[EL] California statewide primary race almost certainly heading toward recount

[Rob Richie]

Folks,

We've been keeping an eye on the California controller race. Three weeks
ago, California held its primary -- the same day that Mississippi had the
first round of its Senate primary that is being decided by a runoff today.

California still hasn't finished its statewide tally,although it's down to
fewer than 7,000 votes, nearly all in Lake County. In the state controller
race, the percentages are:

Tammy D. Blair         Democratic 200,209 4.96%
John A. Pérez Democratic 876,372 21.72%
Betty T. Yee Democratic 877,239 21.75%
David Evans Republican 848,873 21.04%
Ashley Swearengin Republican 1,000,594 24.80%
Laura Wells Green 230,743 5.72%

You'll see that Republican Swearingin advancing with 24.8% of the vote. Two
Democrats are at 21.7%, with Betty Yee holding an edge over assembly
speaker John Perez by 867 votes, or just over 0.02%.

A Republican, David Evans, would have advanced with an increase of 30,000
votes --
 meaning that California would have had an all-Republican runoff with two
candidates from a party with a collective vote of 45.5% due to fractures
among the Democratic and Green candidates. Ironically, if 30,000 Swearingin
backers had switched to vote for Evans, she would faced him in the runoff,
and the been heavily favored -- as it is, she'll be the underdog.

Getting back to the Yee-Perez contest for second, if Lake County's
remaining votes break like the ones already cast, the margin could be cut
in half, to Yee being ahead by barely 0.01%.

That means California almost certainly is heading toward a statewide
recount in an election where more than four million votes were cast
(although less than 1.7 million for the two directly affected candidates).
Given that whichever Democrat wins will be the clear favorite for November,
I'm sure Perez will see it as worth trying - -especially as the median
change in all 23 recounts in all statewide general elections in 2000-2103
was 0.015%. (We have a report on recounts in 2000-2009 and a short update
on ones from 2010-2012 here:
http://www.fairvote.org/research-reports/recounts/  )

Perhaps all this will give more insights into voting and vote-counting in
California -- as happens when everything is put under the microscope can do
that. As one example, we'll likely find a relatively high rate of overvotes
-- the rate of invalidated overvotes in the gubernatorial primary in San
Francisco and Oakland were higher this year than in those cities' ranked
choice voting elections. We'll also get a lessons into how of the
tech-savviest places in the world still has a lot of shoddy voting
equipment due to our broken certification regime and pennypinching on
democracy.

Rob



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote
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