Vote counting in Mendocino County is a laborious, manual process.
As of 8 p.m. on election eve, the county's two voter counters were still struggling to get through the backlog of absentee ballots that were cast leading up to election day. An additional 162 ballots were counted between 8 p.m. on Tuesday and 8:24 a.m. on Wednesday.
As of Thursday afternoon, the Mendocino County Registrar of Voters had received about 18,000 ballots. As of Tuesday evening, just 15,449 of the those ballots were counted.
In Lake County, progress was even slower. Just 7,960 ballots were counted as of Wednesday morning, out of a total possible vote of 37,915, or 20.99% of the possible votes.
In Shasta County, the counting started again early Wednesday morning, with an updated count published at 7:27 a.m. The latest is 23,852 ballots counted out of a total possible vote of 115,626, or 20.63%.
In Humboldt County, an initial 21,893 votes were counted as of 8:09 p.m. out of a total possible vote of 84,741, or 25.84%. By the end of the night, at 1:09 a.m., the count was up to 31,417 votes, or 37%.
In Napa, 22,504 votes were counted as of 8:01 p.m., out of a total possible vote of 85,150, or 26.43%. By the end of the night, at 12:35 a.m., the count was up to 26,160 votes or 30.72%.
In sparsely populated Trinity County, the Registrar of Voters was about to make more progress with fewer votes. By 10:15 p.m., they reported 3,607 votes out of 7,565 possible votes, for a total turnout of 47.68%.
Likewise in Del Norte County, 6,719 votes were counted out of 15,117 possible votes, for a total turnout of 44.45%.
The larger counties were able to count more ballots, faster. Sonoma counted 154,276 ballots out of a total of 309,933 registered voters, for a turnout of 49.78 percent.
Marin counted 85,083 ballots out of 172,304 ballots, for a turnout of 49.38 percent.
We have reported the early results, but please keep in mind that these results represent just a small fraction of the expected vote.
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