More than 782,000 Orange County voters’ ballots have already been counted for the June 2 primary election, data from the registrar of voters show.
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And as of Tuesday evening — just one week after Election Day — an estimated 37,330 ballots are left to be processed, according to the registrar.
That tally includes 16,600 eligible ballots received after June 2 that still need to be processed, as well as another 10,120 that need to be “cured,” which means the ballot envelopes were either missing signatures or signatures could not be verified. Voters have, by law, until 5 p.m. on June 24 to fix signature issues.
Only about 500 conditional voter registration and provisional ballots still need to be verified and processed, according to the latest tally.
In California, every registered voter is mailed a ballot about a month before Election Day, and voters can then cast it either in person, through drop boxes or by mail. Ballots that were mailed back are eligible to be counted so long as they were postmarked by Election Day (June 2) and received by the county elections office no later than a week after the election (June 9).
That means any mailed ballots received from now on will not be counted.
This election has seen an onslaught of criticism for the time it takes for California to declare winners after the election. But county election officials have said it’s not so much the counting itself that takes a while, but rather it’s the process, set by state law, to verify signatures and give voters time to fix a signature challenge on mailed ballot envelopes.
“Compared to the last statewide direct primary election in 2022, we have added more 2026 ballots to the results by this day in the canvass and have fewer ballots still being processed,” Registrar of Voters Bob Page said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday evening.
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“Accuracy comes before speed,” Secretary of State Shirley Weber has said. “California is the nation’s largest voting state, with millions of ballots to process and count. Taking the time to do this work correctly protects voters’ rights and ensures the integrity of our elections.”
More than 70,200 people cast ballots in person at vote centers in Orange County on Election Day.
Unofficial election results show Orange County is on track to have a relatively decent turnout for a non-presidential election primary.
At this point, with some 782,000 ballots already counted out of the 1.9 million sent to registered voters, turnout is at 41%.
To put that in perspective, election (also not a presidential year) among registered voters was 33.2%. For Orange County that year, it was 35.17%.
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In 2018, 37.54% of registered voters . Orange County was a bit higher: 42.86%.