Why are there so many ballots left to count? And why does it take so long to count them?
It is my understanding that absentee ballots must be mailed and postmarked by election day. So all should arrive in the mail within a few days after election day. So naturally they will be counted after election day, however, at least here in San Diego County, ballots to be counted using optical scanners are used for absentees. So the absentee ballots are to be fed into a scanning machine to be counted, just as the ballots for voters who vote in person are counted. Which in turn is supposed to give us fairly quick results.
Good point about Jerry Brown. He was declared the winner on election night before huge numbers of votes were actually counted. How can this be; how did the powers that be declare that and other elections on election night with so many ballots left to be counted? And why does it take so long, and how are so many still left to go through? Something doesn’t sound right about all of this.
Because the rule in Democrat occupied areas is that you count, and recount, and recount, until you get the democrat takes a lead, and then you can declare the winner. Since the Democrat has a slight lead, you can declare her the winner, and ignore the remaining votes.
We've been doing observations at our county's ROV. The ones that arrive at the ROV on Tuesday, whether via mail or having people drop off their mail ballots at a polling place, will get scanned after the regular ballots are processed.
The first thing the mail ballots have to go through are signature verification (comparing the signature on the envelope vs. the original registration card). Anything odd-looking can be challenged, whether it's by the clerk, or by one of the citizen/campaign observers. They'll go through a secondary and tertiary review by senior ROV workers to determine whether or not they'll be processed. Once verified, then the envelopes will be opened and processed.
Then there are the instances where the machine will kick out ballots for overvotes, write-ins, and other quirks, such as crossing outs, using white-out, etc.
Some of those will be reviewed for the infamous "intent of the voter" situation.
Write-ins will have to be hand tabulated.
Once all of the verified mail ballots have been processed, THEN the provisionals will go through the same process. The first thing is to check whether or not the voter has voted twice, e.g., sending in a mail ballot and trying to vote provisional at a polling place, which is why they need to have the mail ballot processing completed before tackling the provisionals.