Like a relaxed surfer dude, California seems to be in no hurry to finish counting its votes.
Oh, maybe you thought California was done counting its votes because that's what all the mainstream media says, fed by the increasingly unreliable Associated Press totals. Here are the totals from the New York Times, which gets them from the A.P. and which hasn't adjusted them since the day after the primary on June 7, a full week ago (as I write this, the D.C. primary is being decided).
Candidate Votes Percentage Delegates
Hillary Clinton 1,940,580 55.8% 269
Bernie Sanders 1,502,043 43.2% 206
There actually IS a place to look for updated status on the California counts. It is on the CA Board of Elections site here:
http://vote.sos.ca.gov/unprocessed-ballots-status/
This page says:
It typically takes weeks to process and count all of the ballots. Elections officials have approximately one month to complete their extensive tallying, auditing, and certification work (known as the "official canvass").
Most notably, voting by mail has increased significantly in recent years and many vote-by-mail ballots arrive on Election Day. In addition, vote-by-mail ballots postmarked on or before Election Day and received by county elections officials no later than 3 days after Election Day must be processed. In processing vote-by-mail ballots, elections officials must confirm each voter's registration status, verify each voter's signature on the vote-by-mail envelope, and ensure each person did not vote elsewhere in the same election before the ballot can be counted.
Other ballots that are processed after Election Day include provisional ballots (processed similar to vote-by-mail ballots), and ballots that are damaged or cannot be machine-read and must be remade by elections officials.
The Unprocessed Ballots Report (PDF) features unofficial county updates on the number of outstanding ballots that still need to be processed during the official canvass. This information is voluntarily reported by county elections officials and may not be complete.
State law requires county elections officials to report their final results to the Secretary of State by July 8, 2016. The Secretary of State then has until July 15, 2016, to certify the results of the election. For the most up-to-date vote counts before the statewide certified results are published, contact a county elections office directly.
The PDF link opens up a report, last Updated: 06/14/2016 11:53 a.m. which shows:
2,128,161 votes remaining to be totaled statewide (there are totals for every county running down an entire page). These include vote-by-mail, provisional, and some category called "other" whatever that is. But here's the thing, the individual counties have only been updated from 6/7/16 - 6/14/16 at the latest, even where's there's 100s of thousands of votes left to be tallied. What are they waiting for?
Well, maybe the deadline above of July 15th, which gives the illusion of lots of time.
But the Democratic National Convention is July 25th, and to wait until 10 days before that to potentially finalize the nominee, since California alone could turn the results, or at least greatly strengthen Sanders' position, seems unconscionable, even irresponsible.
After all, Sanders may drop his bid as early as THIS WEEK. He has sent an email to his supporters asking them to tune into a conference call this Thursday. It's unclear whether he will renew his resolve to continue fighting to the convention, or drop out, or something else.
Does Sanders even know this count is still going on? There's been no indication he does in his statements, which keep mentioning his and his staff's great ability to do arithmetic but say nothing about the veracity of the numbers.
Contact your state officials and the BOE, especially if you live in California, and tell them to hurry up and count the vote! Our democracy depends on it.
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