When San Diego polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday, the Registrar of Voters will release an initial tally of the mail-in ballots the office has already counted.
Registrar Michael Vu said more than 1 million ballots were mailed out and about half of those have been returned. His staff has been busy tallying those results to release at the beginning of the evening, before they start counting the results from the precincts.
“I anticipate that we’re going to have approximately 350,000 to 400,000 ballots in the count,” he said. “We’re scanning-in ballots right now and we’ll continue to do so up until 4 or 5 o clock Tuesday night.”
If every one of the 1.65 million San Diegans registered to vote actually casts a ballot, those 400,000 votes counted by 8 p.m. would represent one-quarter of the final vote.
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But since Vu predicts final turn out might be somewhere around 75 percent — 1.25 million — that initial data release of about 400,000 becomes a bigger share of the final tally. Vu said about one-third of all San Diego votes cast will already be counted and the results released when the polls close.
Precinct results will trickle in all night. Vu said his office will be working until all the ballots cast at the polls on election day are counted — about 4 or 5 a.m., Wednesday. The rest of the mail-in ballots and provisional ballots will be counted in coming days.
