How to Watch and Interpret Election Returns From California’s Presidential Primary

By Frank D. Russo

The California Secretary of State website will have live election results with the best real time information for not only the presidential race, but also ballot propositions and some of the local races. Go to the Secretary of State’s site and click on Election Night Results near the bottom left hand side of the site.

For statewide results and breakdowns by county, go to this page.

For those delegate counters of you interested in the Democratic side, go to this page and you can select individual Congressional Districts or see how all of California’s 53 Congressional Districts are voting. this will give you the voting breakdown, although it will be difficult to interpret the delegate breakdown.

For ballot measures go to this site.

Finally, to see where the votes are coming in from, county by county, you may want to check out this page which will show how much of a county's vote is in.

Bear in mind that in interpreting these election results, you need to know not only where the votes are coming from geographically, but also to consider the mix of vote by mail ballots to those cast at the precincts. Statistically minded observers will look at the first results, mostly vote by mail votes which skew towards older, wealthier, and more educated voters and print them out or make a note of them. As the evening wears on, there will be more ballots cast at the polling places on the day of the election which will also reflect more of the final trends of the election. It will not be until tomorrow that we will see the votes of those who voted by mail and either mailed their ballots in late or hand delivered them to the polls. After that, especially important to any close races, will be the “provisional ballots,” those from voters who were not on the rolls at polling places, but later on determined to be properly voting.

We’ll keep you posted as the night and morning wears on, to help interpret these results and identify the trends in California.

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