are counted.
Democratic ballots make up the majority of returns so far, according to ballot tracking from Political Data Inc.
As of Monday, 17% of mail ballots had been returned, according to PDI's tracker, with Democrats making up 54% of all returns, followed by Republicans with 24% and others with 22%. Older white people, those 65 and up, are also sending back ballots at a faster rate than their younger counterparts and votes of color.
To make sense of the numbers, The Sacramento Bee talked to Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc. and one of the state's foremost experts on elections, voting, and ballot counting.
Mitchell said voting behavior has changed recently. In the past older, conservative voters have made up the majority of mail ballots. That wasn't the case in the 2020 election, when many states expanded voting by mail in light of the coronavirus and then-President Donald Trump cast doubt on that process.
That led many Republicans to vote on Election Day in person, rather than trust the mail ballot system.
It's possible, he said, that the same thing will happen this year. Lawmakers decided in early 2021 to continue sending mail ballots to voters for all other elections this year, citing ongoing COVID-19 concerns.
Q: When will we know who won?
A: I think it's very likely that we'll know who won by late in the night on that Tuesday the 14th or potentially by the morning of the 15th. With everybody being mailed a ballot, and the most common method of voting being voting by mail, we will be able to have tabulated for us a large percentage of the total votes that will be cast by that evening.
It might be that the result is so far out of reach by the time they've tabulated all (the early mail) ballots, that the remaining ballots won't have really an ability to impact the total output of the final outcome.
But if it's close, it could be three weeks or a month before we finally know.
Q: Why are Democrats making up the majority of return ballots?
Democrats are a majority of the voters. They're over-performing their registration rate right now, maybe because they've kind of trained themselves from the experience of 2020.
Republicans may be — again, echoes of 2020 — saying 'Well, I just believe in voting at the polls.' The 'when' of how somebody votes has become a partisan signal.
Q: What should we watch for on election night?
Voting in California has kind of followed the time function, where those votes that come in the earliest (via mail), that have already been received, those votes can actually be tallied kind of by a push of a button on election night as soon as the polls close.
So that first wave is going to represent people who vote early, and oftentimes, people who vote early are different than people who vote late.
On election night, even as we're getting early returns, you'll see votes shift because maybe a Republican county posts, and then the Democratic county posts, then a Republican county posts, and then a Democratic county posts, then a Republican county posts... and you see the numbers going back and forth because all the counties don't report at the same time.
Q: Is it better to vote by mail or in person?
Voting by mail and voting in person are the same in terms of the effectiveness and legitimate ways to vote.
I think that the potential advantages to voting by mail have to do with the fact that you have a month to mail in your ballot, and a vote-by-mail ballot is usually not interfered by my kid scraping their knee, or I need to go run this errand, or I couldn't get home from work on time. Those kind of life events that can interrupt people's ability to go to the polls in person. You don't have to worry about those.
