On Election Night, the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters releases unofficial results of voted ballots received from polling places throughout the County and voted mail ballots received prior to Election Day.

These results are cumulative and updates are released throughout the night.  The first results will be posted by 8:30 p.m. on Election Night.  The postings on Election Night include results for the majority of mail ballots received from the U.S. Post Office before Election Day, mail ballot drop-off locations prior to Election Day, and ballots cast at polling places on Election Day.

Results for ballots cast at polling places on Election Day are added at 10 p.m. and every two hours, thereafter. Ballot counting continues on Election Night until all regular ballots cast at polling places have been counted.  Though ballot counting may be completed for the night, the Registrar of Voters will continue to process and count additional ballots in the weeks following the election.  The estimated number of ballots remaining to be processed is provided to the public shortly after the final posting of the unofficial Election Night results and with each subsequent posting of results until the Final Certified Election Results are posted.

The ballots remaining to be processed include damaged ballots, ballots run through the high-speed ballot scanners that require additional review, mail ballots received on Election Day, mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days following Election Day, mail ballots that require further signature review, provisional ballots, and conditional voter registration provisional ballots.

On Election Night, ballots are scanned using high-speed ballot scanners. To efficiently produce election night results, votes in a write-in space will not be reviewed on election night. These votes are tallied as Unresolved Write-ins. The Unresolved Write-in tally may include:

• Votes for qualified candidates whose names appear on the ballot
• Votes for qualified write-in candidates
• Names of persons that did not file candidacy papers
• Stray marks

The Unresolved Write-in tally is included in the Total Votes for all candidates in a contest and impacts the unofficial percentage of votes for each candidate.

A sample of how Unresolved Write-ins may effect a contest is shown below:

State Senator District 22

Precincts Reported: 160 of 160  (100.00%)

Candidates vote percentages will not add up to 100% until all Unresolved Write-ins have been reviewed. The Unresolved Write-ins are reviewed during the canvass and all votes for qualified candidates will be added to the election results upon completion of this review.

On Election Night, the public often wants to know how the counting of ballots is progressing and when the counting will be completed.  On the Election Results page, there are some statistics that provide the public with a very rough estimate of how ballot counting is progressing.

Underneath the title of a contest and above the list of candidates in each contest, you will find the number of Precincts Reported out of the total number of precincts, followed by a percentage, as shown below:

State Senator District 22
Precincts Reported: 40 / 160    (25%)

These numbers represent the number of precincts reporting results (40), the total number of precincts located in the jurisdiction of the particular contest (160), and the percentage of precincts reporting results (25%).

As the vote count is updated throughout Election Night, the number of precincts reporting and the percentage of precincts reporting will increase, as shown below:

State Senator District 22
Precincts Reported: 80 / 160    (50%)

When all polling place ballots from all precincts in the jurisdiction are counted, with the exception of damaged ballots and ballots requiring adjudication, the numbers will read as shown below:

State Senator District 22
Precincts Reported: 160 / 160    (100%)

The precincts reporting number only provides a very rough estimate of the progress of counting of total ballots for a couple of reasons.

First, it reports on ballots cast at polling places on Election Day as well as ballots cast in designated mail ballot precincts prior to and on Election Day.  However, it does not take into account any mail ballots cast in precincts with a polling place assignment.

Second, it is simply a snapshot of how many precincts have had their Election Day ballots run through the ballot scanners.  It does not take into account the number of ballots in a precinct. Some precincts have hundreds of ballots and other precincts have no ballots at all!  So, there is not always a direct correlation between the number of precincts reporting and the number of ballots counted.

In the above examples, there were 250 mail ballot votes counted prior to Election Day.

In the first report that includes polling place results, 1,000 polling place votes were counted in the first 25% of precincts reporting.

In the next 25% of precincts reporting, 1,000 polling place votes were added to the results for a total of 2,000 polling place votes.

You might expect to find an additional 2,000 polling place votes in the last 50% of precincts reporting, but only an additional 500 polling place votes were counted for a total of 2,500 polling place votes.

The reason is there are many precincts that have zero voters.  In our software program, precincts with zero voters aren’t reported until all other precincts have reported their results.  So, in the final update on Election Night, the percentage of precincts reporting will suddenly rise to 100% but there may not be a drastic change in the vote count.

For this election, there are 2,030 precincts.  Of those precincts, some have very few registered voters residing in them.  In fact, 722 precincts of this election’s 2,030 precincts have no registered voters in them at all.