There’s a chance we’ll know late Tuesday night whether Gov. Gavin Newsom will hang onto his seat for at least another year, or if someone will be chosen to replace him. Then again, it could take a day — or even a few — to know for sure.
Either way, due to new voting patterns in California, experts say initial results announced minutes after polls close in the Sept. 14 recall probably will look good for Newsom. After that, as results are updated to include more walk-up ballots, the race could tighten.
California voters have become accustomed to learning electoral winners and losers late on election night or sometimes several days after. Many recent elections have been close, and voters increasingly cast their ballots by mail — two factors that can delay definitive results.
But that timeline for final results might not apply to the recall. The Sept. 14 ballot includes just two questions, compared with dozens in the November election. Recall turnout also isn’t expected to approach the record 80% of registered voters who participated in November, so officials will be counting several million fewer ballots. Likewise, the timeline to count ballots is tighter, with elections officials now required to finish tabulating all eligible mail-in ballots (postmarked Sept. 14 or earlier) within seven days of Election Day, which is much shorter than the 17-day window allowed in November.
And if recent polls are correct, the recall might not be particularly close.
The final poll Friday from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies showed Newsom with a 21.5 point lead, a finding that shows a bigger win for the anti-recall crowd but is otherwise in line with several other polls released over the past month.
The “when will we know” question will depend on the early results and how they’re handled, said Paul Mitchell with Sacramento-based firm Political Data Inc., which is tracking statewide returns.
If 70% of ballots are counted on election night and one side is up by 15 points, Mitchell said it could be mathematically impossible for the other side to catch up. But if early counts are tighter, or if the number of ballots counted is low, a final result might not be known on election night.
In terms of what early results will look like, expect them to favor the governor. A new pattern of voting that emerged in California in 2020 — in which Democrats send ballots by mail, driven in part over coronavirus concerns, and Republicans vote in person, after former President Donald Trump and other GOP leaders cast doubt on mail-in voting — is expected to be play out for the recall. And that pattern could skew preliminary results that are released on election night and after.
The first batch of results will come soon after polls close at 8 p.m. They’ll be based entirely on early mail-in ballots, which California elections officials have been counting for most of the past month. Those early ballots almost certainly will disproportionately represent Democrats, who overwhelmingly support keeping Newsom around.
But each of California’s 58 counties has its own pattern for releasing ballot counts, which are then updated with the Secretary of State. A second round of results will be announced in most counties shortly after 9 p.m. Those numbers will include some of the ballots cast on Election Day, and that’s when the recall race could start to tighten.
“Using a football analogy, the ‘oppose the recall’ campaign has a huge lead,” said Ali Navid, founder of the Los Angeles-based research firm California Talks, referencing the new pattern of Democrats voting early.
“The ‘support the recall’ campaign is trying to make a dramatic 4th quarter comeback.”
We’ve seen how changes in voting patterns play out locally.
In 2018, in Orange County’s 39th House District, Democrat Gil Cisneros trailed Republican Young Kim on election night by 3,900 votes, leading to early announcements that Kim had become the first Korean American woman in Congress. But at the time, early results still tended to favor Republicans. And over the next few days, as more in-person ballots were tabulated and included in the total, Cisneros pulled ahead. More than a week later Cisneros was declared the winner, eventually beating Kim by 3.2 points. Republicans cried foul, claiming without evidence that the flip was a result of fraud.
But the reverse happened in 2020. With the pandemic and political rhetoric turning voting patterns on their head, Cisneros had an early nine-point lead based on mail-in ballot counts announced on election night. But after in-person ballots were tallied, Kim ended up winning by 1.2 points. There were no allegations of fraud following that result.
The swing between initial and final results isn’t expected to be as dramatic in the recall election, since Democrats make up a much larger portion of California’s electorate than they do in CA-39. But the pattern should carry through.
