The latest results have been posted by the OC Registrar of Voters, and Lynn Daucher's lead over Lou Correa has shrunk to 361, meaning Correa cut Daucher's lead by more than 50% in a single day:
Lynn Daucher (Rep) 50,433 50.2%
Lou Correa (Dem) 50,072 49.8%
Ouch.
According to Martin Wisckol at Total Buzz, 47,000 absentees were counted on Saturday and the bulk of absentees were counted today. If that is true, and the number of uncounted ballots from the 34th SD has dwindled dramatically, that is the best news of the day for Daucher.
UPDATE: I've put in a call to Neal Kelley, but just went to voice mail. Today's results would seem to confirm Team Corea's claim that late ballots will substantially favor Lou.
A reader emailed me this take:
It is impossible to know how many of the ballots remaining to be counted are from the 34th Senate District, but of the 696,777 ballots counted so far county-wide, 14.42% of them voted for either Lou or Lynn.
14.42% of the remaining ballots equals 7846 to go.
UPDATE II: Here's Martin Wisckol's post on the latest tally.
UPDATE III: Following is the now-customary Paul Mitchell analysis of the day's tally:
Today Lou Correa made up a considerable amount of ground against Lynn Daucher. He won 3,910 votes to her 3,507. The gap now sits at 361, less than half of the weekend gap. There are up to 6,200 ballots still to be counted. In order to win, Correa needs to maintain today’s 53/47 advantage for the remainder of the counting.
The good news for Correa: He has caught up some, winning today’s balloting at a 53% to 47% rate – close to his Election Day tally.
The good news for Daucher: The remaining absentee ballots are not specifically from Election Day. They are ballots which were damaged, and could have been cast at any time.
The bad news for us: The rest of the counting will be going very slow. Damaged ballots to be duplicated before being run through the machines and provisionals have to be researched and validated before being counted.
It all now rests on three factors:
1) How many absentee ballots are outstanding, which is probably around 4,000. (absentee ballots have been about 12.2% of votes cast so far. With 32,499 absentees in the county, that makes 3,965 outstanding).
2) When the absentees were cast. The remaining ballots are not date-specific. They are ballots which were damaged and set-aside to be duplicated. They include ballots from Election Day, (when Correa was winning 52/48) and prior days (when Daucher was winning 52/48).
3) How many provisionals are counted. It has been expected that provisionals would lean toward Correa because they are day-of-election and because of the higher propensity for some precincts to have voting problems. However, of the estimated 2,650 provisionals in the 34th, a good chunk will not count. A Grand Jury Report from ’04 found that 16% of provisionals in Orange County were not counted because the voter could not be verified or has submitted more than one ballot (often when they mail on Monday and vote on Tuesday because they think their ballot isn’t going to be received in time). Applying this discounting to the provisionals, the total likely to be counted is around 2,200.
Correa’s one day performance at 53% is not likely to be repeated in the remaining absentees as they are not ballots that were turned in on Election Day. He should out-perform Daucher on the provisionals, however he would have to win those ballots at a rate greater than 60% to 40% in order for it to have a decisive impact on the outcome.
Final Note: One aberration in today’s results was the counting of 5,665 “election day paper ballots” that had been left uncounted since election day. I never understood what these were, but it seems from the counts that about 4,800 came from the 34th. Because of these ballots, over 30% of today’s county-wide totals came into the 34th SD – a figure wildly different than previous days. Excluding these paper ballots, today’s count was 14% of the total county ballots.
And, if anyone cares, here are the numbers:
November 13th
6200 B Ballots Outstanding
50,072 C Correa Total
50,433 D Daucher Total
53% x Percentage Correa Needs to Tie
47% 1-x Percentage Daucher Needs to Tie
Formula: xb+c=(1-x)b+d
47% Y Percentage Daucher won in today's count
53% 1-Y Percentage Correa won in today's count
7417 Number of ballots counted today