What’s at stake?
Fresno County’s below-average turnout included few voters between the ages of 18 and 24 specifically. The clerk’s office is still tallying vote-by-mail ballots through at least next week, however, and over 40,000 remain to be counted.
Turnout in Fresno County’s March primary crept upward after additional tallies from the clerk’s office Thursday – but the updates will keep coming through at least next Friday.
The latest figures from the Fresno County Clerk’s Office put turnout at roughly 21% – on par with the state’s equally low turnout of just under 21% as of Friday morning.
The county clerk’s office estimates another 40,000 mailed-in and 500 provisional ballots will be added to that count in the coming weeks, plus 1,500 ballots requiring a signature cure letter in order to be counted.
With these additional ballots, that would put turnout for Fresno County closer to 30%.
“We are diligently working to make sure that all ballots that should be counted are counted,” said James Kus, the Fresno County clerk, in an interview Friday. “That does take time. There’s a lot of steps in that process.”
The next tally will be released March 12 by 5 p.m., he said.
Who did the most voting in Fresno County’s March primary?
The voters whose ballots have been tallied so far were mostly Republicans over the age of 65 who own a home and were born in the U.S., according to an analysis from Political Data Inc.
Only 3.2% of these voters – or roughly 3,000 people – were between ages 18 and 24.
Political Data receives voter IDs from the Fresno County Clerk’s Office and then independently verifies demographic information about these voters through surname matching, looking at birthplaces, and other measures, said Paul Mitchell, the company’s vice president.
“If Fresno wants to figure out how many Latinos voted,” he said, “they ask us.”
Political Data’s most recent report included data for about 92,000 voters in Fresno County – about 13,000 fewer than the number of voters in Fresno County’s latest tally.
Mitchell said that’s because Political Data hadn’t received an update from the county as of Friday. They expect to have a more complete data set 30 to 60 days after the election.
In addition to skewing Republican and older, a majority of Fresno County voters in Political Data’s report identified as “not” African American, Asian, or Latino.
That demographic designation can be used to count white Americans, but some people of Middle Eastern and North African descent also select it in the absence of a separate category on government documents.
When asked whether Political Data’s category likely included just white voters or Middle Eastern and North African voters as well, Mitchell said that Middle Eastern folks “would be counted in that ‘other’ (category) most likely.”
“The categories are broad for a statewide application,” he said.
When’s the next update from Fresno County elections officials?
Even with “the big chunk now in hand” of mailed-in ballots, Kus said, still up in the air is the number of ballots the office will receive through March 12.
County elections officials are required to count vote-by-mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days of the election, according to the California Secretary of State.
“The post office did give us a heads up on Wednesday that they did have some significant number that they were trying to get to us,” Kus said.
The clerk’s office aims to count as many of these as possible by March 12 and to provide an additional update March 15.
March 15’s update could be the last, though Kus didn’t rule out the possibility of needing another update the following Wednesday, March 20.
“We will be working over the weekend,” he said, “to make sure that we get as many ballots counted and into our next update on Tuesday as possible.”
