As Sacramento County continues to count ballots from California’s primary election, officials report a voter turnout of 29% as of Wednesday, expecting to reach 40%.
SACRAMENTO, Calif — While voting has ended in California’s primary election, election officials in Sacramento County say the work of counting ballots is far from over.
Ballot processing resumed Wednesday morning at the Sacramento County Elections Office following a busy election night. Officials say the next update of election results is scheduled to be released Friday at 4 p.m.
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According to the Sacramento County Elections Office, voter turnout currently stands at 29%, with officials expecting that number to eventually reach around 40%.
Election officials explained that the first results released on election night included ballots cast in person before Election Day, as well as vote-by-mail ballots that had already been processed from drop boxes and the mail. Staff then began processing ballots collected from vote centers on Election Day.
Counting will continue over the coming weeks as additional ballots are verified and tabulated.
On Wednesday morning, the county also conducted its public random selection for the 1% manual tally, a quality control process designed to verify the accuracy of voting equipment.
“The manual tally is part of our quality control system, so we go through all of the precincts that we have, which in Sacramento County is over 600 and we select a handful of them to then take an actual ballot and check the results against what our machines are telling us,” said Sacramento County Public Information Officer Janna Haynes. “It helps to know that everything is being counted accurately, and so we have kind of that human side of it, as well as the machine side.”
Haynes adds Sacramento County has up to 29 days to certify the election before submitting results to the state.
“Typically, we get through the bulk of the ballots within the first two or three weeks, but then we have those other ballots to cure, like signatures that didn’t match or were missing, and conditional ballots that people registered to vote the same day that they voted, and we have to verify their eligibility, Haynes said.
Officials emphasized that even when election websites show 100% of precincts reporting, that does not necessarily mean every ballot has been counted.
Voters can track the status of their ballot through the California Secretary of State’s ballot tracking system while the counting process continues.
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